A journalist’s carefully plotted story shines in its depiction of Italian culture.
A man’s return to his childhood home in Italy connects him to the controversial attempts to restore an old church.
The new novel from Costanzo (Graphic Times, 2008) first follows Carlo Strazzi, a teacher in the fictional mountain town of Roccamonti in the province of Calabria, Italy, where life centers on family ties and the crumbling church of Santa Prisca. Carlo’s brother, his brother’s wife and their son are leaving for America when old disputes come tumbling to the fore, involving the first and second restoration attempts of the church. Later, Stefano Strazzi returns to his home of Roccamonti to visit his uncle, Carlo, and becomes a benefactor of the third attempt to restore the church. Roccamonti and the slow pace of life along Via della Scala renews Stefano, and he finds he is prolonging his stay, much to the anger of his wife, who is waiting for him to join her. Stefano learns of the debate surrounding the previous restoration attempts and the anger Carlo feels toward the whole charade. As Stefano becomes reacquainted with the town of his childhood, he also becomes intertwined in the drama that continues his uncle’s bloodlust for revenge. Constanzo only reveals the intricacies of the plot at the very end of the novel, a tell-tale sign of the author’s affinity for mystery writing. The foundation of the story is laid out well, with a journalist’s attention to facts, but also working poetry and the Italian language into writing that is otherwise unemotional. While Costanzo grounds the story in the telling of Strazzi family history, the characters of the town of Roccamonti and the mystifying back story, the climax comes late with the resolution feeling rushed and confused. Despite the shaky ending, Costanzo’s second novel is bolstered by his intimate knowledge of life in an Italian village.
A journalist’s carefully plotted story shines in its depiction of Italian culture.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-936185313
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Charles River
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
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
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