In this old-fashioned, “once-upon-a-time-in-the-old-country” saga set in northern Italy, author Vittorio Massimo Manfredi introduces the Bruni family of farmers. Living in the rural hills outside of Bologna, Callisto and Clerice, parents of seven sons and two daughters, have worked the same land as generations of their ancestors. When World War I begins, the war changes the very heart of the nation, not just because of the hundreds of thousands of young men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, but because of the totality of the horrors for every person in the country. The years of Fascism form the second part of the novel’s structure, with each of the brothers and their friends responding differently to the rise of Mussolini and his dictatorship. The third part of the novel features the next generation of Bruni sons as they deal with the many factions within Italy during World War II. Various Resistance groups fight against the Fascist Republican Army, or its extreme wing, the paramilitary Black Brigades, but the Resistenza itself is fragmented. This novel has something for everyone, and that is both its joy and its limitation. The fact that there is not a moment of boredom in the entire novel attests to the author’s prodigious narrative abilities, but the thirty-year focus results in a novel that is diffuse and sometimes unfocused, and the conclusion itself peters out.
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Cocky and self-confident on the surface, Neapolitan attorney Vincenzo Malenconico is a personal failure by most objective standards. His psychologist wife has left him, his sometimes troubled kids have their own lives and don’t want his “help,” and he lives in a lonely apartment. He has few, if any, clients and no private office, sharing office space with numerous other failures. He dithers, constantly imagining different outcomes for situations he has already faced, rewriting conversations which have ended badly for him, and perpetually reviewing his own past history. He makes hilariously ponderous philosophical observations and messes up his life royally. Though he has a new love with whom he shares passionate encounters, she seems far too clever to become involved with him and keeps him constantly worrying about the future. Now, for reasons known only to himself, he has decided to tell his story, but as he ponders what to say, he even imagines himself in the role of one of his own readers asking, “Why should we go to the trouble of understanding you? We don’t want to do your work for you. Why don’t you take us for an enjoyable ride someplace.” Winner of the Naples Prize for fiction for this novel, author Diego DeSilva is also a writer of plays and screenplays, and his sparkling dialogue and sense of dramatic irony reflect this experience.
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Having won the Whitbread Award in 1989 for Gerontius, a literary novel about composer Sir Edward Elgar, James Hamilton-Paterson has written most recently in a completely different vein – three wild, off-the-wall novels starring Gerald Samper, an aesthete with a love for gourmet food, clothing, and cutting edge social commentary. Samper is, however, something of an ass, a man so self-absorbed and so convinced of the importance of his (as yet undiscovered) “mission” in life that he “lurches from crisis to crisis,” never pausing for reflection. Despite these unsympathetic qualities, however, Samper cannot help but amuse and intrigue readers as he involves us in his whirlwind activities and invites us to join him on the rollercoaster of his life. In this final novel in the series (though it is not necessary to have read the previous novels), Samper is working on an opera about the vision of Princess Diana he says he had just before his house fell down the mountain in a landslide. The resulting opera gives new meaning to the term “opera buffa.” Hilarious, irreverent.
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Described by Milan’s daily newspaper Corriere della Serra as “the only true first-rate writer that the new millennium has given us for now,” Erri De Luca writes a story of Naples, and its “persons.” The author has made it clear that you “don’t call them people, they’re persons, each and every one. If you call them people you lose sight of the person. Here he recreates Neapolitan life, filled with well-developed characters who live through three different time periods – 1943, as Naples has its popular uprising against their German occupiers; the early 1950s, when the unnamed narrator, a young orphan of about seven, is growing up; and the early 1960s, when the young man is now finishing school and about to set out on his own. The novel moves back and forth in time, as the author writes an often lyrical novel full of noble sentiments and wise observations, at the same time that it is packed with details about life and behavior. Intense in its imagery and emotion, this novel credits the reader by believing that s/he is capable understanding on a level beyond that of plot, and that the longings of the main character and his search to belong are universal and not limited to this one character in this one set of circumstances and times.
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Setting her novel in Cagliari, Sardinia, author Milena Agus creates a story which spans three generations, focusing on women from two families who are joined through marriage. An unnamed contemporary speaker feels particularly connected with her paternal grandmother, and as the speaker pieces together this woman’s life from what she herself recalls and from family lore, she creates a woman who not only searches earnestly for love but is absolutely determined to experience it in all its splendor, believing that it is “the principal thing in life.” The novel deals beautifully with primal events and universal themes—the need to belong, the importance of ties to a community, the yearning for true love, the vagaries of chance or fate, and the importance of memories. As the generations move forward from World War II to the present, each character must protect his/her memories against change in order to preserve a sense of selfhood. It is only the speaker who has the liberty to tinker with the past and/or the truth. Passion, in all its many forms, rules the lives of the characters here—and affects the reader, too.
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