The state highway connecting Bari and Taranto is usually quiet at 2am. Animals snuffle in the deserted gardens of country houses, while “in the distance, a sizzling tiara marked the city”; moths approach the artificial lights outside, performing “an obsessive circular dance that only death could interrupt”. And death is about to interrupt. This first, panoramic sweep homes in on thirtysomething Clara Salvemini, eldest daughter of a wealthy property developer. Clara is walking, bloodied and naked, down the middle section of this deserted road; “the bruises on her ribs and arms and lower back”, we are told, are “like so many Rorschach inkblots”. The next morning she is found dead in a parking lot: the coroner pronounces suicide.La ferocia was published in Italy in 2014 and received the prestigious Strega Prize the following year. Nicola Lagioia’s fourth novel and English-language debut — elegantly translated by Antony Shugaar — takes many characters, central and ancillary, as its protagonist, like a Greek chorus narrating from varied and often contradictory texts. Clara’s father, Vittorio, reeling with grief, finds the news “plummeting down into him like a ball of cement tossed down a stairwell” and contemplates the images of his child as he knew her, “ . . . each detached from the others”. We’re privy to the recollections of a warehouse worker at a textiles plant, a shoe-shop clerk, a body-building instructor, a chief surgeon, all of whom remember a different woman for different reasons. She is simultaneously the “daughter of a well-known builder” and “an ancient Egyptian deity, preparing to step out of a sarcophagus”.For Alberto, Clara’s husband, the loss is compounded by her recent withdrawal, erratic behaviour and the affairs he tried to ignore. Clara’s younger brother and favourite sibling, Michele, is “a hotbed of malaises”. At the time of her death, Michele lives in Rome. “A family of crazy people”, thinks Alberto at the funeral, “and the craziest one of all didn’t even show up.” Michele’s eventual arrival forms the second half of the novel, and follows his attempts to solve the mystery of his sister’s death.Ferocity resists classification as a whodunnit, focusing instead on the corruption coursing through a society desperate to seem more moneyed than it is, a masquerading city of “offices, courthouses, journalists, and sports clubs”. Lagioia reveals a flair for social satire, suggesting that Bari itself is complicit in the woe of its habitants, so keen to maintain a sense of swaggering “untouched privilege” at any cost. Clara’s elder brother Ruggero, for instance, was once “enrolled in an elementary school where the fees were higher than the worker’s compensation checks received by the labourers for their injuries while employed by our father”.The narrative jumps between present-day and historical interactions and events, lending it a filmic quality whose scenes build an overall portrait of the wider vanity, greed and violence that led to Clara’s death. It’s a work of startling energy and structural precision, an ambitious novel whose linguistic brilliance is frequently at odds with the twists and turns of Michele’s quest for the truth. When trying to gather information Michele encounters reluctance and fear, an unwillingness to cooperate, but, we’re told, his motivation comes “from beyond a bloodstained veil, and he felt sincere sorrow for anyone who, forcing him to cross it, would be smeared with the same substance”.The story is one of extreme paradoxes — between wealth and poverty, duplicity and honesty, legitimate and illegitimate children — and though this can appear stark and hyperbolic, there’s a sense throughout that the history of the Salveminis taps into a wider national consciousness about who has licence to ruin another person. This is neatly summarised by one journalist who notes, “In Italy the family is sacred. Usually people prefer to let themselves be destroyed by theirs.”
Ferocity, by Nicola Lagioia, translated by Antony Shugaar, Europa Editions, RRP£13.99/$18, 447 pages
