Vincenzo Malinconico Novels
2 primary works
Book 1
Vincenzo Malinconico is a wildly unsuccessful lawyer who spends most of his time at the office trying to look busy. His wife has left him. His teenage children worry him to death. And he suffers from a chronic inability to control his sentence structure.
When he is asked to fill in as the public defender for alleged Mafioso Mimmo lo Burzone, Malinconico seizes the opportunity to turn his life around. Without dwelling too long on what it might mean to be employed by the mob, he rushes to re-learn the Italian criminal code, all the while attempting to resist any further advances from his employers. Malinconico’s life becomes a comical battle to finish what he has started without falling further into the clutches of the mafia.
I Hadn’t Understood is one of the subtlest and most cunning accounts of the mafia’s influence on everyday life in recent decades. And it is certainly the most entertaining. Written with a neurotic’s love of detail and wry humor, I Hadn’t Understood is an engaging story of family, fatherhood, and the perils of navigating the Italian legal system.
Book 2
He makes you laugh, though you can never be quite sure why. He’s affable enough, of course, but it’s not so much that. He is both a kind of halfwit and a genius, flippant and profound, chaotic and yet possessed of a Zen-like calm. He’s easily distracted but tends to hound-dog every thought until he has it by the throat. His conversation is labyrinthine but he is capable of moments of blinding lucidity. The thing is, you can’t help but love him. He is Vincenzo Malinconico, an underemployed lawyer whose wife has sort of left him (“he’s the kind of man you marry not once but twice, and leave both times”), whose teenage children worry him to death, and whose profession mostly consists in appearing as if he has one.
In this sequel to I Hadn’t Understood, a Neapolitan mafia boss has been kidnapped by a mild-mannered computer engineer who holds the camorrista responsible for the accidental death of his son. The engineer plans to conduct an impromptu trial on live television during which he will list the various crimes of the accused, sentencing him before a captivated national audience and executing him accordingly. The standoff between law enforcement officers and the kidnapper becomes a tragi-comic reality show. The only hope of a happy ending rests with Vincenzo Malinconico, Neapolitan lawyer, poster-child for the proverbial mid-life crisis, and inveterate flâneur. He hardly has a reputation for decisiveness, but now is called upon to play a decisive role in resolving this drama in course with, hopefully, no loss of life, his own included.