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ARLO Fruttero and Franco Lucentini’s "La verità sul caso D." (translated into English as "The D. Case: The Truth about "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"), is the fruit of a joint writing project between two well-known Italian writers of detective fiction who most of the time operate as a couple – hence the use of the ampersand. But even more so, this is the fruit of a joint writing project between them and Charles Dickens. "La verità sul caso D." consists actually in Dickens’s own unfinished "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" interpolated by chapters written by Fruttero & Lucentini which represent about one third of the whole. The two parts form a single text, a dialogue between the two authors and Dickens, or, as some reviewers defined it, “a three-way collaboration” or, even better, “un romanzo a sei mani” (a novel for six hands). To continue the numerical escalation (and borrow Wolfgang Iser’s definition of reading), the new novel is a dramatic example of “the interaction between its structure and its recipients” (1980: 106), in this case not only the common reader but also the over two hundred writers who attempted to complete and complement the novel. |