Cocaine

Cocaine is the story of a young man who runs off to Paris to seek fame, fortune and fun. Pitigrilli’s classic novel charts the comedy and of a young man's a tragic trajectory. Cocaine a is ridiculously fun journey and the lure of a bygone era, where in post-WWI Paris, people really knew how to party.

Tito Arnaudi, the protagonist is a dandified hero with several mistresses he juggles in this brilliant black comedy with sadistic playfulness. A failed medical student, Tito is hired as a journalist in Paris, where he investigates cocaine dens and invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths that he sells to newspapers as his own life becomes more outrageous than his phony press reports.

Telling of orgies and strawberries soaked in Champagne and ether, Tito lives with intensity as he pursues his Italian girlfriend Maud (née Maddalena) and wealthy Armenian Kalantan who insists on making love in a black coffin.

Provocatively illustrated, filled with lush, intoxicating prose, Cocaine is a wicked novel about the lost generation in 1920s Paris. Dizzy and decadent, Pitigrilli leaves nothing unexplored as he presents Tito's lovers with astonishing descriptions of the way the upper classes’ debauching. Strawberries and chloroform, butterflies flapping about helplessly, asphyxiated by the fumes of the mind-altering chemicals, naked dancing, cocaine aplenty, and guests openly injecting morphine. While naughty and witty, Cocaine the orgiastic scenes are veiled, not explicit, but powerful nonetheless.

In Paris, where he worked as a writer and journalist, Pitigrilli cavorted with society’s upper crust who experimented with theosophy, occult séances, gambling, and narcotics as means of replacing the old certainties of church and fatherland. Searching for thrills — for any stimulation, they resort to the fashionable poisons of the era and the wild exaltation they produce. Despite its wit, Cocaine is a sobering account of the dangers of drugs and sexual obsession. While Tito was obviously doomed to a sad ending, he happily traded in his twilight years for moments of wicked ecstasy.

Describing a world of cocaine dens, gambling parlors, orgies, lewd entertainment, and séances, Pitigrilli’s cynical amorality captured the spirit of Italy in the early 1920s, a society emerging from World War One with its traditional beliefs in pieces, where traditional pillars of society had lost their authority, such as the Catholic Church who put the book on its forbidden list.