Tales From the Prison of International Notoriety
Tiziana Fabi/Associated Press
Amanda Knox crying after her conviction had been overturned.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: April 21, 2013 - The New York Times
“She’s a complete blank,” the playwright John Guare once said, trying to explain the public fascination with Amanda Knox, the American student accused (along with two men) of murdering her housemate Meredith Kercher during a sex escapade gone awry in Italy. “You can project anything on to her. Is she Henry James’s Daisy Miller, an innocent young girl who goes to Europe for experience? Or is she Louise Brooks, the woman who takes what she wants and destroys everything? Or is she Nancy Drew caught up in Kafka?”
Since the arrest of Ms. Knox in 2007, the case — with its attractive young cast and lurid details — has been heatedly debated in the news media on both sides of the Atlantic, with a glut of coverage on TV, online, in newspapers and magazines and in several books. While prosecutors and some European tabloids depicted her as a cunning “she-devil,” the Knox family, which hired a public relations company specializing in crisis management soon after her arrest, and her supporters have promoted an image of her as an American innocent abroad who got caught up in the gears of a dysfunctional Italian justice system.
The self-portrait Ms. Knox draws in her meditative memoir, “Waiting to Be Heard,” is very much that of an all-American student whose junior year abroad went off the rails through a series of unfortunate mistakes and misunderstandings. She emerges from these pages less as a Jamesian heroine or Kafka-esque protagonist than as a naïve, impetuous, somewhat quirky girl who loved soccer and the Beatles and who suddenly found herself caught up in a Hitchcockian nightmare, with bad luck and some bad judgment calls leading her into a labyrinth seemingly without end.
She and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were initially convicted in a 2009 trial that caused an international uproar, then were acquitted by an appeals court jury in October 2011, after which Ms. Knox returned home to Seattle. (The murder conviction of a third defendant, Rudy Guede, in a separate trial, was upheld on appeal.) Just last month Italy’s highest court ordered a new trial after prosecutors and lawyers for Ms. Kercher’s family challenged that acquittal.
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1 comment:
I can't wait to read this book. I always felt like she was a victim of Italy's prehistoric laws. Thanks for the review. I am posting the link to a really great book that I recently read. It is called, "Ring EXchange - Adventures of a Multiple Marrier" by author Pam Evans. The author reveals that her many treks ”down the aisle” were part of a ”long and winding road” with learned lessons and wisdom to pass along to others. http://ring-exchange.com/ LOVED IT!
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