A well-wrought crime story that could as easily have been a documentary: truthful and sobering.
Saviano (Gomorrah, 2007, etc.) returns to his native Naples to spin a chilling tale of teenage gangsters.
Call it The Godfather with training wheels. Nicolas Fiorillo is the hardworking, hard-thinking 15-year-old head of a motor scooter–borne gang, or “paranza,” a word that, Saviano tells us at the very start, “comes from the sea.” A boat goes to sea at night with bright lights to lure fish to rise, thinking the sun is up, only to be snagged in the net; so it is that the youngsters of the southern Italian projects become “guaglioni,” tough kids on the way to being made men. When a gang boss called Copacabana hangs out a sign, so to speak, looking for fresh blood, Nicolas and company are there: “You go,“ Nicolas thinks, “you answer the call. You have to be strong with the strong.” The errands that the “paranza” runs provide a powerful education in how the underworld works: Drugs are transported and sold, rival gangs beaten, shots fired. Ambitious and ruthless, Nicolas steadily rises in the demimonde, becoming a force in himself, pushing aside obstacles; at times he resembles a young Don Corleone, at others the Alex of A Clockwork Orange, and he makes for a creepy protagonist, as when he takes down a target: “Now Nicolas caught a glimpse of that enormous Adam’s apple, bobbing up and down in surprise, and he wondered just what it would sound like to put a couple of bullets right through the middle of it." Saviano, well-established as a crime journalist, delivers an effective yarn without much of a moral: Bad kids will rise to their own level, and, if given half a chance, the best of them will become even worse than their best teachers. There are a lot of Neapolitan cultural details, perhaps a touch too much for the casual reader, and a few walk-on characters too many, but Saviano’s story careens to a satisfying if sanguinary conclusion.
A well-wrought crime story that could as easily have been a documentary: truthful and sobering.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-23002-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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