The Past Is a Foreign Country
A Thriller
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3.3 • 22 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An international bestseller and winner of Italy's prestigious Premio Bancarella prize—an intense psychological thriller in the vein of The Talented Mr. Ripley
As world-weary Lieutenant Chiti spends sleepless nights hunting for the serial rapist terrorizing his city, trainee lawyer Giorgio is befriended by dangerously charismatic Francesco. Slowly the innocent Giorgio is lured into a corrupt world of beautiful women and casual violence. Then one terrifying night Giorgio is forced to realize just how far he has left his past behind.
"Set largely in the southern Italian city of Bari, this stylish psychological thriller from Carofiglio (A Walk in the Dark) fuses Jack Kerouac's On the Road with hard-edged crime fiction à la Henning Mankell's Inspector Wallander saga." - Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set largely in the southern Italian city of Bari, this stylish psychological thriller from Carofiglio (A Walk in the Dark) fuses Jack Kerouac's On the Road with hard-edged crime fiction la Henning Mankell's Inspector Wallander saga. When model law student Giorgio Cipriani meets charismatic philosophy student Francesco Carducci, he becomes enthralled by Francesco's dangerous lifestyle. Within weeks, Giorgio has abandoned his studies for high stakes poker games in which he and his newfound mentor cheat players out of large sums of money. Giorgio soon finds his life filled with late-night poker scams, drinking, drugs, and sexual encounters with random women. When Francesco manipulates him to take a "holiday" in Spain, Giorgio realizes just how completely he's forsaken his past. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Chiti of the Bari police tries to identify an elusive criminal who's been assaulting local women. The intertwining plot lines build to a haunting ending.
Customer Reviews
Not bad, unsettling
For me, this is not one of those novels that you "simply cannot put down" once you start reading. I put it down many times. Indeed, it took me quite a while to finish it. That said, I recognize that The Past is a Foreign Country is well-written and compelling in many ways. The characterizations are superb and seem true-to-life, even when there are acts and thoughts that seem extreme or incomprehensible. One can easily imagine being in the shoes of Giorgio, the narrator and main character. His example reminds us of our own fallibility and propensity for misjudgement. Even though most of us do not get pulled into the kinds of ethically compromised positions that Giorgio inhabits for most of the novel, we can empathize and understand the world as he sees it; we can find some familiarity in the difficult places to which his passions and desires take him. The ending, including the conclusions that Giorgo draws from his experiences, leaves one feeling more than a little uneasy. But this story follows its path to the end and remains faithful to itself: complex, ambivalent, open-ended, indeterminate, resistant to wisdom, with a deep-seated goodness that never fully disappears.