The City of the Living

by Nicola Lagioia, Ann Goldstein (Translator)

Overview

A CRIMEREADS AND WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE BOOK OF 2023

From Nicola Lagioia, winner of the Strega Prize for Fiction, a spellbinding literary thriller based on the true story of one of the most vicious crimes in recent Italian history. An intoxicating novel that takes readers on a surprising journey into the darkest corners of contemporary Rome and of the human soul.

In March 2016, in a nondescript apartment on the outskirts of Rome, Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato, two “ordinary” young men from good families, brutally murdered twenty-three-year-old Luca Varani. News of the seemingly inexplicable crime sent shockwaves through Rome and beyond. What motivated such extreme violence? Were the killers evil or in the grip of societal evils? Did they know what they were doing? Or were they possessed? And if the latter, possessed by what?

Based on months of interviews, court documentation, and correspondence with the killers themselves, The City of the Living is not only a fast-paced, revelatory thriller in the style of Lisa Taddeo’s Animal, it is also a descent into the dark heart of Rome—a city that is unlivable and yet teeming with life, overrun by rats and wild animals, and plagued by corruption, drugs, and violence. Yet, the Eternal City is also a place that, more than any other in the world, seems to inspire a sense of absolute freedom in its inhabitants.

Proceeding in concentric circles, Nicola Lagioia leads us through a maze of betrayed expectations, sexual confusion, inability to grow up, economic grievances, crises of identity—progressively tightening the focus of the analysis to locate the breaking point after which anything is possible. As hypnotic as Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, an heir to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and destined to cast on spell on fans of the Morbid podcast, The City of the Living is Nicola Lagioia’s most gripping, bestselling, and critically acclaimed novel to-date. Razor-sharp, unputdownable, devastating, it is the story not only of a crime but of human nature itself; of the tension between responsibility and guilt, between the drive to oppress and the desire to be free; of who we are and who we can become.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609458317
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	998,808
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

One of Italy’s most critically acclaimed contemporary novelists, Nicola Lagioia has been the recipient of the Volponi, Straniero, and Viareggio awards. In 2015, he won the Strega Prize for Ferocity (Europa, 2017). He has been a jury member of the Venice Film Festival and was the program director of the Turin Book Fair from 2018 to 2022. Lagioia is a contributor to Italy’s most prominent culture pages. He was born in Bari, and lives in Rome.

Ann Goldstein has translated into English all of Elena Ferrante’s books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Lying Life of Adults and The Story of the Lost Child, which was also shortlisted for the Booker International Prize. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. She lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

This documentary thriller is psychogeography at its most perceptive, an insightful socio-economic analysis of Italy — and an attempt to understand what human beings are capable of doing to each other and to themselves.”—Anna Aslanyan, Financial Times

“I don’t think it’s possible to praise this book enough.”—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

 “Lagioia’s literary thriller provides a more complicated picture of crime and punishment than many crime novels, and the vivid depictions of Rome leap from the page.”—Jon Jeffryes, Library Journal

“Lagioia draws on court records and interviews with the men’s family and friends in an elegant plotting of the events that led up to their fatal encounter...Compelling.” —Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement

“The City of the Living is fiction at its best—fiction that breathes life into the facts of reality… As only literature can, Lagioia shows us that the fine line that Foffo and Prato walk, surrounded by the great misery and the ever dimmer splendor of Rome—of the entire world—is the same line we all walk every day.”—Domenico Starnone, Corriere della Sera

“An absorbing...study of the banality of evil.”—Kirkus Reviews

“The City of the Living will keep you up way past bedtime and should be read anytime you have a minute. I won’t sell it any further, but to say The City of the Living is a special book for a sophisticated reader.”—Durango Telegraph

“The City of the Living is...a portrait of Rome; of its economic divide, its social problems, its social outcasts. Lagioia paints a grim but compelling picture.”—The Irish Times

 “A gripping thriller that turns into something much more monstrous and shocking by its conclusion...Startling.”—Zachary Houle, Medium

