An often funny, if sometimes-meandering, tour of Italian culture.
In this comedic memoir, a Dutch couple moves to the Italian countryside with hopes of opening a bed-and-breakfast.
In 2007, Smulders and his husband, Nico, left their native country of the Netherlands and traveled to Pavia, Italy, to search for a new home. The author intended to spend the next six months working on his master’s degree in medieval culture while his husband enjoyed the reprieve provided by a sabbatical. They managed to find their dream home in the municipality of Montecalvo Versiggia despite the apparent laziness of their real estate agent, and they successfully bought it for the grand sum of $200,000. Of course, the building needed work before it could properly welcome paying visitors, so the pair hired a contractor—a memorably dyspeptic man named Torti—to steward the project. Despite the relative modesty of the job’s scale, plenty predictably went wrong, and the author describes the foibles of renovation with verve and humor. The author depicts Italy’s notoriously Byzantine bureaucracy as a relentless antagonist that made even the most menial tasks difficult: “Italy is a country full of rules and regulations, but these rules and regulations were not created to shed light on what is right and what is wrong, in fact quite on the contrary,” the author observes. “It seems that they were actually designed to deprive one of clear-cut solutions.” Smulders finally abandons his studies—in part, because he’s given virtually no guidance from an absentee academic supervisor—and instead devotes himself to the eventual unveiling of the B&B, called “Villa I Due Padroni.” Smulders provides a running commentary on Italian culture that’s both perspicacious and sharp-witted. However, sometimes it becomes overly digressive; there are several pages, for example, devoted to the drama of finding and using a toilet. Also, the prose can be overly exuberant at times—it’s astonishing how many sentences end with exclamation points. Still, this is a charmingly lighthearted recollection, even when the author faces genuinely exasperating trials, and it’s as good an introduction to the inimitable Italian ways of everyday life as one is likely to find.
An often funny, if sometimes-meandering, tour of Italian culture.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5071-6296-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Babelcube
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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