Custerlina: Empire Shadow, Italian Thriller, Rights Available (Editorial Sheet)

All’Ombra dell’impero by Alberto Custerlina

(literally: In the Shadow of the Empire)

Verdict: Five Stars. A fast, richly imaginative occult thriller that begins in 1902 Trieste and ranges across Eastern Europe, and a strong candidate for translation.

Premise

Everyone is hunting for a sacred, magical Mandylion, while an ancient line of guardians is ready to defend it at any cost. It all coalesces around the fate of a child.

Spring 1902, Austro-Hungarian Empire. Trieste is flourishing as a cosmopolitan city, the ideal setting at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for an international intrigue of spiritualism, orientalism and esotericism, all typical of the mood of the time.

A non-commissioned officer is found dead and disfigured in an alley. A precious Christian relic, the Mandylion, is stolen, and Davorin, a twelve-year-old boy, seems to acquire strange powers. The boy, his father the police commissioner and a friend who traffics in chinoiserie set out to find the killer, deep in the occult heart of Europe, until an unexpected and deadly enemy emerges.

Ideal reader and market fit

The ideal reader of this novel is the reader of The Last Cato by Matilde Asensi. All’Ombra dell’impero therefore speaks to a general adult audience, a cross-over target (mostly 18 to 60+) looking for a learned, erudite escape read that is nonetheless easy to enjoy.

The driving pace and incisive prose could find a wide response among Anglophone readers, unless they are put off by a rarely visited setting: occult Eastern Europe on the eve of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of the Russian Revolution.

Craft

Custerlina’s skill in handling the register of his nineteenth-century characters is striking. They are sketched on the surface to echo the vintage pop-comic archetypes the author loves: the magician, the Chinese woman straight out of Kill Bill, a positivist with a faint steampunk flavor, the Jewish Kabbalist…

The narrating voice is fast and spellbinding; the plot is well constructed and free of flaws.

Considerations for translation

The book raises a few issues for translation. It is a one-shot: the novel has to repay the investment on its own, because there are no other Custerlina novels on which its eventual success could reverberate.

The pop aesthetics of the characters is both the project’s strength and its weakness, although the overall assessment is positive. The novel shows such assured literary experience that its playing-card characters become an authorial, subjectivizing element, a precious authenticity and an expression of genuine passions, and ultimately give the work its stylistic signature.

At a glance

• Author: Alberto Custerlina
• Original title: All’Ombra dell’impero
• Genre: Adventure and religious thriller
• Length: 360 pp.
• Original language: Italian
• Rights: Available, not yet in English
• It was meant to be the first book of a trilogy that was never completed. The book has a complete ending and can be read on its own.
• After a couple of very successful thrillers about the Slavic turmoil on the doorstep of his Trieste, Alberto Custerlina wrote this fine religious thriller, then stopped writing to devote himself to caving.

Raw reading impressions

In his earlier novels on the Serbian mess, the splendid Balkan Bang and Mano Nera (Black Hand), Custerlina was a lead-sprayer and blood-spitter on every page. Here he surprises us with settings you savor for their aesthetic care and their evocative power.

In my view Custerlina is one of the finest writers in the country. Tight plot, evocative scenery and vividly drawn characters: this All’Ombra dell’impero wrests five stars out of your hands, even if you are going through a hypercritical streak in your reading.