The Ambiguities of Pursuit

...And at the same time you were the only one condemned to know that the facts by themselves really explained nothing, that under this shiny film everything remained eternally to discover, to motivate, to connect...

...Simply that "you were left with your match, your pebble in your hand, and a sense of decay inside you, of irretrievable proportions, of the vanity of all things...

...Post coitum hoc triste omne animal...

...At its core, the book describes the ambiguities of pursuit—sexual and criminal—revealing that the techniques of the chase are the same for a girl or a murderer...

...Good, these were the connections, the reasons...

...Well, for that matter, how do you tell whether your interrogation of a suspect is hitting home...

...that's how it went...

...Bonetto shows films of the Utopian commune at Fathead Ridge, U.S.A., exercises daily with a rowing machine, his eyes fixed on the "little blue trains of the wallpaper," and contemplates putting an end to it all when his rival, Professor Marpioli, takes a verbal swipe at him in a lecture...

...Oh, so...

...During the investigation Vollero hesitates to provide the police with eyewitness information, since this would reveal to his wealthy but ignorant patrons the fact that he is in the habit of frequenting a junk shop to buy picture frames...

...The authors, inhabitants of Turin, have not only managed to sustain simultaneously the twin threads of a narrowing investigation and a burgeoning romance, they have also had the dexterity to evoke a highly detailed picture of modern provincial Italy...

...How do you determine if the woman of your affections is playing fairly upon your emotions—indeed, if she perceives anything at all worth playing with...

...childish...

...At one point, Anna Carla casually asks Santama-ria for her purse: "The inspector, unprepared for that nonchalance (excessive...

...An enormous range of characters is presented, each enough of a stereotype to suggest a general category of people, yet each also enough of an individual to stand as an articulated personality...

...If Fruttero and Lucentini are adept at portraying the uniqueness of personality, their perceptions of individuals in social roles are equally sharp, and pointedly satirical...

...In between the murder (a blow to the head with a stone phallus did the victim in) and the sexual consummation that is the novel's conclusion, a vast amount of very deft writing has been wrought...

...This sophisticated and miniskirt-ed young mother, Anna Carla, and her equally sophisticated and upper-crust playmate, the homosexual Massimo Campi, are dogged through some 400 pages by the astute Inspector Santamaria of the Turin police, who suspects them of involvement in the murder of a repulsive architect manque...

...In love, as in crime, the smallest and most prosaic detail is pregnant with possibilities...

...The Sunday Woman is a plausible and sympathetic romance, a cleverly executed detective story and an often deadly accurate comedy of manners...

...What, then, remains at the end, after the available clues have coalesced and the riddle appears to be solved...

...Among the most memorable is Signor Vol-lero, the gallery owner who knows his painting but feels constrained to place his most plushily vulgar pictures on display in the front window...

...I am the wife of a capitalist son of capitalists and grandson of capitalists...

...The master in love and detection has the ability to spot both the meaningful in the miniscule and the meaningless in the big lead, and can skillfully balance his insights with restraint...

...Bravo...

...Above all, one must recognize the unpleasant fact that whatever the evidence seems to indicate, either in bed or in a completed police dossier, the truth may never really be uncovered...

...I'm not upset by the wretched conditions in our prisons, in our insane asylums', I take no interest in spastics, in underdeveloped peoples, and, if I have to be sincere, I always imagine the Chinese with pigtails...

...And similarly, what is left on an early Sunday evening in the old part of Turin, when most of the city is away for the holidays and the lady with whom you've spent the day between the sheets is rushing to get home to her husband, to preserve appearances in a marriage that has not gone wrong...

...Along with the servile though cultivated art dealer and his overstuffed customers, one finds such fauna as a progressive mother given to speaking of "the child," and Professor Bonetto, an American specialist who lectures on "this new American awareness of the epico-historical and ecological equation: River equals Life...

...He muses disgustedly upon "lawyers and dentists, prominent surgeons and successful tradesmen" who "had all been converted by now to so-called 'modern art,' or, rather, to international fraud," and who, following the lead of bourgeois mag-mficoes like the Olivetti and Fiat executives, "filled their houses (at a cost of millions) with cement pipes and gasoline drums, broken chains and rusted faucets, piles of firewood, dust rags and babies' bottles painted yellow...

...put his hands into the purse feeling as if he were defusing a mine...

...And when your might-be lady is also a prime suspect in the case you are investigating, the complexities of the situation begin to whirl and spiral like a double helix...

...he gently moved a crumpled scarf, black glasses, keys, cigarettes, lighter, and various other highly common and explosive items...

...Yet these human creations of The Sunday Woman, however subtly nuanced they may be, exist merely in the interstices of the novel...

...While performing his duties, Santamaria conceives a passion for "the lovely lady," who is far above him socially, and on page 408, with the case solved and Anna Carla no longer suspect, the two topple into bed together...

...Eventually it becomes apparent, even to Bonetto, that his love affair with the United States is at heart a love affair with beefy blond American pulchritude...

...I'm in a rut of habits and bourgeois prejudices and have no social or political consciousness...

...comradely...

...The rules of the game are to avoid being overly suspicious ?a suspicious cop is a bad cop" —and to be always alert for the main opening, wherever it manifests itself...

...Who can say if the shell that enclosed you was "secure, precious, unchangeable, or perhaps, instead, fragile, with no future...

...The overtones of a girl's responses are as infinite as the overtones shimmering through the testimony of a criminal in the dock...

...regal...