Books & Reviews Archive

Dad Lewis and his wife return from Denver > away from the mountains, back out onto the high plains: in the pastures an expanse of buffalo grass, sagebrush, weeds, and blue grama, in the cultivated fields wheat and cotton. On either side of the highway there were dirt country roads running in all directions under a pure blue sky. Holt is a small Colorado town like so many others, a place hardly worth identifying because it is the same everywhere, it is where normal life is lived, > the precious ordinary life: mundane stories, with nothing exceptional about them, stories that could belong to anyone, yet which hold within them love, familial affection, unhappiness, guilt, memories, and the expectation of Death. Dad has just learned he has only a few months left to live, due to lung cancer. We witness the man’s slow, inexorable physical decline. Through frequent flashbacks, the author offers glimpses of what now torments Dad. In the past, as the owner of a supermarket, he fired an employee who had stolen from him; Dad was unrelenting, cast from a single mold, offering no second chances—not even to the man’s wife, who had gone so far as to offer her own body to pay back what had been taken. The man killed himself, leaving his family in destitution. This unyielding attitude led to a rupture with his son. When he caught him, still an adolescent, wearing his older sister’s clothes, he beat him, terrified of scandal and rejecting his homosexuality; the boy ran away from home, leaving no trace behind. With his elder daughter as well, who has returned home to care for him, he was emotionally detached, stern, and distant. Now, he realizes he has never caressed his daughter. > I was too busy. I didn't pay attention. No, she said, You weren't. She put her hand on his cheek, now. Forgive me, he whispered. I missed out on so much. I could have done better. I have always loved you. He wants to see his son again, he waits for him, he longs to reach out to the woman to apologize, he wishes he could turn back time, but now the people of his life, those he has lost, are merely part of a terminal patient’s nightmares. While Dad’s inexorable journey toward Death is the central narrative, other lives revolve around it, all marked by suffering. > Every life passes through some kind of unhappiness, (...) but there is good as well. (...) There are only brief moments. And as in Kader Abdolah's *The Parrot Flew Over the IJssel* (see review on this site), the cycle of the seasons rolls across the Great Plains. > In autumn the days turned cold and the leaves fell from the trees and in winter the wind came down from the mountains and out on the high plains of Holt County there were night storms and three-day blizzards.   The novel demonstrates how our lives slip by without us seizing the opportunities to show humanity toward others, to comprehend the suffering of those around us. To be sure, Dad displayed great moral integrity in refusing the advances of an attractive woman; but wouldn't it have been better had he accepted them, had he been more forgiving of himself? Even in our prosaic lives, so far removed from those of great men, we are constantly faced with choices, and these decisions concern our relationships with others. At the end of life, nothing remains but remembrance, yet Death dissolves even that. > If one does not die, one lives, so writes Salvatore Satta in *The Day of Judgment* (see review on this site). > And this truth, seemingly obvious, is instead heavy with consequences, for life transforms everything; nothing can withstand its implacable truth. (...) To know oneself, one must live out one's life to the very end, to the moment one is lowered into the grave. The fundamental strength of the book lies in its prose: crisp, spare, and mesmerizing all at once. Short sentences, taut dialogue, and sparse digressions on the setting follow in succession; the characters are not merely described, but reveal themselves, always wrapped in that aura of mystery, of the incomprehensible, that shadows us throughout our lives. If Dad reveals himself in Death, who are the others? It is a pity that the narrative rhythm, elsewhere so intense, is compromised by an ending of a melodramatic and frankly verbose register. Why read it? Splendid prose.

The book is a collection of short stories set in a town in South-Western India, Kittur. The author traverses the various corners of the city, its people, and its social life, like a modern-day Guy de Maupassant. Yet in truth, as an editor remarks when rejecting the stories, > your characters want absolutely nothing. They simply walk through richly described situations and think deeply. They walk through cows, trees, roosters, and think, and then walk through roosters, trees, and cows, and think a bit more. That is all. The narrative, in fact, unfolds between the realistic, stark, and often repetitive depiction of modern Indian society, and the pessimistic chronicle of an unalterable social and existential condition. Despite India’s intense economic dynamism, there is no real shift in the social fabric, in caste relations, in the mechanisms of power—ever dominated by corruption and abuse—nor in the lives of the characters, who, whenever they aspire to or believe they have attained even a modicum of social mobility, are thrust back into the immutable roles of a stratified society. All the stories are remarkably fine, but the most emblematic of the entire collection is *“Market and Maiden”*. Keshaya is a boy from the countryside looking for work in the city: “he is small, thin, dark-skinned, with huge eyes that wander dreamily.” Full of energy yet at the same time “capable of staring at the ceiling for hours,” the boy does not quite know what he wants, but remains captivated by the life of the tram conductor, who works outside, clinging perilously to the vehicle. He manages to secure this job and is thrilled because he rides to work on a bicycle given to him by his employer. It belonged to a former tram conductor, who now begs in the street after being crippled in an accident. One day, Keshaya falls, strikes his head, is fired, and finds himself wandering through the market like a madman, like a wild man. And everyone pretends not to recognize him, yet “he was the king of tram number 5,” cries the lame man, the only one standing by him, bound by the solidarity shared among the poor and the wretched. “That is the way of the world,” remarks the protagonist of another story, “and so it’s a rotten world.” And what can the writer do? If he does not wish to go mad, like another character in the book, he must convince himself that > every true word, as soon as it has been written, is like the full moon, in a day it vanishes and passes entirely into darkness. And this is the way of all things . What is truly remarkable in these stories is Adiga’s writing. It succeeds in transfiguring social realism into the anticipation, or the possibility, of an escape—wholly contemplative and interior—from the deterministic and inexorable forces of economics and sociology. In *“The Bunder”*, Abasi is a small-business owner, beleaguered by the corruption of public officials, who endures a profound inner conflict between the necessity of providing security for his family and the harrowing awareness that the manufacturing processes in his factory will inexorably lead the female laborers to blindness. What is to be done? He climbs onto the roof of his factory: > from here a man can see the limits of Kittur... and see the Arabian Sea stretching out from Kittur. The setting sun is shining above it. A ship is slowly leaving the harbor, sailing where the blue waters of the sea change color and turn a deep dark. And it is about to meet a broad swath of the brilliant setting sun, an oasis of pure light Will Abisa throw himself from the roof, or will he submit to the inexorable laws of economics? We are left in a state of suspense, of waiting, which forms the resolution to most of the stories. Why read it? Splendid stories, marvelous prose, and human and social narratives of powerful resonance.

