The Goodbye Kiss
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Synopsis
A fugitive from justice returns to Italy where he is wanted for a series of crimes. To avoid prison he sells out his old friends, turns his back on his former ideals, and cuts deals with crooked cops. To achieve the guise of respectability he is willing to go even further, maybe even as far as murder.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I am glad that they translated Carlotto into English. I guess there is something in this novel that English language readers will appreciate: that is, the story told by the Bad Guy. And this Bad Guy, the narrating I of this dark story of corruption, violence, and politics (plenty of politics), is as good (or as bad) as the charaters you may meet in the pages of that underrated genius of US fiction, Jim Thompson.
The man who tells the story is a former Red Brigades terrorist and exile. But he is above all a cynical, cold, amoral individual. His story is the grim tale of how you can be formally rehabilitated, thanks to good connections and a corrupt political system, yet remaining the insensitive thug you were. And such cold, cynical people are always appreciated in a world like the Italian Nordest in the 1990s, where only money and glamour and power count.
Carlotto's plain style has been berated as it doesn't meet the literary standards of critics who only care for the highest number of synonyms and adjectives and adverbs. Actually he writes in a language which is as simple, polished and piercing as a bullet. But some of his choices of words and details are simply powerful. And this is one of those books where you simply can't take away anything.
A remarkable thing is that in noir you always have the dark lady. This is an exception. Here you have the dark man. The lady is the only clean person in the story...
The man who tells the story is a former Red Brigades terrorist and exile. But he is above all a cynical, cold, amoral individual. His story is the grim tale of how you can be formally rehabilitated, thanks to good connections and a corrupt political system, yet remaining the insensitive thug you were. And such cold, cynical people are always appreciated in a world like the Italian Nordest in the 1990s, where only money and glamour and power count.
Carlotto's plain style has been berated as it doesn't meet the literary standards of critics who only care for the highest number of synonyms and adjectives and adverbs. Actually he writes in a language which is as simple, polished and piercing as a bullet. But some of his choices of words and details are simply powerful. And this is one of those books where you simply can't take away anything.
A remarkable thing is that in noir you always have the dark lady. This is an exception. Here you have the dark man. The lady is the only clean person in the story...
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Massimo Carlotto's The Goodbye Kiss produces yet another anti-hero in the vein of Ripley. Pellegrini is an amoral and self-serving Italian fugitive who aims to set himself up for life in the home country after years of exile in South America following atrocities he committed with the Marxist Red Brigade in the 1970s. As part of his masterplan to reinvent himself, he bullies and blackmails weak women, rips off shady criminals, allies himself with a corrupt cop, starts a fine restaurant and claws his way into the upper classes. Meanwhile, ex-colleagues and sundry low life are gunning for him, Croatian terrorist and nihilists enter the action, and Pellegrini - true to his credo that death is the final solution to all problems - has to come up with ever more inventive ways to knock off his adversaries. There is no charm to him at all, but there is enough deviousness in this twisted person, and enough googlies in this twisted story that it is all becomes great fun.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is noir. As in: dark, very dark. Reminiscent of Jim Thompson on a bad day, reading this novel will rewrite the software currently running inside your brain. An unsettling and razor sharp character study of a man who is willing to do what is (as Machiavelli put it) "not good" in order to make ends meet. For anyone interested in the genre, this is an absolute must buy.
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