Fric-Frac: The Great Riviera Bank Robbery

Few books I've read have had me sympathize with the main character as much as this one. Anyone who is stuck in the suburbs, working a dead end job, bored with modern life, and sick of lying politicians will enjoy this book. Just don't go into it expecting to read about a heist. While the robbery is a central pillar of the book, there is so much more to it than the crime itself. Spaggiari's accounts of soldiering, his childhood, adventures, and disgust with modern society are the best parts. I laughed, I cried, and I pumped my fists in the air and exulted in his ultimate escape from the courthouse. It's very clear that it was written by an amatuer, but you'll be having too much fun to notice or care.

I'd first read "Fric Frac" while in High School. I remember that I didn't really know what to make of it then. It had struck me as having been amateurishly written - with the author always straying from the story and turning maudlin one too many times - but at the same time it was riveting and exciting because the author himself had actually pulled of the greatest heist in history and here was the story straight from the horse's mouth! It's now 10 years later and I find that my first reading was actually pretty accurate, but the very things I found maddening about the book the first time I read it are the things that I loved this time around. It is the author's existential angst and his revulsion at modern man's false nature that trigger his yearning to pull off the heist. He is an adventurer who's run out of adventures. He feels trapped in modern society. His wars are over and most of his friends are dead and he is starting to feel domesticated. He describes himself as a walking 200 lbs carcass. I suppose that the reader's sympathy will depend largely on the reader's moral convictions. To me, he is a sympathetic character. It doesn't matter that he is a criminal and a right wing sympathizer - I like him because he is these things for all the right reasons. He is true to himself and as soon as the smell of modern man's sickness settles on him he shakes it off. He makes it plain enough throughout the book that he is not in on the job for the money - he's in it for the adventure. He's in it to live again. 10 years later it is his mawkish memories and his rebelliousness nature that's won me over again. The heist is irrelevant - how one lives is not.