A slim, sharply pointed knife of a novel.
A recently widowed Italian farm wife spends a long night on the phone with her local veterinarian.
With its dependence on dialogue and rising tension as revelations about the characters’ pasts build toward a present-moment crisis, Naspini's short novel feels like a two-character play. The usually resilient 66-year-old Nives falls into despair when her husband of many years dies unexpectedly. Rebuffing a suggestion to leave the farm and move in with her daughter’s family in France, Nives suffers debilitating loneliness until she brings Giacomina, a chicken, into the house for company. Then Giacomina becomes paralyzed, and panicky Nives calls old acquaintance Loriano Bottai for veterinary advice. Once Bottai’s wife, Donatella, rouses the alcoholic vet and goes to bed, Nives and Bottai settle in to what becomes a verbal marathon. Their argument about the chicken’s condition leads to banter about Donatella’s snoring, so loud Nives can hear it over the phone. When Bottai mentions that his upstairs neighbor, Pagliuchi, hears Donatella too, the banter becomes gossip about Pagliuchi’s long-ago youthful affair with Rosa, a girl who threw herself from the church belfry. Nives ponders what it must be like for Pagliuchi, “living with death on [his] conscience,” but reveals that she, as well as Donatella, had problematic relationships as an adolescent with both Pagliuchi and Rosa. While Nives talks in concrete terms about Rosa’s ghost cursing them, Bottai sees Rosa as a metaphor for “that thing we all have, which sometimes keeps us awake at night"—a night Bottai and Nives are sharing as they bring up one “Rosa” after another whom they hurt or were hurt by. The two are by turns friendly and hostile, with each revelation shifting who dominates the conversation. Then, midway through, Nives declares that part of her was “massacred” more than 30 years ago, and it becomes clear that Nives and Bottai are each other’s main “Rosas,” cursed with love, resentment, vengeance, cowardice, and guilt.
A slim, sharply pointed knife of a novel.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60945-666-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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