Pugliese’s dark story serves as an extended metaphor for whatever the reader might wish: climate change, the human capacity...
Here comes the rain again, and a storied Italian city washes away in this brooding novel by a Milanese transplant to southern Italy.
While he worked in publishing, as so many Italian writers do, Italo Calvino discovered and published this slender novel in 1977. It made a mark, then disappeared, reissued only after the author’s death in 2012. Why he withheld it—his only novel—from being reprinted is a mystery. In a theme that nicely complements Max Frisch’s near-contemporaneous Man in the Holocene, the story opens with fogged windows and rain-lashed streets, “with inky streaks and sudden gusts, the wind blowing up Via Marittima on the corner of Piazza del Municipio, and beyond, and beyond….” Transfixed, a weary journalist named Carlo Andreoli collects odd sightings: here a sinkhole opens, swallowing roads and buildings; there spectral voices whisper from ancient castle walls. The scene shifts, now to a police commissioner who is wondering just how he is going to explain those odd sightings: “What answer would he give to Rome, otherwise, if they asked him to explain the voices?” What answer indeed? Pugliese occasionally swings into the satirical, mimicking Moravia here and the Mafia novel there (“That evening so sweetly autumnal, with all that falling rain defining veils of omertà”), peppering the narrative with sharply realized observations from many points of view, as with the barista who worries, “People would stop coming to Susan’s for coffee the day they realized that if they had coffee at Susan's they also risked ruining a pair of trousers with the muddy water from the puddles.” More often he falls into stream-of-consciousness reveries in which sentences and paragraphs flow like rain for pages, to beautiful effect. One comes at the very end, when Andreoli flashes on the happy thought that maybe, just maybe, the rain will stop pouring down and the sun will shine once more.
Pugliese’s dark story serves as an extended metaphor for whatever the reader might wish: climate change, the human capacity for suffering. A memorable work of modern literature.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-911508-06-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: & Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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