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I Will Have Vengeance
The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi
by Maurizio de Giovanni

Claudio Magris has been a professor of Germanic studies at the University of Trieste since 1978.
He is the author of Danube, a best-selling novel now translated into more than twenty languages, and in 2001 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize. He has translated into Italian the works of such authors as Ibsen, Kleist, Schnitzler, Buchner, and Grillparzer.

Yale University Press,
September 2012

Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly? Clearly a recluse and a fugitive, but what more of him can we discern? Baffled by the events of his own life, he muses, "When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread."

Claudio Magris, one of Europe's leading authors and cultural philosophers, offers as narrator of Blindly a madman. Yes, but a pazzo lucido, a lucid madman, a single narrative voice populated by various characters. He is Jorgen Jorgenson, the nineteenth-century adventurer who became king of Iceland but was condemned to forced labor in the Antipodes. He is also Comrade Cippico, a militant communist, imprisoned for years in Tito's gulag on the island Goli Otok. And he is the many partisans, prisoners, sailors, and stowaways who have encountered the perils of travel, war, and adventure. In a shifting choral monologue—part confession, part psychiatric session—a man remembers (invents, falsifies, hides, screams out) his life, a voyage into the nether regions of history, and in particular the twentieth century.

First published by Penguin Canada, 2010

From The New Yorker, October 22, 2012, p. 81:
Blindly, by Claudio Magris, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel (Yale). Written in a torrential monologue, this novel presents readers with the disconnected thoughts of a madman (that most unreliable of narrators), and depicts one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. "History is a spyglass held up to a blindfolded eye," he says at one point, perhaps summing up the novel's conceit. At times, he is a prisoner in Goli Otok, the hellish gulag where Tito condemned Yugoslavian fascists and, later, Stalinists. At other times, he is Jorgen Jorgensen, the adventurer and self-proclaimed ruler of Iceland, who explored Tasmania only to return to it years later as a convict. Or, maybe, he is both. As he reassures the reader, "It's History that's sick, that's taken leave of its senses, not me." The narrative is confusing and unstable, but the prose, which meanders through the crevasses of a complicated mind, takes off and reads like poetry.

From M.A.Orthofer’s review in The Complete Review, September 2, 2012:
“fascinating approach, impressively textured”
“…the success of the novel comes in the musical counterpoint composition of the text. It’s not always easy to follow, and yet, like a piece of music, does easily carry the reader along.”
“Quite a remarkable work, playfully amusing and deeply serious.”
read more at http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/italia/magrisc.htm

First U.S. edition Europa Editions, January 2013
Maurizio de Giovanni's thriller, I Will Have Vengeance: The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi, is the first of a series. Set in the city of Naples in the Mussolini era, it introduces Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi who has the unusual "gift" of seeing the dead. First published in the UK by Hersilia Press, 2012.