Adeptly explores the consequences of pride and respect for women against the backdrop of Renaissance Italy.
The heir to a gondola empire rejects his birthright but comes full circle in this fascinating glimpse into late-Renaissance Venice by art historian–turned-novelist Morelli (Made in Italy, 2008).
Twenty-two-year-old Luca Vianello believes his left-handedness to be his greatest curse, until the death of his beloved mother right after she gives birth. Luca’s rage at seeing his father—whom he blames for his mother’s frequent, ill-fated pregnancies—at work so soon after her death results in a tragic fire at his family’s squero (a gondola boatyard). Fleeing his home, his betrothed and his trade, Luca ends up on the streets of Venice. Unable to fully escape his heritage, he finds a position as a gondolier. Eventually, in a life-altering move, he becomes private boatman to Trevisan, a successful artist. Luca is introduced—first in a painting, then in the flesh—to the beautiful Giuliana Zanchi, with whom he becomes infatuated. She hires him to perform side jobs for her, and the two eventually become friends. While restoring an old gondola of Trevisan’s that was made in his family’s squero, Luca, and eventually Trevisan, recognizes that he is in his own right a craftsman, a true artist. But when Luca becomes aware that Giuliana is in danger, he risks everything to save her. Vulnerable, honorable Luca will tug at readers’ heartstrings, while author Morelli’s evocative descriptions of late-16th-century Venice and its inhabitants alternately captivate and nauseate, with accurate depictions of personal and public hygiene. The paucity of dialogue does little to slow the novel’s pace, and long paragraphs of Luca’s self-reflection can be surprisingly interesting. Under Morelli’s deft pen, the gondola- and oar-making trades are elevated to the historic art forms they really were.
Adeptly explores the consequences of pride and respect for women against the backdrop of Renaissance Italy.Pub Date: March 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0989367103
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.
Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: “Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper,” writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who’s pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott’s “Natural Light,” which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a “museum crowded with tourists.” Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another’s struggles; as the narrator’s father says of a secret enshrined in the image, “She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.” In Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi,” an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva’s lyrical “Letter of Apology” is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, “Omakase,” centering on “one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.”
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48424-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-15398-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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