In Michael Dibdin's Back to Bologna, series character Aurelio Zen is sent to the city of the title to keep an eye on the progress of the police in solving the murder of a wealthy man who happened to own the local, struggling soccer team and who was loathed by thousands of soccer fans for his treatment of that team. Zen is quite happy to get away from home because although he is still recovering (slowly) from recent surgery, his girlfriend Gemma thinks he's being hypochondriacal; in any case, their relationship has gone terribly downhill in recent months and the farther away from her that he can get, the happier he is. Meanwhile, the world's most incompetent private eye, also based in Bologna, is looking into the behaviour of a wealthy man's son, there's a terrible but extremely famous chef who has come to loggerheads with an arrogant post-modernist academic, and nobody at all is behaving very well.... This is the tenth Aurelio Zen novel, the seventh that I've read (having been unable to find several others, which are apparently out of print), and the morose and rather sickly Zen is as morose and insecure as ever. Unfortunately, by now I've begun to get tired of him; while the series started as a fascinating expose of an interesting character, over time that character has, well, lost his charm for me. I'll still pick up the missing volumes in the series should I run across them, but I don't think I'll go out of my way to search for any more of them; while the story lines here are quite entertaining (and overlap where you'd least expect them to), Zen himself has just become too downhearted for me to enjoy anymore.
Enormously funny, as the ever cynical Dibdin pokes fun at post-post modernism, overblown celebrity of several kinds, and the corrupt culture of celebrity in these various fields, while using with great humour the time honored and very convoluted device of mistaken identity, with nods to Shakespeare and others (so that we can not fail to miss them) late in the book. The use of overblown characters well illustrates the outrageous reality of these basically foolish cultures, and holds them up to mockery, the mockery in a bitter-sweet fashion extending even to the protagonist. I wonder, not for the first time in reading this series of Zen novels, whether the dysfunctional relationships that Aurelio keeps building for himself are not too well understood by the author. For me, the many references to the very observable follies makes the whole novel extremely enjoyable, not so much as mystery or police procedural, but as social commentary, thus 5 stars!
Do You like book Back To Bologna (2006)?
Now, here is what I think about Michael Dibdin's Zen novels.Dibdin has created a main character who is neither credible nor likable nor interesting. He may have mitigated this problem in the early novels of the series by convoluted plotting, but eventually he ran out of ideas, or got bored, and then utilised the rather lazy smokescreen of (a) a kaleidoscope of geographical settings (all of which were ideal holiday destinations for his English readers) and (b) silly jokes and increasingly farcical plots.Back to Bologna is a great example of this. The plot is ridiculous and Zen's participation in it is pretty much peripheral.What perhaps annoys me most of all is the arrogance and rudeness of the writer who uses a foreign country as a setting for his work for the sole purpose of mocking that country. Really, Mr Dibdin, the only country that an Englishman should be mocking is England. Anything else is a piece of supreme bad manners. The guest should not mock the home of his host.On page 217 of this book, Dibdin gives an exceedingly thin excuse for the plot of this novel. How irritating that he fully recognised that this book is a lame parody and yet still insulted his readers by submitting it to his publisher. I read that he died two years after the publication of this book. From shame?
—Kathy
Loved this book for its comic overturns; building on Cosi Fan Tutti, here Dibdin does not hold back in wit and imagination. This book works well on so many levels and could be re-read several times over before all the author's subtle skills and play on words could be appreciated. More farce at times than crime fiction Zen holds his own as he reaches a mid-life crisis with no impetus to work or strive professionally or romantically. Somehow he blunders about, even falling under suspicion himself, in what is a cleverly written novel that ends all too soon.
—Richard
This is one of those stories that makes you wish Aurelio Zen could find better women with whom to saddle himself. His private life is clearly infringing too much on his professional life, and yet ... is there a vague connection? You keep rooting for Zen to wake up and drop the troublesome women, but what a surprise lingers at the end. Of course you'll read this one; you read all the others, didn't you? He's a likeable guy and would be more so if only he could solve his love life as successfully as he solves cases. You want to read this; just do it.
—M.R.
