Procedura

The first U.S. publication of Italian writer Mannuzzu is a signal event. Judge Valerio Garau of Sardinia dies after swallowing a cyanide-laced liver pill while his mistress, herself a magistrate, looks on. The nameless narrator of Mannuzzu's elegant, labyrinthine procedural (winner of Italy's Viareggio Prize in 1989) is a brooding investigative judge who sifts metaphors as well as clues in his hunt for Garau's killer. Stranger in style than in substance, this meditative novel circles around the dead man's dark secrets: his hoarding of stolen archeological artifacts; the suicide of his alcoholic sister; his homosexual trysts with his typist and with a photographer implicated in a gay juvenile prostitution ring. Garau's neurotic ex-wife, his mistress and her jealous husband are all suspects. The atmospheric narrative (felicitously translated by Shepley) unfolds in 1978-1979, its action framed by the Red Brigades' kidnapping of Italian politician Aldo Moro, which accentuates the theme of modern Italy's social malaise. Mannuzzu, a poet, former judge and member of Italy's parliament, works at the Center for Government Reform in Rome. (June)