GiuseppeBenassi's "Cnque più uno"

I have read all of Benassi’s books, and this Cinque più uno strikes me as the best. Not for the plot — simple and tangled at the same time — nor for the message, born of Benassi’s personal and legal outrage at the 2020 quarantine; not even for the ending, which cannot be revealed since this is a sort of metaphysical crime novel. Rather, it is because here, what in his previous novels were only lyrical asides to the Tuscan landscape and nature, become — perhaps in spite of the author — the real protagonists.

The usual Livornese lawyer, Leopoldo Borrani, a little less caustic, less acidic, less vulgar and embittered — enough to make one suspect either editorial censorship or a late softening of the author himself after his last novel, in which he gave full voice to the decay and basest animal instincts of a depraved humanity — finds himself confronted with the death of a friend, Cosimo Erba, also a lawyer and an activist in cases against the state that, during the Covid period, locked us all indoors.

Murder? A hunting accident during a wild boar shoot? A conspiracy of the powers to spread the virus and sell deadly vaccines? All possibilities remain open.

Around the dead man various characters orbit: his wife Matilde, once the beauty of the faculty, scatterbrained either in earnest or as a form of mockery; Zoran, a “so well-mannered” young Kosovar; Bertha, a German neo-Nazi. Glimpses of political fantasy and dystopia emerge in this crime novel where everyone is guilty — because each has something to gain from Cosimo’s death — and perhaps no one is guilty at all. But above all, there are the places: Venturina, Campiglia Marittima, the Calidario hot springs, and the woods where wild boar are hunted. Images that could have come from the pen of Fucini or the brush of Fattori. Beautiful, clean images that, as is usual with Benassi, stand in stark contrast to human corruption.

A strange, layered book, well-written, and one that — with a constant effect of estrangement — demands the reader’s active participation throughout.