The adult characters in My Brilliant Friend share their lives in an economically depressed community on the fringes of Naples in the early 1950s, people who are still traumatized by the war and the disasters, both personal and financial, that have resulted from it. Like their children, they live in the moment – passionately, emotionally, and often violently. They have intermarried over the years, and their children play together and will also, in all likelihood, marry each other. The bulk of the novel details Elena Greco’s relationship with Lila Cerullo from the time they are six years old in the early 1950s. Elena is a conscientious student and works hard, but Lila, who is incorrigible in her behavior, is an instinctive student who taught herself how to read when she was three. Between the beginning and the end of this novel, when the two friends are sixteen, author Elena Ferrante creates a vivid picture of Neapolitan life from the early 1950s to the early 1960s as times change and people must either change, too, or be left behind. Both women are aware from the outset that it is the men of the family who determine one’s social class and who control virtually every aspect of family life. The competition for “appropriate” suitors within their small neighborhood, as the girls in the neighborhood reach puberty, becomes fierce. This well-developed family saga is the first of a trilogy, which continues up to the present. Well done narrative with wide appeal.
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With its quick narrative pacing, its unusual story lines filled with ironies, its wounded characters (appealing in their vulnerability), and the novel’s inherent charm, this newly reprinted novel from 1975 may be the perfect answer for lovers of literary fiction looking for a great book to read on a hot summer day. Russell Hoban is in fine fettle here, creating a novel which raises big questions while focusing on two quiet characters whose lives are about to change in significant ways. The “ends” they have been seeking have been present in their “beginnings,” as the review’s opening sentence (from T. S. Eliot) indicates, though until now these characters have not recognized this, spending their middle age dreaming and second-guessing – and ruing the fact that they have missed their chances for happier, more satisfying lives. In their separate narratives, William G. and Neaera H. share their lives and their thoughts. William G., the divorced father of two, now works in a bookshop and lives in a small room. As the novel opens, he is at the zoo, but he concludes, petulantly, that “I don’t want to go to the Zoo anymore.” Neaera H., a writer of children’s stories, is sick of writing about Gillian Vole and birthday parties, and has been contemplating using a predator as her next character. As her first commentary opens, she has just purchased a home aquarium, not for fish, but for a Great Water-beetle, which she has ordered by mail. Eventually, both speakers come together in a plan to release the sea turtles into the ocean, an event which changes their lives. A great book for a book club.
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Maurizio de Giovanni’s newest novel, The Crocodile, is not part of the Commissario Ricciardi series, though the book is dedicated to “Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, and the souls in darkness,” and frankly, I wondered how the author would ever succeed in creating a new “hero” to rival Ricciardi, one of the most intriguing and imaginative “heroes” in noir fiction. I wondered, too, if a setting in contemporary Naples could possibly be as atmospheric as that of Naples in the 1930s. I should have had more faith. Without even a backward glance, de Giovanni has created yet another brilliantly realized protagonist, Inspector Giuseppe Lojacono – equally lonely, equally wounded by life, equally sympathetic, and at least as intriguing as Ricciardi, though from a very different background. Lojacono, from Sicily, is fully familiar with the workings of organized crime there, and he has recently become a victim of its machinations. A low level crook in Sicily turned state’s witness and identified the innocent Lojacono as an informant for organized crime. Instantly Lojacono became a pariah in the police department. Sicily shipped him off the island to Naples, which took him in but did not want him. The author succeeds in making this as much of a character novel as it is a novel of dark and violent crime. Ultimately, readers who are already familiar with Maurizio de Giovanni’s work will be thrilled to see the author branching out and taking new chances, even as they thrill with the information that the fourth book of the year will be the third installment of the brilliant Commissario Ricciardi tetralogy.
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Vincent Balmer’s decision to write a “novel” about Antonio Flores, with whom he works, results in an engaging story in which Vincent, a writer, talks about his writing, his troubled characters explore the present and share their unhappy pasts, his lovers fall in and out of love and fail to connect with the objects of their desire, and a confessed serial killer goes on trial, “half asleep in the dock, utterly silent, his eyes blank.” I put the word “novel” in quotation marks here because though the speaker’s “novel” contains all the ingredients which could make Antonio’s story an exciting best seller, author Herve Le Tellier himself deliberately rejects the traditions of the novel as it has been written for hundreds of years. As a member of the French literary group “Oulipo,” a “workshop of potential literature,” Le Tellier is dedicated to finding “new patterns and structures which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.” As a result, he takes this novel in the many different directions which he fancies, leaving the reader to tag along for the ride. Vincent has recently returned to Lisbon from Paris following a failed love affair. A journalist, he is working with Antonio Flores, a photographer, covering the trial of a serial killer for a Paris magazine, a narrative which fades into the background when the speaker becomes more interested in writing the story of Antonio, the people they both know, their overlapping histories, and their real and imagined amours. Clever and full of fun (and games), Electrico W examines the themes of love and death with a good deal of honest emotion.
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Alfred Hayes, an almost-forgotten author who wrote this book in 1958, spent much of his career writing screenplays, both in Hollywood and in Europe, and he uses the skills he developed in writing for films to great advantage here. His economy of language, a necessity for great film scenes, allows him to develop a novel in which the reader becomes a participant, imagining the dramatic pauses in dialogue, the tones of conversations, and the words a character does not say at times in which s/he might be expected to reveal something crucial. As a result, this brief novel, close to a novella in length, is so evocative that upon reading it for the second time, the reader gains even more appreciation of the author’s technique – and his brilliance. His control of both his material and his literary objectives is absolute, his writing style is flawless, and he never has to resort to literary trickery to keep the reader focused on two characters who, despite their lack of uniqueness are, nevertheless, emotionally exposed to the reader and for all the world to see.
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