A family saga that boasts ambitious, sophisticated, and controlled storytelling.
The lives of an Italian Piedmontese family are traced across generations in this novel.
In the opening to this intricate family history, the first-person narrator, Antigone, confides that “cameras have always played an important role in the lives of the Ducati family.” The book centers on a family archive, with the narrator describing various photographs and documents, then “filling in the narrative spaces with action and dialogue.” The first photo to be examined is a group portrait taken in 1908 outside the family seat, the castle of Cortalba in Piedmont. The picture depicts the narrator’s great-grandparents Pietro and Olga Ducati along with their daughter Ada, the narrator’s grandmother, and Giulia and Luca, two of their other children. The narrative springs from these characters. It is revealed how Pietro and his brother Leo traveled south to Rome for work and established a biscotti business, after which Pietro married Olga, the daughter of a Genoese ship owner, and bought the castle at auction. The work recounts the stories of numerous other family members, such as Andre, Leo’s son, who moves to Hollywood and establishes himself as a movie director, and Alma, daughter of Ada, who marries Dardo, an actor and direct relative of the pirate Sir Edward Walton. Luca, meanwhile, frequents a brothel and becomes infatuated with a savvy prostitute named Catarì. Divided into three parts spanning the late 19th and 20th centuries, the novel charts how the family copes with rapid change across Europe, such as the rise of Fascism. Featuring a cast of 15 principal characters and over 80 others, including a domesticated leopard, this tale has considerable scope that could easily have proved sprawling. Some concentration is required, particularly since a number of the players have similar names; Alma is also known as Mina, for example, and her daughter is called Nina. Yet the way in which the author refers to photos is a clever way of isolating particular stories and characters to limit potential confusion: “In all the photographs Luca is wearing the same stunned expression in his cerulean, lifeless eyes, and a faint smile seeking his audience’s approval: ‘I’m handsome, aren’t I?’ ” These passages, which exemplify Lawton’s (Amy’s Story, 2017, etc.) keen and elegant descriptive skills, also tantalizingly hint at aspects of each character’s personality, which becomes more evident as the story unfolds. The result is a patchwork of lives that have been painstakingly sewn together. There is also a deep sense of Italian regionality to the tale. The players sip Moscato di Canelli and eat Biscotti Torinesi, both Piedmontese products. Translated from the Italian by Shugaar (The Athenian Woman, 2018, etc.), the narrative occasionally sounds unnatural or ungrammatical to the native English ear. This awkward passage is an example: “It’s not as if there weren’t fraternization among them. There was.” Similarly, candies are described as being “all wrapped individually, with legends written in different colors according to the flavor.” The use of legends is not incorrect, but labels would prove a more natural word choice. Still, this marginally off-key translation detracts little from an elaborate and far-reaching tale that makes for compelling reading.
A family saga that boasts ambitious, sophisticated, and controlled storytelling.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73304-082-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: New Academia Publishing/ The Spring
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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