A lumpy mass of family misadventures with a sour aftertaste.
Growing up Italian in the Midwest.
Imagine an enormous stack of postcards. Reading Giordano’s debut, the first in a trilogy, is like working your way through the stack, absorbing every new bit, often garnished with English or Italian exclamations. It’s 1946, and narrator ChiChi Maggiordino is a little girl in a peasant family on a mountainside above Naples when her mother gives birth to her half-brother Marco. ChiChi adores the sickly Marco, and that’s just as well, for her 18-year-old Mamma has withdrawn into a stony silence; the newborn is illegitimate. Her spirits revive when her American serviceman husband, now in Germany, arranges her passage to America. But when Mamma, Marco, ChiChi, and her beloved grandmother Nonna arrive in Minnesota, husband Bruno’s parents send them packing. They endure a freezing winter in a shack by the Mississippi before moving to an Italian section of Minneapolis. Mamma continues to brood; Nonna, life of the party, dies of pneumonia; Marco, with chronic lung disease, looks like a goner. Then things look up. Mamma is hired to sing at a restaurant and takes a succession of lovers, five and counting. ChiChi’s dark skin draws ethnic slurs, so she turns scrappy. She practices the Evil Eye (a constant refrain), then fights back with fists, teeth, and spit (plenty of spit). When one of Mamma’s lovers molests ChiChi, she stabs him. She also develops a talent as dancer and clown, encouraged by two dwarfs, circus performers and dignified old pros, a welcome respite from the domestic brawling. What ChiChi can’t handle is Marco’s growing away from her; she’s awash in unexamined emotion. She loathes Marco’s best buddy Ed and his girlfriends. As for his wedding: “How could I witness my brother pledge his troth in the church we sat in as children and swore we’d never ever leave each other?” Fortunately, the call from the New York talent scout comes right on cue: ChiChi heads east with a knife on her belt.
A lumpy mass of family misadventures with a sour aftertaste.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30668-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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