Florian Heumann, the young narrator of this intense and moving study of families and their memories, has just arrived with his family from Hamburg, where he lives, to visit his mother’s ancestral home in southern Italy for a family vacation. His grandfather, Giorgio Bellusci, is absent, but no one will tell him where his grandfather is. All we learn is that his grandfather has been a friend of Hans Heumann, Florian’s other grandfather. Gradually, through flashbacks, the family history unfolds, following numerous generations, all memorably depicted, and their lives in Roccalba, a town in the “toe of Italy” located between the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas. Just as the Calabrian peninsula separates the two seas, it also separates the life forces which drive the novel–the sense of romanticism vs. hard-nosed reality, the generosity and love for others vs. long-time vendettas, and the drive to fulfill one’s dreams vs. the loss of one’s dreams due to outside forces. Abate, a great story-teller, creates lively atmospheres and family dynamics. His characters are sensitively developed, and as the narrative flips back and forth in time, the reader becomes involved in an intense family saga concisely rendered in only two hundred pages.
Read Full Post »
#1 on my list of Favorites for 2015! Powerful, climactic moments, both physical and emotional, pervade these stories, which are dramatic and thought-provoking in their emphasis on the various ways of looking at traumatic incidents while recognizing that there are always unknowns that creep into the reality of such events. The title novella is a classic, and three additional stories of varying lengths add to this unforgettable collection about points of view and the impossibility of ever knowing for sure what the essence of reality really is and why its interpretation differs among people who have participated in the same events but come to different conclusions. The stories come alive through McCann’s matchless ability to describe places and recreate lives through dialogue.
Read Full Post »
Maurizio de Giovanni just keeps getting better and better. With this seventh novel in his series featuring Baron Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi di Malomonte, Commissario of Public Safety at the Royal Police Headquarters in Naples, he creates a new mystery which takes place during the reign of Benito Mussolini in the early 1930s. At the same time, de Giovanni also continues to develop the stories of the many repeating characters throughout the series to date. It is the new developments in the personal, very human stories of these characters – who represent all aspects of Neapolitan society, from the saintly to the criminal – which make the series so much fun to read. The most highly developed and complex novel of the series to date, The Bottom of My Heart is also one of the liveliest and most satisfying, though de Giovanni does save a number of questions to be answered in the future.
Read Full Post »
Dario Fo was WINNER of the Nobel Prize for Literature in1997, though he had never written a book. Instead, he was recognized by the Nobel Committee for his more than forty plays, his acting, his directing and his “emulation of the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.” This biographical novel is his first novel. Over the years, Italian author Dario Fo has made no secret of the fact that he believes that Lucrezia Borgia does not deserve her murderous reputation for more than five hundred years as the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI, formerly known as Rodrigo Borgia. The Pope himself was often manipulative, acting in response to the changing political landscape, and Lucrezia’s brother Cesare was even more self-serving –a murderer of anyone in his path to success. Fo believes that Lucrezia was not only intelligent and incisive in her insights into politics, but also innocent of the crimes which have made the Borgia name synonymous with treachery and danger. Still considered by many students of the Italian Renaissance to be a power-hungry madwoman, a poisoner of her enemies, and a lover of her brother, Lucrezia Borgia gains new respect in this sympathetic portrait by Fo, who admires her insights into the nature of power and how it may be used to benefit society, as she sees it, as well as herself.
Read Full Post »
Set in Dublin in 2003, during the height of the Celtic Tiger economic boom, Dubliner Rob Doyle’s debut novel focuses on four young men who have just finished secondary school, none of them with any idea of what they want to do with their lives, and even less motivation. Most have been ignoring the academic demands of their school, preferring to float rootlessly within the social atmosphere of their peers, an atmosphere in which drugs and alcohol have been the primary driving force. Main character Matthew Connelly, a punk teenage Everyman, does not know whether he has passed his Leaving Certification, and he does want to think about it. He and three friends grow for the reader in their own chapters here, and the comparisons and contrasts in their lives are vividly depicted. The author’s insightful scenes of teen life, related in unambiguous language, draw the reader into the boys’ inner worlds, however foreign those worlds might be to the reader’s own experiences. Their conversations and behavior, while often bizarre, somehow inspire empathy, since most seem to have some residual sense of what is “right.” As the novel evolves, and the boys’ own issues become increasingly dramatic, however, the novel becomes darker, more frightening, and eventually violent. Few readers who are drawn in by the action and themes of this novel will forget it quickly, and parents of teens may become particularly alarmed at the unambiguous depiction of their teens’ secret lives.
Read Full Post »