The book’s subtitle is “the epic story of Kit Carson and the conquest of the West.” Indeed, the book spans a very long period, from 1809, the year of Kit Carson’s birth, to his death in 1868. Even though the great scout lies at the heart of the book, in reality it features all the protagonists of those years who contributed to an exceedingly complex and multifaceted history, shaped by competing ambitions: the imperial dream of the United States aimed at conquering the entire continent from East to West at the expense of a weaker nation, Mexico; economic expansion toward territories whose wealth was often overstated; the American Civil War and the role played by Indigenous nations; the clash of cultures (North Americans, Mexicans, and Indians); and, finally, the heavy imprint of a Methodist vision intent on imposing its own rules without acknowledging particularities and cultural distinctions. At the core of the book, therefore, lies the American dream: the conviction of being inherently in the right, and consequently the inability to understand the indigenous peoples. The latter, accustomed to a nomadic society rooted in raiding, fail to realize that they are up against a new adversary—one quite different from the Spanish and the Mexicans, equipped with technological superiority and, above all, an obstinacy driven to see matters through to the bitter end. It is the Navajos who pay the heaviest price, despite having been one of the strongest and wealthiest Indian nations. They are destroyed: first by starvation, then by the long march toward a settlement intended to serve as an experiment in civilization, which proves instead to be an inhospitable wasteland where disease, poor harvests, and contaminated water deal a mortal blow to the Navajos. It is a chronicle of clashes and battles, of plunder and cruelty, laying bare a violent society on both sides. A curious code of conduct effectively binds Americans and Indians alike: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In this context, Kit Carson—already a legend in his own lifetime—stands as an emblematic figure: a consummate scout gifted with both diplomatic and martial prowess, a commander, yet ultimately an executor who, against his own inclinations, is compelled by obedience and gratitude toward others to wage wars and endure conditions he does not himself condone. Deep down, he is frail, a weakness evident in his physique and his voice to such a degree that visitors who had read accounts of his life and exploits failed to recognize him when meeting him in person. He is a hero who becomes one in spite of himself, almost an artfully crafted figure within the American collective imagination. This persona served to open the conquest of the West to the American people and to rationalize the slaughter of the Indians. Like all heroes, he is also an antihero. The book is a compelling work. It appears historically well-documented, and while not a novel in the strict sense, the narrative possesses all its hallmarks. The overlapping of episodes, which develop in parallel before converging into a central storyline, likewise generates an atmosphere of suspense typical of a detective story or contemporary fiction. The approach is cinematic. Its most compelling aspect is the extensive reliance on the very diaries of those who took part in the events. For instance, a woman who followed the wagon train toward the conquest of Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, writes with scandalized outrage about a ball held in honor of the conquerors, where Mexican women appeared in low-cut, provocative gowns.

The protagonist loses his wife and children in a plane crash. To escape despair, he writes the biography of a silent-film actor who had vanished without a trace. Tracked down by Alma, with whom he falls in love, he learns that the former actor lives on a farm, where he has continued to make films that he has resolved to destroy upon his death. The protagonist reaches the country house to witness the former actor's death, manages to watch one of the films that had been produced, and then stands by as a spectator to the fire that destroys the entirety of the cinematic works. The narrative concludes tragically with Alma’s death. It is a complex novel, in many respects intellectualized and erudite, unfolding through paradoxical events around two philosophical and existential themes: the world is entirely an illusion, where the boundary between what is real and what is fiction or the product of our imagination remains blurred; and destruction—death—is the arbitrary outcome of the illusion in which we live. The theme of illusion is personified by the former actor Hector: his origins are unknown, and he does everything to keep them obscure; he leads a double life in love that ends tragically; he is perpetually on the run, pretending to be someone else and fabricating situations until finally secluding himself in the countryside to produce cryptic films destined never to be shown in theaters. The theme of destruction, of tragedies overwhelming human lives, of inexplicable events, is embodied in the very plot of the book and in the protagonist's torments. > It is a book of fragments, a gathering of nostalgias and dreams only partially remembered . The book is very well written, in a pleasant and fluid style. Yet there is an intellectualist undercurrent that frequently renders the narrative pace cumbersome and redundant.

