Back to Bologna, an Aurelio Zen Mystery, by Michael Dibdin
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 it has a nihilistic aura. “Surely the whole point is that everything’s been done,” says the semiotics student to Prof. Edgardo Ugo, as they discuss a not-so-novel idea for a novel. It is this exchange that offered any sense of catharsis, rather than the denouement of the plot (the details of which are already forgotten):
‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book,’ Ugo said at last. ‘For years, I mean. Cornell, early 1980s. Wonderful campus, magnificent library. Some reference text in English. …It was entitled, in gold-blocked letters on the spine, “BACK to BOLOGNA,” those being the headings of the first and last articles in that particular volume. …[T]his experience made me realise two things. One was the obvious fact that I was homesick, my research project was stalled, and the only way that I could salvage something from it was by going back to Bologna.’
‘Which you did?’
‘I came home, yes. And as it turned out, wrote the book that really launched my career. What I didn’t write was the second thing suggested to me by that reference work in the library at Cornell, namely Back to Boulogne, a mystery in which the detective solves nothing. For my protagonist I had in mind a certain Inspecteur Nez, playing on the French word for nose, as in “has a nose for” but also “led by the nose”. In short, at once a deconstruction of the realistic, plot-driven novel and an hommage to Georges Simenon, the master of Robbe-Grillet and hence in a sense of us all. Any amount of atmosphere and sense of place, in other words, but no solution, just a strong final curtain line.’
Rodolfo stole a glance at his watch.
‘Why not scrap the sense of place too?’ he murmured.
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. And I felt grumpy and distracted when Dibdin actually names Umberto Eco in his text at one point, on top of the obvious parody throughout. Why did he do that? Maybe my metafiction skills are rusty, or just amateur. Reading up on Simenon and Robbe-Grillet certainly had me wondering how much of Dibdin’s book was over my head.
The cute wordplay in another scene certainly registered. Here the semiotics student is harassed about his choice of discipline by a second authority figure, his dad, a hardworking Southerner in construction:
‘What the hell is this semiotica all about, anyway? …If you have to waste more of your time and my money at university, why not go the whole hog and study ottica? That way you could at least make some money as an eye doctor when you finally graduate…’
‘You’re confusing the etymology, Dad.’
My dear dad (who’s quite good with words himself) was patient and supportive throughout my linguistics-literature double major, and never said anything like this to me. But I sure have second-guessed myself and played out such conversations internally!
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.