On 26 September I attended the presentation of Gianrico Carofiglio’s Temporary Perfections at Foyle’s bookshop, brilliantly organised by Bitter Lemon Press.

Carofiglio is a former anti-mafia judge and now a member of the Senate, and was in conversation with Marcel Berlin and Paul Blezard. His books have been translated into 24 languages including Swahili, which Gianrico confirmed, with a smile on his face, he carefully reads and checks all!

The discussion kicked off with a question about building a relation of trust between the translator and the author. Gianrico commented that translators have different ways of working: some contact him via email or phone, but some never contacted him, which surely makes it more difficult to iron out any doubts and problems a translator might have.

Gianrico is the only Italian exponent of the “legal thriller” (he remarked that he had once been introduced as “one of the most important legal thriller writers”, saying it’s not difficult when there’s only one of them!), where the protagonist is not a cop or a detective. Marcel Berlin remarked that Italian fiction is usually very noir: how come Gianrico decided to write in this genre? When he started to write his first book, Involuntary Witness, he didn’t know it was going to be a thriller, he just wrote the story. Gianrico says that the same book can be read in different ways or from different points of view, for example at an event one reader commented that she read the book as a love story: and this is still fine, because there are many stories woven into the book.

Marcel said that on average there is more political content in Italian books, however Gianrico says he doesn’t write about what he’s too close to: in fiction you shouldn’t decide in advance what politics you’re going to write about. According to Margaret Atwood [paraphrasing Virginia Woolf], writing is like being in a dark room where the writer finds his or her way around it until the process comes to an end at the exit of the room itself.

Gianrico, like many writers, reinforced the idea of writing fiction as a necessity and says: “I know I have a story when I have a situation”. Writing a novel is also making a deal with the reader, with a promise at the beginning, which is as important as the end. However, starting to write is actually very scary, and that’s why he started so late (in his forties), but the piece of advice he would have for novice writers is “begin tonight”, don’t find excuses.

Marcel then asked about Italian noir more in general, since in his opinion it’s quite concentrated on corruption, on ‘gangsterland’: for example, non-Italian authors of books set in Italy, like Donna Leon and Michael Dibdin, who write books that are more detective stories, are they well known in Italy? Gianrico says that Leon doesn’t want to be translated in Italian, while Dibdin is not very well known.

Gianrico also says that the duties of a writer are to be honest and reduce the necessary suspension of disbelief to a minimum, do appropriate research and be accurate. So he writes what he likes to write about: people and characters. Every character has a back story, Gianrico says his writing is character-centred rather than plot centred: he uses the plot to talk about things he’s interested in. He likes writing ‘subplots’, what’s happening on the side of the main story. He says “It’s fun to write biographies of characters”.

Marcel and Paul then want to know how his books are received by Italian lawyers and Gianrico says they love them: he runs legal writing workshops and he says people come because of his fiction, not because of his legal writing! He is also asked often how autobiographical Guerrieri is: he admits initially he was saying Guerrieri wasn’t then realised this was creating a bit of an aura around him and, again with a smile on his face, “became much more flexible.”

Finally, Gianrico is asked what kind of books he likes to read: Lawrence Block, the early RJ Ellory, not so many Italian writers. Grisham, Connolly, Thurow he finds very plot-driven and with not enough depth to their characters.

Does he intend to carry on writing books on Guerrieri, asks Marcel: yes, although his next book is not in the Guerrieri series. Gianrico likes the idea of an “open mega-novel” where each book is like a chapter, he writes a new novel when something happens and something is changing. He reminds the atendees of the Lao Tze quote at the beginning of Involuntary Witness “What the caterpillar thinks is the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly”: this is what he’s interested in writing about. And he shares with Guerrieri the motto of “never feel too comfortable”.