Author Carmine Abate grew up in Carfizzi, a small Arberesh village in the toe of Italy, and he returns to that area again* in this novel with a warm and embracing story of a young man’s growing up and his search for his place in the world. Marco has a different life from that of boys in other parts of Italy. Like his father, he may be destined to leave his home in Hora, one day, to spend long periods of time in the mines and fields of France earning enough money to support a family in Italy. Filled with everyday details which bring the community of Hora and the difficult maturation of this young boy to life, The Homecoming Party is a coming-of-age novel, a small morality tale, a domestic drama, and a paean to the beauty which still exists in the hills of southern Italy. By emphasizing the characters’ natural, uncomplicated reactions to important events, and keeping those reactions consistent with the ages of the characters, he allows readers from other parts of the world to participate in a family whose culture is very different from their own.
Read Full Post »
The fraught events in the Balkans leading to the occupation of Greece by the Nazis in April, 1941, form the structure of this complex novel, which begins in Greece and ranges through Albania, France, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey, as small, vulnerable Eastern European countries try to stave off both the Italians and the Nazis. Alan Furst, famous for his carefully researched espionage thrillers focusing on events from 1940 and 1941, recreates the confusions and the complications of the Balkan countries in early 1941, as they try to maintain some semblance of sovereignty against the massive war machine of Nazi Germany. Forty-year-old Costa Zannis, a senior police official in the northern Greek city of Salonika, is in the middle of the conflict. Zannis walks a tightrope, doing his part to aid people in Germany who have risked their lives to save others. His life becomes even more complicated, however, by his suddenly developed attraction to the wife of one of Greece’s wealthiest men.
Read Full Post »
The last novella written by acclaimed Italian author Romano Bilenchi before his death in 1989, The Chill, written in 1982, is a coming-of-age story so universal that it could just as easily have been written in 1902 or 2002. Set in the mid-1920s, in the hill towns between Siena and Florence, the novella recreates the story of an unnamed narrator dealing with the pangs of adolescence so skillfully that the reader can easily associate it with the author’s own childhood—and though the setting is dramatically different from that of J. D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, or any of the other coming-of-age novels one might recall, the issues are similar, if not identical in many respects. With its focus on family history, death, friendship, love, betrayal, and revenge, this novella deals with the most important of life’s issues.
Read Full Post »
In 1967, an unnamed writer begins writing a long letter to an unknown recipient in Italy, a letter he knows will take weeks, if not months to conclude. The writer’s references to the Six Day War and to the fact that “here most of the people have no past and no one is surprised” quickly establish the letter writer’s home as Israel, but there are no clues about the person being addressed. Writing from Tel Aviv, the narrator reconstructs that time in his life “before Israel,” when he lived in Rome and where his parents owned the Albergo della Magnolia, an elegant hotel. The speaker, whom we learn is Dino Carpi, has been only a “twice a year Jew,” on Yom Kippur and Passover, and he ignores the then-unimportant cultural differences to pursue his love of Sonia, a Gentile. The love of Sonia and Dino is increasingly tested by political forces, and their families begin to exert ever more pressure on their relationship.
Read Full Post »
The Leopard, an assassin who figures in a number of Silva novels, becomes a major player in this third Gabriel Allon novel, about the passive involvement of the Vatican in the Holocaust and its subsequent denial of all responsibility. Basing the novel on research by scholars like Susan Zuccotti (whom Silva credits in his acknowledgments) into the secret connections between factions within the Catholic Church and the Third Reich, Silva creates a chilling and utterly compelling story about the reasons that the Vatican might have feared the Jews were a threat to its own power and wanted to prevent the ultimate establishment of an Israeli homeland.
Read Full Post »
