UBC: Preston (and Spezi), The Monster of Florence [audio]

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


[library]

Okay, so I'm going to start with something catty, for which I apologize, but it also serves as a pretty good tl;dr:

This book would be greatly improved by about 80% less Douglas Preston and a concomitant 80% more Mario Spezi.

I am NOT INTERESTED in Preston's story of the American naif whose romantic vision of Florence is ripped apart by his investigation of the Monster of Florence. This is a tired old plot--John Clute dissects it in The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror--and I don't think it works very well in nonfiction. It's so obviously a story about the blindness of privilege and Preston so completely fails to come to grips with the way he forces his friends into the roles he imagines their identities to be that I find it mostly a frustrating scaffold around the actual story. I am especially not interested in all the name-dropping and subtextual bragging about his obvious wealth. (Dude can afford to drop everything and move to Florence with his wife and two children on (a) a whim and (b) a moment's notice. This is a guy who is not worrying about his car payments, let's just leave it at that.) But ultimately, I just DON'T CARE about the perspective of a wealthy American bourgeois who waltzes into the story 40 years after its murky beginnings and foregrounds HIS anagnoresis & collateral angst over the story of either (a) Il Mostro & his victims or (b) the story of Mario Spezi, the Italian journalist who has been writing about Il Mostro since 1974, and who was actually arrested and imprisoned for his pursuit of the truth. (Preston was interrogated & threatened ... and allowed to leave Italy. Not quite the same.) I would be much more interested in a translation of Spezi's collected writings about Il Mostro, or even in a translation of the book Preston & Spezi wrote in Italian, Dolci colline di sangue--it's not the same as The Monster of Florence, since part of TMoF takes place around the publication of Dcds--possibly TMoF is just an expansion/translation of Dcds, but since Spezi gets equal billing in Dcds & is only a "with" for TMoF, I have some doubts. If Preston clarified this point in TMoF, I missed it.

LEAVING THAT ASIDE (and again I apologize for being catty), the story of Il Mostro di Fiorenze is trainwreck-fascinating, both the brutal unsolved murders and the absolutely lunatic theories of the official investigations and the terrible terrible damage they have done and continue to do to innocent people. Preston says, both in the book and in the vapid interview that was a bonus feature at the end of the audiobook, that he doesn't think the case will ever be solved, and I understand that belief. Unless Il Mostro himself confesses (and by now he may very well be dead), the truth may be hopelessly buried beneath conspiracy theories about organ-harvesting Satanists.

As I'm sure you're learning to expect from my reviews of audiobooks, I once again was driven nearly to distraction by the reader. He was so excellent for the most part that I was stupidly surprised that that's not what Douglas Preston actually sounds like, but whenever he was reading quotes (in English) from Italian speakers, whether they were speaking English to Americans, speaking Italian to Americans, or speaking Italian to other Italians, he used an Italian accent, complete with nasal sing-song, that was distracting as all fuck and just NOT NECESSARY. It's not like we're going to forget that the story is set in Florence or that everyone except Preston is Italian.



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