'What the caterpillar thinks is the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly': these words by Lao-Tzu appear at the beginning of my first book, Involuntary Witness. They are quite a good explanation of how and why I started to write.
When I was a child, I said I wanted to be a writer: or rather, being a great fan of Western films, books, and comic strips, a sheriff and a writer. Like Guido, the main character of Involuntary Witness, I wanted to chase the bad guys, one way or another. And I wanted to tell stories. My first childhood dream came true while I was still in my 20s: I became a public prosecutor in my city, Bari, dealing with Mafia crimes - murder, extortion, drug trafficking. This work - my 'first' work - showed me many sides of humanity, some depressing, some quite amusing, and certainly gave me a particular way of looking at people and things, an eye for stories. But I was nearly 40, and I had not yet realised (for fear of really putting myself to the test) my second childhood dream, to be a writer. I started writing Involuntary Witness out of an acute awareness that time was passing and that this dream might never come true.
Like all changes, all transformations, the early stages were difficult and even painful. They coincided with a moment of crisis: this, in a way, was my own 'end of the world'. It is not surprising, then, that in Involuntary Witness - as, indeed, in the books that have come after it - I wrote about change, I told stories of transformation, concealed within the structure of a legal thriller. The main character in Involuntary Witness, Guido Guerrieri, lives in Bari, is a criminal lawyer, and is not yet 40 when, at the beginning of the novel, he lives through his own 'end of the world'. His wife throws him out. His work gives him a feeling of nausea, he no longer enjoys his profession, no longer knows why he is exercising it. He experiences solitude, anxiety attacks, genuine panic. He consults a doctor, and then a psychiatrist. He is haunted by a sense of failure. Then one day, Guido is engaged to defend Abdou, a Senegalese peddler accused of the murder of a 9-year-old boy, Francesco.
Francesco disappeared one afternoon at Monopoli, south of Bari, while playing football alone outside his grandparents' house by the sea. His body was found two days later. There are no witnesses to the crime, but there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence, all of it pointing to Abdou. The story of Guido's redemption develops hand in hand with the trial of Abdou. In both cases, the main character gains in insight as the book progresses. The book is about the difficult relationship between two men, both, for different reasons, desperate: Guido, the lawyer in crisis, and Abdou, the terrified but quarrelsome defendant. It is also about the people who inhabit the courtrooms, the mechanisms of the law, the search for, and examination of, clues and evidence, and the fickle memories of the witnesses. Simultaneously, Guido tries to put his own life back together: he meets Margherita, who has come to live in his apartment block, she is an expert in aikido, and has the carefree approach to life of someone who has been through a lot of suffering. Guido tries to escape his own pain by recalling his past and the people he has loved, and so the book is also about his walks, his Sundays by the sea, his trips to bookshops, and the things he likes: films - Manhattan, Big Wednesday, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Chariots of Fire, The Ghost and the Darkness - songs - Simon and Garfunkel, REM, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen - and books - Gerald Durrell, JD Salinger, Arthur Schnitzler: an ideal library, or rather an ideal bookshelf, which I filled with my own obsessions, my own passions.
This novel has been called many, often quite different things, both by the critics and the public: a legal thriller, a roman noir, a psychological novel, a Bildungsroman, a love story. All these definitions contain an element of truth. But what I like to hear more than anything goes something like this: Reading your novel kept me up all night, I couldn't wait to see how Guido's story was going to end, how the trial was going to end, whether Abdou was going to be found guilty or not guilty, and all the rest of it. And you know something strange? As I was getting to the end I started to slow down, and I felt sad. Because I didn't want it to end.
