Memory lapses for Commissioner Soneri

Having now reached the sixteenth stage of a literary adventure that began in 1998 with the novel “Ultime notizie di una fuga”, Commissioner Soneri is now an old companion for lovers of the noir genre . Every now and then we lose sight of him, perhaps shrouded in the fog of Parma where he lives and conducts his investigations. Then he reappears in the bookstores, thanks to the fertile pen of Valerio Varesi , with his inseparable cigar to keep him company in his investigations and his passion for good Emilian cuisine, based on culatello and anolini brodo and tortelli d'erbetta. This is the fuel that sets in motion the neurons of an investigator who often finds himself having to deal with elusive cases, animated by ambiguous characters, with profiles that are difficult to perceive, like the Parma landscape on foggy days or in autumn twilights.

In his new investigation, “ Vuoti di memoria” (Mondadori, 2024, pp. 238, also e-book). Soneri has to deal with a story that is more than a puzzle. Page after page, in fact, it becomes a labyrinth for the investigators from which it seems increasingly complicated to extricate themselves. And yet, at the beginning everything seemed clear, almost crystalline: Romeo Calandri, an undertaker, was killed - or rather, executed, considering the brutality of the murder. Following a rapid investigation, Carmelo Musci, a professional killer in the pay of the 'ndrangheta, ended up behind bars, also indicted for the probable murder of Luciano Orsi, Calandri's partner who disappeared on the same day of the execution. And instead, by a curious, grotesque and vaguely macabre coincidence, just as a mass is being celebrated in suffrage for his presumed death, Orsi reappears after months on a boat off the coast of Cesenatico . Where has he been all this time? Why is he on that boat? Has he escaped a murder, or is he implicated in that of his partner?

The revived Orsi could clarify everything, but amnesia seems to have erased his ties with the past . Soneri thus finds himself with a mute or delirious witness in his hands, while the commissioner himself has been questioning himself for weeks about memory and its fatal unreliability, so much so that the investigation becomes not only a stimulus to ask how much truth there is in our memories - which we all, involuntarily, manipulate -, but also reveals itself as an opportunity to discover that technology - the computer skillfully operated by Soneri's faithful squire, Inspector Juvara - can shed new, surprising light on cases perhaps shelved too quickly.

Between the lability of human memory, so capable of flashes and intuitions, and the vast digital archive of a computer, so efficient and monotonous, Soneri will often find himself at a crossroads and will find himself less and less certain of his own analyses and conclusions .

Will the culprit or culprits slip out of his hands? Or is no one guilty because all the protagonists of the case investigated by our commissioner are guilty to some extent? The answer to these questions can be found in the last two pages of the novel, pages that should be left strictly until the end if one does not want to give up the tasty investigative theatre set up by Valerio Varesi and in which a more meditative and philosophical Soneri than usual stands out.