1. A GENRE-BENDING GEM . Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini are legendary European authors known as pioneers of the modern mystery genre. Runaway Horses follows on from The Lover of No Fixed Abode, which we published last year. They are two of six works of fiction they wrote together, published in the 1980s in Italian and never before available in English. Runaway Horses works on many levels: it contains a murder mystery, a deeply satirical portrait of a marriage on its last legs, a Fellini-esque take on a wealthy and television advertising-obsessed Italian society, as well as a splendid description of Siena and its Palio, the city's colourful annual horse-race. Many will have seen Rick Steves video "The World's Most Insane Horse Race" (the link is in Marketing/websites). 2.
THE STORY: You are a perfectly average Milanese couple: the lawyer Maggione and his wife Valeria, on their way by car to Siena to stay with friends. A violent hailstorm and you take a wrong turn. Here you are at a luxurious villa where refined Sienese and their Filipino servants give you shelter. That is when your world disintegrates. Which explains why three days later, for the great Palio, you, sir, find yourself at a window in the company of the too-pretty and too-young Ginevra; while you, Madame, watch the race from another window, leaning against the shoulder of Don Juan Guidobaldo. Truth be told, each one of you is mostly watching the other. And it's something else that you're trying to understand. Who is the jockey Puddu, a coarse and triumphant gnome who has bitten you very incongruously, Madame? Why is he found dead, with a viper around his neck? And what is this muddled history of the Palio, a race contested by the seventeen urban wards (the contrade, each named after an animal or symbol) of Siena while six "dead" contrade are no longer allowed to run? And what is the relationship between all these contrade and the inhabitants of the villa? There are so many riddles that you won't be able to tear yourself away from - perhaps because it's with yourselves that you have an appointment at the end of the investigation.
3. SIENA AND ITS PALIO: Central to the novel's particular charm are the brilliant descriptions of Siena (in many ways more seductive than Florence, its Tuscan rival) and the famous Palio horse race. These include the history and fascinating rules of the race--the allocation of horses to each ward and their starting positions are drawn by lot, but, in true Italian fashion, bribery of jockeys is used to reduce the role of chance in producing a winner. And the story mentioned above of the six "dead" contrade is true. They were abolished in 1729: six riders with helmets lowered represent them to this day in the pre-race parade. What The Lover of No Fixed Abode did for Venice, Runaway Horses has done for Siena. 4. SOCIAL SATIRE : Fruttero & Lucentini's novels are always highly effective social satires, with the authors focusing a cynical eye (or, rather, two pairs of eyes) on Italian society from the 1970s on.
Subtle irony veers into cutting satire of the upper strata of Tuscan society, exposed in all their venality, as are their corruption, naïve fatalism, obsession with branded consumerism and outrageous decadence.