Gianrico Carofiglio's Le perfezioni provvisorie (Temporary perfections), whose hero-narrator is Bari-based lawyer Guido Guerrieri, was published in 2010.

I read it as part of my Italian shadow journey, and found it very enjoyable. (All the photos in this post are from our brief Bari sojourn last year.)

The mystery to be unravelled is the unexplained disappearance of a young woman. Normally, this would be more a job for a private detective than a lawyer. But Guerrieri, moved by the plight of the missing person's parents, takes it on, in the hope of finding loopholes in the file that will justify a reactivation of the investigation.

The story is not action-packed. Rather, it ambles along, occasionally pausing for long conversations. I have no problem with that, because it's essentially a novel about a character, and that character is very likable.

Guerrieri is in his forties, and he is to some degree a man of his time (he comments, for example, that one of the young women he is questioning is "the type that looks a lot better with the right clothes and makeup").

But he's honest, and self-deprecating. He works responsibly, honorably, and conscientiously, but he is not overly idealistic, and he admits a tendency to procrastination. He seems a little bit afraid of aging, but then aren't we all?

After several failed relationships (the sine qua non for the lead protagonist in a mystery story, it seems), he's now largely a solitary figure, who works out with his punchbag at home, and enjoys long walks in out-of-the-mainstream parts of the city.

Given that he seems a reasonable judge of character, it seems a little surprising that he allowed himself to be sucked in by that manipulative Caterina... We all saw her coming a mile off. But hey, lapses are the lot of humanity.



Guerrieri loves reading. And he has an interesting line in philosophy, which emerges in the stream-of-consciousness presentation of his thoughts, and in his conversations with interesting and thoughtful people like Nadia, formerly a sex worker, and currently the owner/manager of the Chelsea Hotel (a bar that Guerrieri has taken a liking to).

He is fascinated -- as reflected in the title of the novel -- by the momentary and fleeting:

"Someone said that moments of happiness take us by surprise, and sometimes -- often -- we don't even notice them. We only find out that we were happy afterwards, which is a very stupid thing..."

He repeatedly voices the belief that the sense of perfection is present only in temporary things that are destined to soon finish. (This is a very Japanese idea, I discovered last year.) There is nothing more perfect, for example, than the kind of temporariness a surfer experiences when briefly on top of a wave.

And to appreciate this temporariness, you should never get too settled:

"Adorno said that the highest form of morality is to never feel at home -- even when you are at home. I agree. You should never feel too comfortable. You always have to be a little out of place."

Totally. That's why I travel. (When I'm able to travel, that is...)

Nevertheless, there are handholds in life: "The remedy for the unpredictability of fate, the chaotic uncertainty of the future is the ability to make and keep promises."

And there is the power of memory, about which Guerrieri has quite Proustian things to say:

"It is not that memories dissolve and disappear. They are all there, hidden under the subtle crust of consciousness. Even those we believed lost for ever. Sometimes they stay down there for life. Other times something happens that brings them back to the surface."



As I commented in my Purple Tern post, Bari is not upfront in the novel in the way that Vigo is in the novels of Domingo Villar. But there are definitely little snippets of Puglia in there. It's a conservative place, it seems. People are surprised when Guerrieri's associate, a dark-skinned woman with Andean features, turns out to be a lawyer... The Chelsea Hotel, catering primarily for a gay clientele, is an unusual phenomenon.

There are also echoes of last year's experiences. A colleague of Guerrieri's, at a conference in the US, meets a Christian Turk who complains that the people of Bari have stolen the bones of St Nicholas of Mira -- we remember him -- and ought to give them back.

There's talk of home-made orecchiette. And when we go back -- which, please God, we will -- we definitely need to try tiella di riso, patate, e cozze.

All up, a good read, and I would definitely be up for taking in some more.