A complicated but unsatisfying story about vicious murders and the overlapping lives of frustrated people.
In Mancini’s (Tracce 24, 2014, etc.) novel, a group of Italians in the late 1990s deal with problems involving civil engineering and violence that has roots in Mussolini’s dictatorship.
In this work set in 1997, several Italians’ lives intersect and diverge, soap-opera style. They include Manuele De Mari, an architect who vividly remembers his young cousin’s drowning on a trip to the beach 30 years earlier; Umberto Cassini, a toy salesman who suffers from road rage; Deborah, a disgruntled factory worker who finds herself romantically involved with one man after another; Davide Giorgi, an engineer who’s determined to fix an old water tower built during the years of Fascist rule; and other characters, including a shadowy killer whom Manuele eventually traces to the home of an old man, a disillusioned athlete and architect who created futuristic structures for Mussolini. Manuele also discovers that someone close to him was one of the killer’s victims. Overall, the prose is choppy, full of single-sentence paragraphs and awkward phrasing (“Manuele noticed the anomalous throng of people on the shore”). The omniscient third-person narrator is a hypermasculine stereotype who notes the make of every car (“a dark four-door BMW with a hatchback, a Mercedes Station Wagon, a sparkling metallized Audi A3 with radial tires”). The book presents infidelity as default behavior, and female characters almost entirely through a sexualized lens. The plot is complex, and many of the book’s characters have promise. However, their compelling qualities are obscured by the narrator’s interests. The book does address a lesser-known element of Italy’s Fascist history, with its focus on architecture, engineering, and public health. However, it does so through a meandering story that subordinates its thrillerlike elements to the sex lives of its characters.
A complicated but unsatisfying story about vicious murders and the overlapping lives of frustrated people.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4452-1742-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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