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
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
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
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