“A magnificent panorama of Rome, dark and rotting… Unlike bad journalism, literature knows no monsters, because ‘monsters’ are comforting, something we humans can never become. Instead, the world of Lagioia’s book is deeply human: a world where parents don’t know their children, where fresh young love is based on a lie, where dark passions unfold with cold, geometric precision. That world is our world.”—Walter Siti, Domani

“Reading some books can be an experience as extreme as the story they tell… This is the case with Nicola Lagioia’s The City of the Living, a journey into the horrific murder of Luca Varani and into the decadence of Rome, a ‘dead city, inhabited by the living.’ A city from which Lagioia is on the run—psychological and emotionally as well as literally… The book turns into a painful therapy session—for the author and for each of us.”—la Repubblica

“Before I started reading, I wondered how Lagioia would be able to tell such a terrible, ambiguous, twisted story without being crushed by the weight of moral responsibility. The degree of the suffering inflicted on Luca Varani is almost impossible to imagine. How to write anything other than a long condemnation of his killers? It was a difficult task, but Lagioia succeeded. He found the words to tell the darkest of stories, and allowed us to enter into the minds of the killers. Not in order to forgive them—that’s not up to us—but to finally be able to see them.”—Antonella Lattanzi, La Stampa

From the Publisher

10/01/2023

Lagioia (Ferocity) creates a contemporary Italian In Cold Blood, using extensive research and interviews to recreate a real-life notorious Roman murder and its aftermath. In March 2016, after days of bingeing cocaine and vodka, Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato lured Luca Varani, a 23-year-old sex worker, into Foffo's apartment where they tortured and killed him in a Leopold-and-Loeb-style unmotivated murder of curiosity. In his fictionalization, Lagioia recounts the reporting of the case, the reactions of people who knew the victim and the killers, the impact on survivors, and subsequent trials, as well as gruesomely recreating the murder. The author enters the story as a character, feeling drawn to researching the case by his own experience of nearly murdering someone in adolescence. He aims to move beyond easy classifications and examine the humanity of all involved. VERDICT Lagioia's literary thriller provides a more complicated picture of crime and punishment than many crime novels, and the vivid depictions of Rome leap from the page, but readers will require a firm resolve to wade through the detailed horrors of Varani's murder.—Jon Jeffryes

Library Journal

2023-07-26
In Cold Blood meets Less Than Zero, Roman style, in a fact-based novel about a notorious 2016 murder.

Though the victim, 23-year-old mechanic Luca Varani, was bludgeoned with a hammer and stabbed with knives over two hours by his assailants, the barbarism of the attack was less noteworthy than the absence of any apparent reason for it. Manuel Foffo, 29, a successful event organizer, and Marco Prato, 29, a failed university student and son of a restaurateur, were hardly killer types. However nasty their intentions were with Luca, who supplemented his income as a gay prostitute, they didn’t plan on subjecting him to more than a “fake rape.” But after ingesting massive amounts of cocaine and alcohol, which they shared with the victim, they gave in to their darkest impulses, killing him just to see what it was like. Lagioia deeply researched the story, using testimony from the largely unreliable main characters as well as friends and family of all three men. He sees the killers and their victim as products of difficult childhoods as well as the rot and despair of a rat-infested Rome, in which “you breathed a tense, angry air that could inspire imprudent behavior.” Most of the novel acts as a prelude to descriptions of the gory murder scene, which is recounted late in the book. Rather than provide a Rashōmon-like complexity to the narrative, all the contrasting views of Manuel, Marco, and Luca tend to bog things down. The author of the Strega Prize–winning novel Ferocity (2017) and host of a podcast based on the Varani murder, Lagioia makes brief appearances as himself in the role of interviewer. He's more effective in that role than in dispensing grand bits of philosophy: “No human being measures up to the tragedies that befall him.”

An absorbing, if sometimes excessive, study of the banality of evil.

Kirkus Reviews