The life and literary fate of Carlo Fruttero were for several decades bound to those of Franco Lucentini. Fruttero was born in Turin in 1926, Lucentini in Rome in 1922. The pair met in Paris in 1953 and instantly became friends. Within a few years, they joined up professionally at Einaudi, both working on the editorial team. Lucentini was a man of culture; he graduated with a degree in philosophy from Rome University, with a thesis on Time. He was a polyglot and translated "The library of Babel" by Borges.
Fruttero was also a translator, translating, amongst other works, the plays of Samuel Beckett, one of his favourite authors. Together, they edited two of the most exciting science-fiction publications of the age: "Le meraviglie del possibile. Antologia della fantascienza" (1959) and "Il secondo libro della fantascienza" (1960). They moved to the Mondadori publishing company to edit the science-fiction magazine "Urania" (staying for over twenty years), and in 1965 began to pen an unusual thriller together, which they published seven years later. Using suspense to great effect, "The Sunday Woman (La donna della domenica)" (1972) paints an unusual portrait of Turin; the investigation is led by Superintendent Santamaria (whom we meet again in the 1979 novel "The Night (A che punto è la notte)"), a detective from southern Italy struggling to adapt to life in the north. This heralded the start of a highly successful writing partnership, which sadly ended in 2002 when Franco Lucentini committed suicide.
After five years of silence, Carlo Fruttero has taken up his pen once more, publishing "Donne informate sui fatti" (Mondadori, 196 pages, 16.50 euros), a novel that has several things in common with the author's best-seller of thirty-four years ago: the story is set in Turin (though the characters are placed in a variety of backgrounds, from the residential Crocetta quarter to the Abbey of Santa Maria di Vezzolano, from the rice paddies of Vercelli to the castles of Monferrato), it involves a mysterious crime (a Romanian prostitute, Milena, is discovered murdered), and the structure is not merely choral, but positively polyphonic.
The events are narrated by eight women from very different backgrounds: a school caretaker, a barmaid, a policewoman, a daughter, a best friend, a journalist, a voluntary worker and an elderly countess all give their version of the events in a sort of soliloquy, which more than the facts themselves give a glimpse of the workings of their minds. Highly skilled in rendering the arrangement of Piedmontese cadences and inflections (the working class characters have the typical accent of the suburbs, where middle-class women express themselves in a starchy language perhaps occasioned by hasty reading), Fruttero displays the dexterity of a master puppeteer in moving the strings of the tale: enjoyable, sometimes funny, "Donne informate sui fatti" has nonetheless a mournful ending that is highlighted as the mystery unravels. Even amid the changing times, changing relationships between the classes and changing ethics, what dominates is still the destructive force of passion, vendetta and jealousy. Age-old motives for new, shifting scenarios, where the hearts and minds of individuals remain equal.

Francesco Troiano