A portrait of a young man adrift in a world where meaning has been swept away.
When nothing means anything, what do you grab onto to save yourself?
Drifting aimlessly in a sea of alcohol, coffee, women, and cigarettes, Milanese transplant Leo Gazzara floats through life in Rome, buoyed by his collection of secondhand classic books and a loose network of friends (some similarly disaffected, some seeming to have goals or, at least, cash). Leo’s attempts to create a more structured life—usually involving less alcohol and more employment—occur in waves and begin to take on more urgency when he encounters the troubled but alluring Arianna at a party at the home of more successful (and more settled) friends. Leo and a coasting soul mate, Graziano, mull over the causes of their estrangement from routine life and attempt a concerted effort to rescue themselves from slipping away entirely into adolce vita punctuated by drives to the sea or revivifying showers. Leo’s own efforts to recognize and connect with a meaningful existence rely in no small part on what may be the enduring love of his life: books. Allusions to Proust, James Fenimore Cooper, and other masters echo throughout Calligarich’s short but dense novel. Andre Aciman’s epic foreword to this first American edition provides biographical and bibliographic context for Calligarich’s novel, which was widely rejected before finally being published to acclaim in Italy in 1973 and, though falling in and out of print, developed a cultlike following over the years. The account of a lost generation in Rome in the early 1970s (possibly the children of the children of Hemingway’s lost generation) carries the weight of both family history and generational saga.
A portrait of a young man adrift in a world where meaning has been swept away.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-60015-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
An eccentric, well-written small-town novel jam-packed with appealing characters and their dreams.
When a photo booth–type machine in the grocery store starts spitting out predictions of people’s true callings, the residents of Deerfield, Louisiana, are deeply affected.
“In the way that aspiring novelists might like to imagine their work someday being discussed in a sophomore literature class…or the way philosophers like to chart the evolution of thought from Socrates to Plato to Jay-Z…Douglas also liked to imagine himself one day becoming part of some traceable lineage.” Douglas Hubbard, a happily married high school history teacher, has a fantasy of becoming a famous jazz trombone player. He’s even signed up for lessons. Unlike the other dreamers in his little town, he came up with this idea all by himself, on his 40th birthday. His wife and many of his neighbors, on the other hand, are carrying around little blue slips of paper produced by a machine called the DNAMIX. They say things like ROYALTY, CARPENTER, LOVER, and MAGICIAN, and because of them the school principal, the mayor, and many others in Deerfield are quitting their jobs, buying costumes, and planning major life changes. There’s something a little strange about Walsh’s follow-up to his remarkable first novel, My Sunshine Away (2015). On one hand, it has a warm, folksy, Fannie Flagg–type feeling, complete with John Prine references galore (the title is one) and a goofy touch of magic. On the other hand, like the author’s debut, it addresses very serious and disturbing issues. It opens with the death of a teenager, as experienced by his twin, and later adds intimations of a school shooting, a gang rape, and a terrible revenge plot. Both aspects are well handled, but do they really go together? When you get a bereaved dad dressed up in a ludicrous cowboy outfit intervening to rescue his son from being gunned down by the police you have to wonder.
An eccentric, well-written small-town novel jam-packed with appealing characters and their dreams.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1848-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
