The gift of crime

Possessing profound verbal precision, Lucchesi is no ordinary author. His writing eschews simplicity, yet remains open to creativity. The result is a blend of prose and poetry, in a language that enchants and hypnotizes. A translator, essayist, and award-winning poet, Lucchesi turns his talent to another genre and embarks, for the first time, on the novel with the highly anticipated THE GIFT OF CRIME. Lucchesi creates a delightful, unidentified narrator-author who tells a story for the future. A 19th-century man who, upon being advised by his doctor to write his memoirs, dedicates himself not to his own life, but to a crime of passion, reported in Rio de Janeiro by Machado de Assis. This mysterious narrator draws curious parallels between this murder, the trial that acquits the allegedly betrayed husband, and Machado's most acclaimed work, Dom Casmurro. Does Machado's Bento have anything of the real José Mariano? And was Capitu inspired by Helena, the wife who succumbs to her husband's jealousy? All the informative, factual data was extensively researched and verified, using scrap paper and similar sources—everything passed through Lucchesi's scrutiny. But beyond that, the novel constantly fluctuates between literature and documents, history and fiction. In THE GIFT OF CRIME, reality and fiction intertwine in a work of great depth, in which trials rarely encapsulate the truth of the facts, the complexity of life. "I needed to maintain this dynamic throughout, so that the reader would wonder, as in a game, where this begins and where that ends," argues Lucchesi.