Letters to Lorenzo

Lorenzo Gherardi, a card-carrying member of Italy's young, rich, Red Brigades revolutionaries of the early 1970s, has been blown up by neo-Fascists. Or was he himself a terrorist who made a deadly error with his own explosives? These are the two possibilities his 27-year-old British widow, Juliet (Giulietta to her aristocratic, emotionally manipulative in-laws), faces in this absorbing literary thriller. A Marxist herself, Juliet is determined to clear the stain from Lorenzo's name and to restore order in the life of her young son. To do so she must prove that terrorism is a tactic of the Right, not the Left. The prosecutor Carosi--now repulsive and insensitive, now strangely attractive--suspects that Juliet was Lorenzo's accomplice. The scales fall from the sympathetic narrator's eyes as she conducts a serious moral inquiry about the relationship between politics and love. Several of this novel's many plot twists and turns spin out as the genre shifts from thriller to character study. Sinister characters are intriguingly introduced and then dropped, and in the end Juliet herself seems to have lost interest in uncovering the mystery. Nonetheless, the narrative examines the moment in history when revolution seemed imminent and political violence was thought by some to be a necessary step toward freedom. (Mar.)