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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This breezy commentary by Inez Pereyra, wife of Ernesto, belies her initial shock at discovering a lipstick love-heart, saying “All Yours,” inside her husband’s briefcase and her realization that her husband of seventeen years is probably having an affair. From Inez’s point of view, things have been stressful in the month leading up to this discovery. The housework, she explains, has been “exhausting” because she wants everything to be “perfect,” but life has been bearable, and she has not wanted to go looking for trouble (as her mother did, to her own misfortune). Ernesto has been coming home late, working on weekends, and avoiding her, and except for school meetings involving a senior trip for their daughter Lali, he has been physically AWOL for most of the month. For Inez, selfish and deliberately obtuse, however, “The truth is…why confront Ernesto with some big scenario, when this woman’s going to be history in a week anyway?” In the classic (and very dark) farce which emerges from this opening scene and becomes the body of the novel, Inez exploits her husband’s predicament for her own ends, becoming the perfect wife, even as he continues to remain distant, a situation which absolutely begs for conversion into a play or film. The plot moves at warp speed, with twists and turns, surprises galore, and ironies which will keep even a jaded reader entertained and anxious to see how the author will resolve these issues—and laughing out loud almost non-stop.
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This novel was WINNER of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2010, in addition to being WINNER of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. Despite the extraordinary literary recognition which this book has garnered, I had not really been very tempted to read it. A “genre-bending,” post-modern novel about the rock music business over the past thirty years seemed so far from my interests that I’d decided to leave it and its reviews to others who are fans of that music. Then I read the Guardian (UK)’s list of the favorite novels of British authors for this 2011 and discovered this novel at or near the top of the list of no fewer than five major British authors, including John Lanchester, David Lodge, and Roddy Doyle. And the book is truly funny and original and brilliant. Lovers of experimental writing will find Jennifer Egan’s approach to story telling, including seventy-five pages of PowerPoint presentations about life in the 2020s, to be unique, and for that alone, the book would be captivating. Fortunately, she also manages to create several fascinating characters who echo and re-echo throughout the short-story-like chapters, even when the narrators change constantly.
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Gerard Woodward has been one of England’s most iconoclastic literary authors, rejecting all the polite expectations of writing and society by creating novels that seem, on the surface, to be about real families experiencing real life but having a darker agenda. A poet with a fine eye, ear, and sense of pacing, Woodward uses these talents in unique ways to create dozens of scenes which surprise and shock and even repulse, all the while causing the reader to laugh uproariously, not from shock or embarrassment but from surprise and delight in his daring. The opening pages of this novel, which are alternately wickedly funny and darkly ironic, graphically illustrate these points. Mrs. Head, a proper London widow is preparing dinner for her daughter Tory who is living with her and working for the war effort in a gelatine factory. When a German bomb hits the butcher shop nearby, Mrs. Head explores. As she looks over the wreckage, she finds an absolutely perfect leg of pork. Quietly picking it up and wrapping it, for fear that someone will think she is looting the wreckage, she brings it home and roasts it for their first real dinner in ages, admiring the cracklings and the scent as it roasts. It is not until Tory returns home from work and asks, “Where’s Mr. Dando?” that the horror of what they are eating hits home.
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