Omicidio a Villapedrosa

A Sardinian crime novel, but also a book about narration, tourism, identity, journalism, middle age and the impossibility of fully “explaining” a place from outside. Its ostensible case is the murder of Antonio Maria Monni, shot in the countryside near the coastal town of Villapedrosa. Its deeper subject is Sardinia as both real place and projection: a tourist dream in summer, a difficult human landscape in winter, and an island constantly misunderstood by outsiders and half-outsiders.

The narrator is Alessandra Lombardi, a Roman journalist in her forties, daughter of a Sardinian mother. Alessandra has spent her life feeling partly Sardinian and partly fraudulent about that feeling. As a young woman she romanticized Sardinia: Grazia Deledda, village stories, Sardinian punk bands, old houses, pastoral defiance, boys in velvet trousers who seemed to her like anti-modern rebels. A former Sardinian boyfriend once told her that if she wanted to write about Sardinia, she should first live there and stop treating it like Cherokee country full of moonlit legends and ancestral magic. That old rebuke hangs over the whole novel.

Alessandra works as a television reporter for a public-affairs talk show she no longer believes in. Her job consists mostly of travelling around Italy to make short segments that may never be aired. She is sent to Sardinia to cover a hazy story about a local administrator whose country house has been shot at, possibly because of a proposed wind-farm project. She is bored by her work, tired of television, tired of political clichés, and drifting in a long relationship with Alberto, a depressed violinist.