Bonucci can't quite muster the necessary urgency and suspense. There is something finished or unchangeable in her characters...
This debut novel by Bonucci, known in Italy as an anti-Berlusconi political activist, is the portrait of a wealthy Jewish family living in Trieste in the turbulent period between 1900 and the rise of the fascist movement in the ’20s.
Judging from the author's dedication, “To Grandmother, because this is her story,” it is a narrative with a basis in fact. Chapters are related in the voices of various members of the Levi family, creating a layered impression of largely tragic events, precipitated by the flirtatious irresponsibility of the mother, Gemma; the inability of her banker husband, Sandro, to deny her any extravagance; and the ill health of the couple's sensitive, neurotic eldest son, Marcello, who suffers a near-fatal case of meningitis, and a subsequent dependence on morphine. There is an engagingly unconventional brilliance to the family. Gemma, for example, describing living in a Trieste apartment overlooking the sea when she was growing up, recalls, “Mama and I would dive from the living room window directly into the water.” The impulsiveness, joie de vivre and wish to dazzle that make Gemma so charming also make her feckless and wanton. Dolly, her daughter, whose voice is the book's moral compass, sadly observes that her mother went out to parties and social engagements so frequently that “I have to refer to photographs to be reminded of her face, because without them I see only the back of a figure turned away from me.” Bonucci does an excellent job of recreating a hectic period of decadence and ruin, in which a family, despite meaning everything to one another, are mutually self-destructive. She is equally adept at pinpointing the ways family members manipulate one another. Dolly, for example, identifies Marcello's most hateful behavior as, “the systematic sabotage of our rare moments of happiness” with ill-temper or psychosomatic symptoms. And yet there is a similar remoteness to these characters, an inevitability or determinate quality that permits us to accept more easily than we should the wreck of so much happiness.
Bonucci can't quite muster the necessary urgency and suspense. There is something finished or unchangeable in her characters that marks them as belonging not to a novelistic present but to a historical past.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2006
ISBN: 1-58642-098-4
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
