"We survive in the confusion of a life reborn beyond reason." - Pier Paolo Pasolini
What reasons can there be beyond the reasons of love? Now married to successful businessman, Achille Lombardo, Julia appears to have it all until her she embarks on an ill-fated affair with Arturo, and her ex-pat adventure morphs into the crime of passion.
Crime Passionnel in Southern Italy
The second part of the Mezzogiorno Trilogy, Accidental Death of a Terrorist tells the story of Julia and Arturo's forbidden affair as it becomes entwined with the fate of Marco, a naïve Arab medical student they have befriended. Told as a series of flashbacks and vignettes, the novel opens up the shutter on the hidden world of passion and deceit that lurks in the sleepy towns of Southern Italy, and begs the question: can love triumph over circumstance?
EXTRACT
An Interview with the author of the Mezzogiorno Trilogy
Young and love in Southern Italy
SP: Where is your bowler hat and your Union Jack? they used to say, tongue in cheek Do you like the Beatles? - Can you sing us one of their songs? Badly I said. And there I was quite naked. Without a bowler hat or a Union Jack, and very often with my feebly remembered Beatles lyrics. I would be listening to their songs and their music. And sometimes I didn't get it. Sometimes they didn't get me. And often, because I was burning my arse off on a beach, or in some cove that may or may not have been the place where Aeneas landed when he fled Troy, it really didn't matter, because I was young and in love.
The Half Days
SP: I suppose my life was not unlike that of Julia in the book. I was, like her, a language teacher. I did that job for a long time, nearly twenty years. And there is also that undercurrent. I think the feeling that it is described in the books - of being an outsider with some extra knowledge. Like Julia, I could speak Italian pretty well. And I began to get all sorts of cultural things that you can only get if you live in a country for a long time. I could laugh at the impressions of Maurizio Crozza (a kind of Rory Bremner). I could mumble some of the lyrics to Pino Daniele and get all sentimental about Neapolitan love songs. I knew the difference between pasta ascuita as my father-in-law used to call the dry pasta you got in packages and the pasta your mamma rolled out and pinched into little ears that became orrechiette. And yet there was always a part of me that was different. There had been a whole life elsewhere. In London! England! (Laughs) That difference marked me. Not in a bad way. But it gave me a different way of looking at things. That is what I realised when I wrote the first book, The Half Days. I had caught the feel of the south, not as they saw it, but as I saw it - in my position of half-way house. Not as an Italian nor as an Englishman in a bowler hat. That something in between. I suppose it reflected the strangeness of my position.
Accidental Death of a Terrorist
SP: What about the second book, Accidental you ask? That's easy. That was characterised by a particular feeling, that feeling of being on the edge of the known world, and realising one might, like some flat earther, fall off.
Sedley Proctor
Speaking to M.T. Sands, author of Ten Naughty Stories
Sedley is currently working on the third part of the Mezzogiorno Trilogy, Man from the South, which takes up with the story of Julia's ex-husband, Achille Lombardo.
