Back to Bologna

If you like Aurelio Zen novels, this book might disappoint you. If you enjoy Michael Dibdin, you’ll love this story. Aurelio is really just a peripheral character. He’s recovering from surgery and trying to fix his relationship with Jenna. (Reading some of the earlier novels first would be useful.) Dibdin’s goal in this wickedly funny and cynical view of Italian academia and upper crust is to skewer the phoniness of the elites and famous. Lots of in jokes including a hidden appearance of Umberto Eco disguised as Eduardo Ugo as a semiotics professor which gives you an idea of Dibdin’s humor.

I suggest reading some of the earlier books in the series and Googling “Ruritania.” The crime is irrelevant and plays second fiddle to show more Dibdin’s irreverent look at Italiana and gentle spoofing of Italian detective stories. Dibdin has a way with words that often brings a smile to one’s face. show less

A wonderful thriller, one of the best of the Zen series. It seems Dibdin really doesn't like Umberto Eco, and his judgement on the Piedmontese Polymath is channelled hilariously through these pages.

More zany farce than hard-boiled crime fiction, this Aurelio Zen mystery features an ensemble of wacky characters running amok in beautiful Bologna―la dotta, la grassa, la rossa. A Berlusconi-esque tycoon and controversial owner of the local football team is found shot dead and stabbed with a parmesan knife. Meanwhile, an arrogant semiotics professor (a thinly veiled parody of Umberto Eco) dukes it out with a contentious student and a maniacal and fraudulent celebrity chef. A slapstick gumshoe muddles various links between characters, while our detective hero, Inspector Zen of the national police, turns out to be brooding and lethargic, a borderline hypochondriac who, in this case, doesn’t investigate much beyond his navel.

Overall show more it has a nihilistic aura. In a meta moment:

'Any amount of atmosphere and sense of place, in other words, but no solution, just a strong final curtain line.' ...

'Why not scrap the sense of place too?’

Alas, I confess to having rushed headlong at this book with high expectations for exactly that atmosphere and sense of place. I was yearning for a hearty dose of armchair travel to the beloved city where I once lived and haven’t yet managed to get back to. So, while I generally appreciate clever wordplay and metafiction, I was disappointed to miss a straightforward escape, a satisfying noir teeming with precise and detailed descriptions of that place I love.

After finishing the book I read speculation that Dibdin was tiring of his protagonist in this tenth and penultimate entry in the Aurelio Zen series. Some critics recommended heading elsewhere―to the beginning of the series ("Ratking") or to Venice ("Dead Lagoon") or Sicily ("Blood Rain"). I’ll consider visiting these other stories, once I recover from his bummer of a Bologna. show less

In Michael Dibdin's Back to Bologna, series character Aurelio Zen is sent to the city of the title to keep an eye on the progress of the police in solving the murder of a wealthy man who happened to own the local, struggling soccer team and who was loathed by thousands of soccer fans for his treatment of that team. Zen is quite happy to get away from home because although he is still recovering (slowly) from recent surgery, his girlfriend Gemma thinks he's being hypochondriacal; in any case, their relationship has gone terribly downhill in recent months and the farther away from her that he can get, the happier he is. Meanwhile, the world's most incompetent private eye, also based in Bologna, is looking into the behaviour of a wealthy show more man's son, there's a terrible but extremely famous chef who has come to loggerheads with an arrogant post-modernist academic, and nobody at all is behaving very well.... This is the tenth Aurelio Zen novel, the seventh that I've read (having been unable to find several others, which are apparently out of print), and the morose and rather sickly Zen is as morose and insecure as ever. Unfortunately, by now I've begun to get tired of him; while the series started as a fascinating expose of an interesting character, over time that character has, well, lost his charm for me. I'll still pick up the missing volumes in the series should I run across them, but I don't think I'll go out of my way to search for any more of them; while the story lines here are quite entertaining (and overlap where you'd least expect them to), Zen himself has just become too downhearted for me to enjoy anymore. show less

A few random thoughts, which I will hopefully put into some sort of coherent form of review soon:
I am getting a little frustrated that Zen can't ever be in a happy relationship. I was worried about how things progressed in the book in which Gemma was introduced in book #8 - "And Then You Die" - and I find myself distracted from the mystery at hand with worrying about how that situation will resolve.

The mystery in this book reminded me somewhat of "The Long Finish" in that I felt neither of them had a very satisfying conclusion. Dibdin seems to be writing this mystery as if he was a postmodernist himself. Being a fan of the Golden Age mystery, I don't want an inconclusive ending in which varying meanings can be found -- I want a culprit show more who is tracked down by the detective and caught!

I loved the characters in this book: Ugo (the postmodern academic novelist) who is a thinly disguised portrait of Umberto Eco & his graduate student Rudolfo, whose girlfriend claims her name is Flavia and to be from Ruritania (!); the TV celebrity chef who can't cook but loves to sing (and do drugs); and the P.I. who acts as if he is in a book by Dashiell Hammett. show less

Just remember that B2B is a satire of a mystery and you are OK. Actually you are fine. Dibdin is a writer who is playing with you. That's fine with me. The location, so important in this genre of Italy-based mysteries, plays second fiddle to an Umberto Ecoist gobblespeak prof, a Sam Spade failure, a singing drug-addled TV chef, and an hypochondriac Aurelio Zen (among others). And don't worry about how it turns out. Who cares when you are reading post-post modern mysteries.

Thoroughly enjoyable - the most overtly comical of the Zen novels. A professor of semiotics named Eduardo Ugo (sound familiar?), an opera-singing TV chef, a delusional private eye and an illegal immigrant from an imaginary country are all among the beautifully-sketched characters contributing to the fun...