I pregiudizi di Dio

"Luca Poldelmengo is intimately familiar with the multiple mechanisms of investigation and this lies at the heart of his novels. In this novel, what’s particularly interesting is that he approaches the investigation from the points of view of three completely different characters, and he holds them all up against each other to ask a pivotal question about the influence on the investigation process of personal perspective. There is no such thing as an objective stance in investigating something, it’s always subjective because it’s bound to the investigator. Poldelmengo, by bringing different views together, unhinges the assumptions of each character, forcing them to reveal the depths of their own humanity and the relationship of their account of things to a wider reality which is obviously far more complex. He is really meticulous – he’s driven by a desire to depict the places in his novel down to the enth degree. His writing is really photographic. But even if the places he takes us to aren’t immediately recognizable—Mandela, a tiny commune on the outskirts of Rome where the body is found, will only be known to those with a very clear idea of the area—readers feel a wider sense of familiarity with the places. Of all the authors here, Poldelmengo is probably the one with the tightest grasp when it comes to describing the territory of his novels. First up is the extent to which the most recent financial crisis has modified us from the inside. I think that the changes that the crisis has triggered on a deeply individual level have yet to be properly explored in literature as a whole—and perhaps especially by noir—and I expect this to become more of a theme in coming years. The country is constantly transforming—for the most part not in a good way—and this will require a continuous process of reconsideration and re-reading, and perhaps we need new forms in which to tell these stories. Noir in Italy—well, all genres in Italy, really—are in need of a new phase, as well as a new internal reckoning; we need the kind of self-scrutiny that used to be much more common a while back, when authors seemed to stand together more in groups. Things seem more frayed now, in the sense that individual authors tend to be perceived in isolation. That’s one of the reasons genre-specific series and collectives like Sabot are so important – they create a network of writers who are constantly working with each other and questioning how what each is doing fits into the whole. Translation by Thea Lenarduzzi"