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First published under the title of La Commedia des
Rates
by Editions Gallimard 1991
Translated from the original French by
Adriana Hunter
Bitter Lemon Press, April 2005
Reviewed by Sunnie Gill
Tonio Polsinelli is the son of Italian immigrants living in France.
Although he was born in Italy he regards himself as French and goes out of
his way to avoid his Italian heritage. One day, Tonio runs into an old
childhood friend, Dario, who asks Tonio to help him write a letter. Tonio
is a little reluctant because Dario has never amounted to much in life and
how he earns a living is somewhat obscure.
A week or so later Tonio is not only shocked to learn that Dario has been
murdered but that Dario has left Tonio a bequest in his will: a small
vineyard in Italy. Against his better judgement, Tonio travels to Italy to
see his inheritance and discovers that Dario has set up a rather elaborate
scam which should rake in millions. Along with the money comes unwanted
attention. The locals detest Tonio and apparently want him dead. Then the
US Mafia turn up late at night with guns and an empty suitcase demanding a
cut of the profits. Finally there are the Vatican officials with dark
threats of imprisonment if the entire enterprise isn't handed over to
them.
Poor Tonio. His efforts to escape the clutches of those clamouring for a
piece of the pie are met with disaster. As events spin out of control, the
one person he thought would help turns out to have motives far darker than
anyone else.
HOLY SMOKE has a lot of action packed into just 200 pages. Because of
this, there is not a lot of depth to most of the characters. Even Tonio,
we don’t learn that much about, partly because we are seeing everything
through his rather bewildered eyes and he isn’t much into self-analysis.
HOLY SMOKE is written in the first person present tense, which is never
easy to pull off. Benacquista is one of those rare authors who has managed
to do it well. Adriana Hunter has done an excellent job with the English
translation and it’s pretty nigh impossible to tell that the original
manuscript wasn’t written in English.
Reading HOLY SMOKE is a little like starting a paint-by-numbers oil
painting. A blob of colour here, a dash there, which up close appear to be
a mish-mash of unrelated daubs but once finished it all blends together to
create a complete picture. However, there is nothing paint-by-numbers
about the plot. It's very clever and darkly comic with a wry look at
Italian culture, pasta and wine. All of which make HOLY SMOKE a highly
enjoyable book.
July 2006 review originally posted on Murder and Mayhem
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