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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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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Wanting to find serenity, a new life, and maybe even a new love, Kerrigan has arrived in Copenhagen, the birthplace of his mother, hoping for changes in his own life, but “like Gilgamesh he kept finding instead a Divine Alewife who filled his glass and chanted” words like those above, urging him, instead, to eat, drink, and be merry. Kerrigan, who has a Ph.D. in literature, experienced a personal disaster three years ago, one in which he lost his young wife, his three-year-old daughter, and an unborn child, and he has come to believe that “that is how all stories end. With the naked, withered Christmas tree tilted against the trash barrel.” Now, as the new millennium is about to arrive, Kerrigan plans to “clothe himself in [Copenhagen’s] thousand years of history, let its wounds be his wounds, let its poets’ songs fill his soul, let its food fill his belly, its drink temper his reason, its jazz sing in the ears of his mind, its light and art and nature and seasons wrap themselves about him and keep him safe from chaos.” For Kennedy, as he relates the story of Kerrigan, Copenhagen becomes the equivalent of the Dublin which Stephen Dedalus explores in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
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If you came to this review because the title suggests that this is a romantic, even pretty, little novel of love in exotic India, then you will be shocked by what you discover here. This is a tough novel depicting what author Uday Prakash, controversial in his own country, sees as a major hurdle for India – not necessarily in the major cities so much as in the rural countryside. The economic changes in India in the 1990s have brought about a thriving middle class and a vibrant life in the cities, much of it “American style,” but those changes do not translate into similar changes in rural states, where traditional ways of life continue, including dramatic contrasts between the wealthy Brahmin class, which still controls the economic, political, and intellectual life of many areas, and the non-Brahmins who seem unable to rise, no matter how hard they try, because those very Brahmins also control most of the opportunities. A sweet love story between Rahul, a non-Brahmin student at a university in the state of Madhya Pradesh, and Anjali, the Brahmin daughter of the state minister of Public Works, provides the framework through which the author illustrates what he sees as a cultural crisis for the next generation
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Although Irish author Colum McCann has written six previous books and a collection of stories, winning many literary prizes including both the National Book Award and the IMPAC Dublin Prize for his most recent novel, Let The Great World Spin, he has never before written a novel set primarily in his native Ireland. Transatlantic shows that it has been worth the wait. Always precise and insightful in his descriptions, and so in tune with his settings that they seem to breathe with his characters, McCann uses three different plot lines set in three different time periods to begin this new novel, and all three plots are connected intimately to Ireland. In the process, he also creates a powerful sense of how men and women, no matter where they start out, may become so inspired to reach seemingly impossible goals that they willingly risk all, including their lives, to achieve success, often in new places, away from “home.” Always, however, they remain connected to their pasts. Filled with insights and uniquely developed themes, this novel shows McCann at his most inspirational best.
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