The speaker in this quotation, called “the man” throughout most of this novel, will repel every female reader – and most male readers – with his macho vulgarity, his unrelenting assessment of women in terms of their anatomy and sexual stamina, and his proud alcoholism. Boasting of his ability to consume seven bottles of vodka in his prime, he manages “only” two bottles a day on this trip to a new job site in construction in Mongolia. “The girl,” who has the great misfortune to be sharing a compartment with him on a trans-Siberian train traveling four thousand miles from Moscow to Ulan Bator, had hoped to be alone on this trip. Recovering from a personal crisis involving Mitka, a young friend on whom she had set her romantic sights but who is now hospitalized, the girl is making this trip almost as a memorial to him, since they had hoped to make the trip together. She had met him in Moscow in college, where she studied antiquities and anthropology for three years, and she is especially anxious to get to Mongolia now so that she can see the famous ancient petroglyphs there, some of them dating back to 12,000 B.C. So quiet and repressed that she makes only one or two statements during the entire trip, she is the complete opposite of Vadim, the man, with whom she has been fated to travel, destined to spend the trip fending off his advances. Considering the fact that neither of the main characters is one with whom the reader will identify to any great degree – Vadim because he is so disgustingly venal and the girl because she is so passive – author Liksom does a remarkable job of keeping the reader completely occupied during her novel. Vibrant pictures of life in the Soviet Union from the 1940s to the 1980s emerge as Vadim tells his life story in pieces throughout the trip, and the girl’s own life, though a bit confused and undirected, reflects some of the attitudes of young people and the reasons for her own lack of commitment.
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I had great hopes for this current novel, Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone, since author Maurizio de Giovanni had given just enough individualization of his four main characters in the previous novel, The Bastards of Pizzofalcone, to make me think he might go further this time, bringing his main characters even more fully to life; his use of some trademark humor in that novel also made me think that might continue in this novel. The first half of Darkness…. was in keeping with my high expectations, despite the emphasis on the word “darkness” in the title. The novel begins with the kidnapping of Dodo, a ten-year-old boy who brings his Batman action figure with him, the boy is not mistreated, despite his being confined to a dark room, and he chats with Batman – and the reader – without much sense of fear. That plot line is paralleled throughout by a second line in which a robbery takes place at the home of a well-to-do couple, though what is stolen is a mystery. A third line, which is included in the narrative but not as an investigation, involves a priest, Brother Leonardo Calisi, a good friend of Deputy Captain Giorgio Pisanelli, who is suffering from prostate cancer. The second half is less successful.
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“I often dreamed of the moment of [my classmate’s] fall, a silence that lasted a second, possibly two, a room full of sixty people and no one making a sound as if everyone were waiting for my classmate to cry out or even just grunt, but he lay on the ground with his eyes closed until someone told everyone else to move away because he might be injured, a scene that stayed with me until he came back to school and crept along the corridors, wearing his orthopedic corset underneath his uniform…”—a schoolboy speaker in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Prize winner. At age thirteen, a boy in Brazil participates in a prank involving another boy who is seriously hurt and forced to miss school for months. This becomes a major moment in his life, since he recognizes that he was wrong to participate in bullying the only non-Jewish boy in his class. His grandfather was an Auschwitz survivor who never communicated with his wife or son. His father is not a communicator, either. Here all three males come to new understandings and take actions in novel that is human, not epic. Finely organized, beautifully conversational, and insightful. A short novel with big themes that feels more like a memoir than fiction. Outstanding. Ideal for book club discussion.
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I grew up with stories of the Titanic, as did my sisters, and they have been part of my family’s life since the beginning. My mother was born the night the Titanic hit the iceberg – on April 14, 1912 – a fact imprinted on us from birth. Shortly after midnight that night, the Titanic sank with a loss of over fifteen hundred passengers. Those who are students of the Titanic will already know something that hobbyists and people like my sisters and me might never have learned without a book like this one, something that is, in many ways, even more dramatic than the sinking of the Titanic itself: The Titanic was not alone at sea as it was sinking. There was another ship not ten miles away – the S.S. Californian – a ship which might have saved hundreds of passengers if it had gone to the rescue. The Californian’s crew saw the distress signals and the changes in the appearance of the Titanic’s on-deck lights, and though they informed the captain of what they saw, he never gave the order to go to the Titanic’s aid and never even came up to the bridge. This recently released “novel,” based on facts, is primarily the story of this ship, the Californian, its captain and crew, and why it never became the savior of some of the fifteen hundred who died.
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The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt by German author Wilhelm Genazino begins as an existential investigation by a self-conscious 46-year-old man into who he is and why he behaves as he does. His hypersensitive observations about the world around him show a man who “hardly thinks at all anymore—I only look round and about.” The unnamed speaker has been working for seven years as a “shoe tester,” a man who walks around Frankfurt testing quality shoes for a manufacturer and then reviewing them. The speaker enjoys this job, as his walking gives him unlimited opportunity to muse about his life, observe people from the past with whom he has had relationships, reminisce about their mutual experiences, and contemplate “the collective peculiarity of all life.” While he walks, he thinks about his childhood, his failed relationship with Lisa, with whom he has lived for several years, and his lack of professional motivation, and the reader observes him as he has an afternoon interlude with his hairdresser, begins a new relationship, meets a friend who is a failed photographer, gets a drastic cut in salary, and begins work as a vendor in a flea market. The author’s dry, tongue-in-cheek humor keeps the novel from imploding under its own weight, while the conclusion offers an upbeat future. Slow to start, the novel evolves into a delightful exploration of one man’s memories and his halting steps toward a new life.
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