Cosi Fan Tutti, Orlando Furioso

My last outing with the Aurelio Zen series was to Venice, in Dead Lagoon.  This time, I followed him to Naples in Cosi Fan Tutti.  Dead Lagoon is, I recall, the darkest piece in the series; Cosi Fan Tutti, in a bit of chiaruscuro, is by far the lightest.  Dibdin weaves in wit, slapstick, mistaken identity, and other tools of the farce-writer's trade in a masterful comedy.  It's a pity that, although he delved in humor in other novels, he never wrote another full-on humorous mystery.

In general, I think it's hard to write a humorous mystery -- either the humor or the mystery tend to get short shrift.  Here, it's definitely the mystery.  In the end, Zen "solves" a crime he wasn't even investigating by the criminals' mistaking him for someone else.  But I can forgive Dibdin this, for a few reasons.  First and foremost, it fits the tone of the novel; the novel's light tone would be undermined with a lot of actual investigating.  In a way, the best way to think of the book is as a comedy which uses the trappings of the detective novel. 

Second, the whole thing feels legitimate.  Often, when a mystery focuses on the humor, the actual crimes end up being completely implausible.  (E.g. Amanda Cross, who's very funny, but ends up with solutions involving filling a swimming pool with salt water, then draining it and refilling it with regular water.)  Here, although the plot is over the top, as befits a farce, the actual motivating events (a simple gang war) make sense.  Although Zen stumbles through the novel, the underlying events are well-motivated.

From modern Italy, I then retreated a few hundred years, into the world of Orlando Furioso.  Ariosto, the poet who composed the epic Orlando has been considered second only to Dante among Renaissance Italian poets.  Sadly for him, since most people only know one Italian Renaissance poet, his work is not as widely read as it used to be.

Penguin splits Barbara Reynolds's translation into two parts, and each part is very long -- part I is 700 pages, without the introduction, endnotes, etc.  It's a sprawling epic -- in Part I, Orlando himself barely shows up.  Instead, Ariosto concentrates on a number of his compatriots, Ruggiero, Bradamante, Ferrau, Astolfo, et al.  He somehow manages to keep them all straight; although the poem jumps around among them very frequently, whenever it returns to someone, it only took a line or two for me to remember who he was.

I think in some ways the jumping around is one of the defining characteristics of this work.  Ariosto will jump away from his current thread several times in any canto, saying something to the effect of "this is exciting stuff, but now I want to draw your attention somewhere else; we'll return here later."  It's a very different feel from the classical epics I'm used to.  On the other hand, his use of simile is clearly influenced by Homer.  Many of the subjects could have come straight out of the Iliad, and Ariosto develops them at a length (half a stanza) that feels Homeric as well.