The Natural Disorder of Things - Hardcover

Canobbio, Andrea

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847242502 ISBN 13: 9781847242501

Publisher: MacLehose Press, 2008

Synopsis

Claudio Fratta is a garden designer; a naturally solitary man, he is nonetheless a playful companion to his nephews. He is at the same time obsessed with the determination to exact vengeance on the loan shark who bankrupted his father and with the pursuit of an enigmatic, alluring woman, one of his clients. Set in an Italian landscape in part unchanged, yet deeply marked by the twentieth century, The Natural Disorder of Things is peopled with an authentic cast of contemporary Italy: wealthy dilettantes, ex-convicts, right-wing secessionists, left-wing conspiracy theorists, and immigrant Moroccan, Chinese, and Sikh workers. Andrea Canobbio's masterful and fluid prose captures not only the character of Claudio - who cannot stop mulling over his past , including the death by drugs of his brother - but the central theme of the book: that his history is a burden, a legacy of guilt, silence, and misunderstanding. Professionally, Claudio imposes order on the landscape, but he cannot lay to rest the tragic past for himself and those he loved

About this title

About the Author

Andrea Canobbio was born in Turin. A senior editor at the publishing house Einaudi, he is the author of the novels Vasi Cinesi (1989), Traslochi (1992), Padri di padri (1997), and Indivisibili (2000). This is his first book to appear in English translation in the UK.

From the Back Cover

"An engaging existential thriller ... The Natural Disorder of Things is in one sense a murder mystery, but it is also a romance, a satire and a philosophical exercise in self-inquiry ... Canobbio's voice is entirely his own" Chris Moss, Washington Post
"Revenge served cold drives this subdued, smart thriller" Playboy
"Andrea Canobbio straddles the worlds of murder mystery and literary fiction ... a writer this talented deserves to have all his work in translation" Vendela Vida, New York Times

From the Inside Flap

Claudio Fratta is a garden designer, a naturally solitary and gentle man. He lives along, taking care of his nephews at weekends, keeping a watch over his widowed mother, grieving for his dead father and haunted by the loss of his drug-addicted younger brother.
One sleepless night, Fratta is driving aimlessly around the Italian countryside when he witnesses a shocking and bewildering killing in a supermarket carpark. The murderer is a woman, Elisabetta Renal, who will, in the months that follow, commission him to remake the garden of her ancestral Piedmont home. The mystery of the killing, to which she never refers, begins to be an obsession for Fratta - as Elisabetta herself will also become. Her husband, an older, scholarly man confined to a wheelchair, keeps watch on his wife and on Fratta, but he allows her to spend her own sleepless nights driving around - sometimes accompanied by men whom Fratta begins to suspect are in some way connected to the bankruptcy of his father's business. Gradually, his need for revenge becomes entwined with the distraction that Elisabetta Renal has become.
The Natural Disorder of Things is a beautiful, haunting, gorgeously evocative novel that is at once a literary thriller and a tale of an all-consuming erotic obsession. Psychologically disturbing and aesthetically moving, this is a meditation on order and disorder, and on fathers and the traces they leave on their children.

Edition details

• Publisher: MacLehose Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847242502
• ISBN 13: 9781847242501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256