Teems with incident, wit and pathos.
The tale of an ordinary boy, lonely, sweet and introspective, driven toward a singularly dark coming of age.
Twelve-year-old Pietro dreams of deliverance. A brutal father, a neglecting mother and an oafish brother addicted to heavy metal and motocross enshadow Pietro’s poetic soul, aquiver with love for Gloria, the loveliest and richest girl in town. And what a town. Italian author Ammaniti (I’m Not Scared, 2003) peoples the nowheresville of Ischiano Scalo with wondrous citizenry—among them, Pierini, snarling “alpha hunting dog” of Michelangelo Buonarrotti junior high; Italo, the school’s diabetic, lame caretaker, besotted with a porkish prostitute; and redheaded Flora, a no-nonsense teacher fretting over her mother’s stomach cancer. Returning home to this hamlet is Graziano, a 40ish former-hunk troubadour who couldn’t quite make the big-time playing Santana and Gipsy Kings cover tunes. Exhausted by the wastrel life, he’s bringing back to mama his new bride, a sizzling, bitchy TV starlet. Won’t the hicks be dazzled! But when she dumps him, Graziano sniffs out Flora. The playboy’s and the lonely boy’s lives intersect: Coerced by Pierini, Pietro has trashed Flora’s classroom in an act of reluctant vandalism and, after elaborate plot twists, the teacher will end up drowned in a bath tub—Pietro to blame. How he pines still for Gloria, how Italo plots revenge for the schoolhouse crime, how Graziano suffers, all make for edge-of-the-seat reading. Yet Ammaniti is more than a red-hot storyteller: his delineation of Pietro’s agonized adolescence and Graziano’s ridiculous, moving midlife crisis, his cinematic descriptions of village atmosphere and custom, the way he portrays Italy’s fabled old loveliness with its desperate embrace of Americanized pop culture, qualify him as an astute psychologist and sharp social critic.
Teems with incident, wit and pathos.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-84195-824-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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