I have been reading Clarissa Oakley for about ten days. I  pick it up   at dinner, more often before bed, read a few pages then bid goodnight to Aubrey and Maturin. I am around page fifty. It’s alright, but I can’t say I am taken away with it. A couple of nights ago I ordered   Io sono il Libanese (I am the lebanese), Giancarlo de Cataldo’s slim prequel to Romanzo Criminale. I found it here when I got back from work yesterday afternoon. I’ve just finished it.

I’t’s not as good as Romanzo Criminale, and it is much simpler: no multiple narrative focuses, almost entirely set in the  environment of Rome’s lowlife and petty criminals, it does not refer to  politics and does not use  detection as a narrative means. It stands to Romanzo criminale the way a good episode in a series stands to a great film, and yet, I couldn’t put it down., like with the original novel, even though I am usually quite allergic to the Roman dialect  used in most dialogues, and I have no patience for druggy characters. Yet, there you are: I read it in two evenings.

In the meantime Clarissa Oakley has remained, closed, on my bedside table. It will take time. Its characters lack that sparkle of life that makes you wanto to know what will happen to them, and makes you care even though you disapprove of them.  Its setting may be far more fascinating than the squalid outskirts of the Eternal City and its heroes, a sailor and a scientist, much more my sort of characters than a bunch of thugs, yet I can’t be bothered, and I’ll end up finishig it a bit at a time, and  only because I almost never drop a book.