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WHAT WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT CHILDREN

Name: WHAT WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT CHILDREN
Author: Simona Vinci
ISBN: 0-375-40411-2

by Simona Vinci & translated by Minna Zallman Proctor ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2000

One feels there’s a more expansive, expressive story struggling to break through the rigid confines of this almost...

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An insular world of sexual play and fantasy is explored with affectless and disturbing clarity in this 1997 first novel by a young Italian writer, awarded her country’s Elsa Morante Prize.

Vinci’s protagonists and victims are five children, all living in a Bologna suburb, who surreptitiously furnish and meet in an abandoned shed that they employ as a “play house.” Following orders given by the oldest of them, 15-year-old Mirko, they peruse pornographic magazines and begin experimenting with one another’s bodies, at first impersonally, attentive to Mirko’s warning that “We can’t be like other people, do the whole couple thing”: they must exist solely as a group, independent of the conventional world of their parents and schoolmates. But the introduction of sadomasochism and child pornography into this willful Eden turns their playhouse into something far more sinister, and the story segues—quite credibly—into dangerous new territory. Vinci has an unerring eye for the quixotic mixture of high energy, rebellion, self-consciousness, and ennui that brings such characters as the brooding Mirko, the younger Matteo (a gentle boy who, poignantly enough, prefers sports to their jaded games), and especially dreamy, sentient ten-year-old Martina (the focal character) vividly to life. But ultimately you don’t know what to make of this accomplished yet opaque novel. Is it an allegory of incipient fascism? (Mirko’s morning erection seems to him “a symbol of omnipotence.”) Or a muted lament for the passion (and the innocence) that lives briefly and perishes quickly (“Sunflowers always go black in September, as if burnt”)? Vinci efficiently immerses us in the book’s amoral hothouse aura—but it’s hard to care about characters who care so little for others or even themselves.

One feels there’s a more expansive, expressive story struggling to break through the rigid confines of this almost unnaturally poised and controlled one. Perhaps that will be Vinci’s next novel.

Pub Date: June 7, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-40411-2

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.