A fable for dummies.
The 2004 Prix Goncourt winner is a lachrymose Old World melodrama tracking several generations of an outlaw Italian family entrenched in a bygone Southern village.
The novel opens like a spaghetti Western, as the notorious bandit Luciano Mascalzone, released after 15 years in prison, returns to the dusty village of Montepuccio on the back of a donkey in full midday heat. No one sees him ride in and stop at the home of the woman he has pined for all these years, and he beds her right there, while the village sleeps. Although he is stoned for his audacity (in fact, the woman is the younger sister of his deceased beloved), the product of this unlawful union is Rocco Scorta Mascalzone, farmed out as a boy to a fisherman’s family and, in turn, sharpened into a brigand who terrorizes the town. From him and his wife, the Mute, three children are born: Domenico, Giuseppe and Carmela. When Rocco dies, his ill-won booty is dumped on the local church, and demands are made for a splendid burial. The impoverished children are cast out on a ship to New York in order to seek their fortune. At the gateway of heaven—that is, Ellis Island—Carmela is rejected because of an eye ailment, and they turn back in solidarity. Eventually, they open a tobacco shop in their hometown and make good, growing prosperous and multiplying—the Scorta curse becomes a mark of pride. It’s hard to blame this corny novel on the translation—there are plenty of vague platitudinous descriptions of Italy that read like a travelogue, with abundant family feasts and exhortations of loyalty and revenge by characters who seem embarrassingly stereotypical. Wisely, Gaudé (The Death of an Ancient King, 2004) retreats from entry into New York and avoids treating that American city with the same mama-mia formula.
A fable for dummies.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2006
ISBN: 1-59692-159-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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