"This biting Italian relationship drama and murder mystery dwells within a disintegrating marriage and one of the most famous horses races in the world. "
A murder mystery yes, but one where the focus sits outside the desperate deed itself, with a couple acting as witnesses to the fiercely competitive contrade. This was originally published in Italy in 1983, I first came across the author’s Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini with The Lover of No Fixed Abode where Venice simply sings. Both novels have been translated from the Italian by Gregory Dowling, and in Runaway Horses he enables the details of the time and race itself to shine. Here Siena claims the spotlight and the sections containing the famous Siena Palio horse race are vibrantly alive as the sense of place sings: “The gently curved polygon of the Piazza del Campo blazes with a dazzling variety of colours, from the vivid tinctures of the banners to the pale ochres of the palazzi and the dizzying pointillism of the crowd…”. The story weaves backwards and forwards in time sending the plot twisting one way and then the other, leaving thoughts in turmoil. The characters aren’t likeable (which is always interesting), and a stinging wit and judgement falls on the self-indulgent as a sense of the macabre stalks the pages. Mysterious and cutting, Runaway Horses is a wonderful study of humanity.
Siena, one of Italy's most beautiful cities, is feverishly preparing for the Palio, a horse race dating back to the Middle Ages, held every summer in the centre of the town. Tempers flare, rivalries between the competing neighbourhoods intensify. Milanese lawyer Enzo Maggione and his wife Valeria are unwittingly caught up in the death of a jockey and a maelstrom of plots, counterplots and bribes surrounding the race. What begins as a listless excursion to a medieval equestrian competition turns into a hallucinatory nightmare for Maggione and his wife, awakening their dormant libido, for each other but, more dangerously, for others in their entourage.
Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini were a well-known literary duo in Italy for several decades until Lucentini’s death (by suicide) in 2002. For about forty years they co-wrote newspaper and magazine articles, literary essays, edited numerous anthologies and published six groundbreaking and best-selling mystery novels. Their first novel, The Sunday Woman, was made into a film in 1975 starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Louis Trintignant. The Lover of No Fixed Abode, first published in 1986, is the fourth of their novels.
