Birgit Müller-Wieland Das neapolitanische Bett The Neapolitan Bed Klaus Wagenbach Verlag, August 2005, 240 pp. ISBN 3-8031-2522-7 Two shots are fired and two men fall. The assassin has waited patiently for his moment, nonchalantly nibbling sunflower seeds and crushing the shells beneath his feet as he whiles away the minutes. We are in a piazza in the Old City of Naples, and Vesuvius, lowering ominously in the background and with lava bubbling just beneath its surface, could have served as a portent of the killing about to occur. A Camorra killing, or so it seems, for these sinister gangsters are all-powerful here. But was it – and who are the victims? The triumphant twist in this riveting new novel by the prizewinning Austrian author Birgit Müller-Wieland is that one of the two – the one over whom three mysterious women are wailing and saying their rosaries – has been the principal narrator of the tale, and has now, in the final moments before he dies, been describing his own murder. He is – in his latest incarnation at least – one Signor Ignazio, proprietor of a small hotel, who passes the time of day in a pasticceria close by with an elderly, crippled woman with very blue eyes. Does he stir within her vague memories of a dashing young man called Ombra, who, between dancing and making love to her, had some business with a Camorra chief called Don Anchiso, after whose death he had to vanish and change his appearance? More characters appear and the time-scale moves back and forth. There is Lavinia, a woman dangerous to cross, and her unfaithful husband Enea, Don Anchiso’s son, who nowadays runs a shop selling carvings of painted Madonnas but is found to be conducting other business as well. And enter, next, Ermes, a former Italian partisan, whose life Signor Ignazio saved when he was called Ignaz and spoke German, since his family came from Galicia, once the German part of Poland. And, finally, who are the two young tourists, one from each side of the Iron Curtain (the time is pre-1989), who act as a sort of catalyst? This jigsaw of a novel – thriller if you like – is a study in identity, war and revenge, with an operatic setting Fellini would have had a field day with. A complex, absorbing read.