A gritty read from one of 20th-century Italy’s leading cultural lights.
A colorful, episodic depiction of youths living rough on the outskirts of post–World War II Rome.
Known in the U.S. mainly for his film work, Pasolini (1922-1975) was also a poet, novelist, and essayist. This 1955 novel was the Italian writer’s first and follows several teenage boys over the course of some five years as they struggle with hunger, poverty, and a squalid environment. The author has a tireless eye for ugliness: “blackened, broken stairs, past twisted pipes spilling from the walls”; “a light bulb smothered in fly shit”; “buildings crusted with thick, damp filth…” The adolescents survive by scavenging and theft and occasionally sexual trade. The potential for desperate acts is never far offstage, lending a constant tension to a meandering narrative. Pasolini sometimes raises a threat and leaves a cliffhanger, as when a boy arguing with his mother grabs a kitchen knife, only to resolve it further along. Amid all the squalor and privation, the youths are resilient and resourceful and even amusing, with an ability to shrug off the hard knocks and go on to dig up the next tiny break life might have to offer. This isn’t The Little Rascals, though, and no ship will rescue them like the boy savages of Lord of the Flies. These are nasty youngsters. Everyone is a target for their entertainment or advantage. They steal from each other and they have scant regard for girls or women, having seen their fathers habitually mistreat their mothers. Pasolini spends little ink on female characters, the chief ones here being mocking prostitutes and angry mothers. Parks does a fine job with what seems to have been a challenging translation, while also providing a helpful introduction and footnotes.
A gritty read from one of 20th-century Italy’s leading cultural lights.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377629
Page Count: 224
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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