SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Baron Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi di Malomonte, Commissario of Public Safety at the Royal Police Headquarters in Naples, is a lonely man. Growing up as the orphaned child of a wealthy family, he has been living with his Tata Rosa ever since. With a natural shyness that is close to terror when it comes to women, the thirty-year-old Ricciardi’s only real “friend” is his deputy, Brigadier Raffaele Maione, in whom he confides nothing about his private life. With his life secure because of his wealth, Ricciardi does not fear losing his job, but he often goes his own way in investigations if he feels justice will be better served. He has no fear of his department’s higher-ups, most of whom walk a fine line to avoid embarrassing government officials who, in 1931, are closely associated with Mussolini and his Fascists. Set in 1931 in the Sanita area of Naples, an area in which many families are eking out a living through long hours of work at service jobs, the author introduces a series of characters whose lives further develop during the novel but do not always overlap with each other, their stories often moving along separately with occasional connections to Ricciardi and Maione. By the time Ricciardi is called to investigate the gory murder of Carmela Calise, the fortune teller and money lender, Maione has already started to investigate the slashing and disfiguring of the beautiful Filomena Russo, who refuses to talk. As Ricciardi investigates, the case becomes broader, and he finds himself challenging his superiors.

Read Full Post »

Wildly imaginative and filled with scenes so vivid that the reader cannot help but participate in the story as it unwinds, Life After Life engages the reader from the outset with the novel’s ironic and seemingly contradictory premises: first, that everything here is real and nothing is real; and second, that everything changes and nothing changes. As the book’s title confirms, this is a novel in which there is a life after life – a life in which a character’s fate as described in the novel in one place is revisited and rewritten in new scenes in other places, creating a new fate or fates. The characters change as they move forward obliquely, learning from each set of new, changed circumstances as reality merges with fantasy to create a new reality in a new dimension. Despite all the structural and thematic cleverness (and even game-playing), the novel is neither weird nor esoteric. Instead, it is loads of fun, a book that speeds along on the strength of the author’s deft handling of details and her creation of lively characters who interest us as their circumstances change – moving us, sometimes, from grief to happiness or from delight to puzzlement.

Read Full Post »