In this loving, and even exhilarating, memoir of his son Tito’s life, Brazilian author Diogo Mainardi introduces the reader to Tito from the moment of his birth in Venice, a birth bungled beyond belief by the doctor who delivered him. Mainardi and his wife Anna had been living in Venice, and, under the spell of this magical city and, especially, of the beautiful Scuola Grande di San Marco, designed by Pietro Lombardo in 1489 and converted into a hospital in 1808, Mainardi wanted his son’s birth to be in this special building, which Ezra Pound celebrated in one of his cantos for its perfect beauty. As Mainardi and Anna make their way on foot through the piazza on their way to Lombardo’s Scuola Grande di San Marco for the birth, they pass Andrea del Verrochio’s statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, thought by many to be the “most glorious equestrian statue in the world.” Mainardi, overcome at this moment, is “in the grip of the same stupid aestheticism as Ezra Pound…I could only associate the perfect art of Pietro Lombardo [and Andrea del Verrochio] with an equally perfect birth. Because [such] Good, would be incapable of creating Evil…[or] a bungled birth.” He was wrong.
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Setting her novel in the farmlands of Iowa, as she did with A Thousand Acres, author Jane Smiley once again homes in on a proud farm family as it faces crises connected with its land. This novel, however, has a broader, less intensely climactic sweep than A Thousand Acres, in which the action parallels that of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Some Luck is quieter and more contemplative, the first of a trilogy which will eventually trace three generations of the Langdon family from 1920 to 2020, as it becomes a microcosm for one hundred years of United States history. Smiley’s characters, beautifully realized through her trademark use of perfect small details to illuminate bigger aspects of personality, illustrate the many different talents, and ultimately goals, of a family whose members are firmly rooted in the land, which is their only real asset. Some members will eventually choose to leave the farm, while others choose to stay. Smiley limits each chapter to one calendar year beginning in 1920 – the births and deaths, the hopes and dreams, the rhythms of nature and the yearly rituals it inspires, the uncertainties of daily life and the accidents of fate, the roles which each character chooses to accept or reject within the family, and the unpredictable, often dramatic effects of national events on people who have no control over them. The novel ends in 1953 with the focus on new family members who will face another set of topical issues in the next novel.
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Author Elizabeth Taylor, who failed her entrance exams to university, never let that get in the way of her writing career. Like Angel in her novel of the same name, she began writing as a teenager, finishing her first novel before she was sixteen, and writing constantly ever after that. Unable to get any of her work published until she was in her early thirties, she made up for lost time, however, publishing six novels between 1945 and 1953, and five more between then and 1971. A Game of Hide and Seek, published in 1951 and recently republished as a New York Review Book Classic, is one of her most intensely psychological novels, the story of two young people who spend their time in self-imposed isolation, their paths crossing briefly when, as teenagers they find themselves sharing summer vacations. By the time Harriet Claridge and Vesey Macmillan are eighteen, they are being encouraged to play with Harriet’s younger cousins to keep them busy during their summer vacation in the country, and they sometimes use hide-and-seek games to be together in the loft where they wait for the younger children to find them. They are, however, shy, innocent, and self-conscious, despite Vesey’s uncontrollable malicious streak (which Harriet sometimes thinks she deserves), and so they sit in the loft or the barn “in that dusty stuffiness, among old pots of paint, boxes of bulbs, stacks of cobwebbed deck-chairs, rather far apart and in silence…The only interruption was when one of them timidly swallowed an accumulation of saliva.”
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Jussi Adler-Olsen’s fifth novel in the Department Q series, under the “leadership” of Copenhagen Detective Carl Morck, continues the story of Morck and his unconventional assistants who operate out of a basement office dedicated to the solution of cold cases. This novel begins obliquely. A man from a Baka village of pygmies in Cameroon, Louis Fon, is working with a Danish bank which funds development work in the rural Baka area of the country. After receiving a cellphone call in the jungle, he realizes that his discovery of funding irregularities puts his life at risk, and he has only enough time to type out a message (which is unreadable) before he is attacked. Further development of this plot line shows the massive corruption of the funding bank in Denmark, and the administrators in Cameroon who are responsible for using the funds for the betterment of the rural Baka area. A second plot line takes place Copenhagen, where a group of gypsies, mostly children, under the leadership of a sadistic and violent “spiritual” leader, roam the streets, picking pockets, begging, and doing petty crimes in order to meet their monetary quota each day. Marco, one of the young men still in his early teens, publicly challenges the leader, his own uncle, and, as a result, finds himself running for his life. A third subplot concerns a cold case in which a woman is killed in the explosion of the houseboat on which she lives, and questions arise as to whether this was an insurance scam, a murder by her husband, or some other kind of crime. Adler-Olsen has always excelled at keeping interest high both through his dramatic action and through his use of wonderful repeating characters as they continue to develop.
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There’s an irony to the Amazon reviews of this elegant, but unpretentious examination of time present, past, and future, which the author reveals through the most “normal” of families and the way they live their lives. A large number of reviewers have downgraded this book because it has “no plot,” “nothing happens,” there’s “not much point,” the language is “pedestrian,” and the story is too “domestic.” For me, this was a rare and engaging novel with “voices” that speak directly from the characters’ hearts, and there is little sense that an author is present, pulling the strings and determining outcomes. It is 2006, and Ireland’s economy, the Celtic Tiger, is at its peak. Main character Fintan Terrence Buckley, age forty-seven, works as a legal advisor at an import/export firm in Dublin. Happily married for twenty-four years, he has a doting wife, one son out of college, one son just starting, and a seven-year-old daughter. Fintan, however, has been having some recent episodes in which words and language become strange to him as he stares at objects and people, and on one occasion, “It was as if the air had thinned out and the man [in front of him] was like something that had dropped out of the sky…” He is confused by his own reality and fascinated by the antique photographs at the restaurant where he has met this person. One photo from the past shows a terrible train accident at Harcourt Street Station in 1900, in which a locomotive slammed right through the wall and out the other side, without killing anyone. He also notices pictures of streets he has walked, past buildings he recognizes, though the people in the photographs are long dead. He ponders, even questions, the reality of these scenes.
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