*The Bottle Imp*, in Italian *Il diavoletto nella bottiglia*, is a short story that revolves around man’s ambiguous relationship with evil. Keawe, the protagonist, > was a poor man, brave and industrious; he could read and write like a schoolmaster, and was furthermore a first-rate sailor . One day, in San Francisco, he stops to admire a splendid house. When Keawe expresses his desire to possess such a home, the owner tells him that his entire fortune originated from a bottle in which an imp resides. Whoever purchases this bottle will have all their wishes granted. There are, however, drawbacks: one goes to hell if one dies while still in possession of the bottle, and it must always be sold at a price lower than its purchase cost. Keawe is torn, but ultimately agrees to buy the bottle for fifty dollars. His life swiftly undergoes a radical transformation: he becomes a wealthy man and can afford a magnificent home. He manages to sell the bottle and is thus able to live peacefully and happily, not least because he has since fallen in love with a young woman, Kokua, whom he intends to marry. One day, however, he discovers he has contracted leprosy and resolves to track down the bottle once more so that the imp may cure him. Thus begins a search that leads him to discover that the price of the bottle has been steadily falling, down to a mere two cents. Yet the bottle would then have to be bought for one cent—and how could it ever be sold afterwards, given that the cent is the smallest coin available? Keawe buys it nonetheless and marries Kokua, but finds no happiness, knowing that upon his death he will go to hell. Once she learns the terrible secret, Kokua decides to secretly purchase the bottle herself through an ingenious expedient: she travels to a French-held island where coins of lesser value than a cent are in circulation. Yielding to evil has created a sort of “reverse chain letter,” breeding further evil to the point where the two lovers become entangled in a paradoxical short-circuit, wherein the happiness of the one becomes the source of the other’s torment. Then, as in a fine fairy tale, comes the happy ending: Keawe manages to sell the bottle to a drunkard, ridding himself of it forever. The story mirrors the structure of a fable (the presentation of the initial situation, the hero confronting hardships until he successfully overcomes them) and also bears the hallmarks of a maritime yarn, unfolding as it does among ships and southern cities. The underlying concept, however, is the depiction of the trajectory of evil, played out entirely through its progressive loss of value. As if to say: the more one lives immersed in evil, the more one grows accustomed to it, to the point that the imp is worth less and less. Why read it? It is remarkably well written, if at times repetitive, but above all, the moral underpinning the tale remains profoundly relevant. In recent years, Italians have gradually accepted increasingly illegal, immoral, and vulgar behaviors, the cost of which drops ever lower because they have by now become part of the collective ethos. Beware! There is no end to the worst.

Anyone who has read or seen *The Bone Collector* in the cinema is already familiar with the book's main characters. Lincoln Rhyme is a renowned criminologist who bases his investigative techniques on the rigorous and meticulous use of "physical" evidence, even the most insignificant. Despite having been left paralyzed following a shootout. Rhyme continues to collaborate with the police, assisted by a team of detectives and by Amelia Sachs, a close and capable collaborator as well as his life partner. Rhyme's cousin is accused of rape and murder. All the evidence points to his guilt. Rhyme is quickly convinced that the clues have been fabricated by a serial killer who "knows everything." In the course of the investigation, Rhyme and his team discover the existence of a massive private organization that collects, stores, and processes information on virtually everything, selling it to corporations (for market research, for instance) as well as to public and state institutions. It is a "Digital Big Brother," whose data is seemingly inaccessible, yet which the criminal has managed to exploit and even manipulate. The thriller is skillfully constructed, boasting a plot rich in twists and an unpredictable conclusion. The best part of the book is its depiction of the world of big data processing corporations. Rhyme’s team proves remarkably inexpert (perhaps excessively so, given they do not even know Excel) and ventures into this realm step by step, left stunned, fascinated, and alarmed. Rhyme himself is disconcerted: can access to such vast amounts of information truly supplant the method and intuition that must govern criminology? And the reader, too, begins to wonder. On the surface, possessing powerful databases and sophisticated data collection tools would appear to be a monumental achievement. But is it worth it if a criminal can exploit them to commit rape and murder with impunity? Is the availability of so much information—which even enables the prediction of events—truly helpful in tracking down killers, or do traditional, obsolete investigative methods remain more effective? The premise is intriguing, the prose concise and effective, the plot well-engineered, and the characters—especially Amelia Sachs—compelling; it is a pity that, as so often happens with thrillers, the novel's sheer length renders it wordy and meandering. Are these authors paid by word count, as Salgari once was? Why read it? It is a solid thriller, and the theme is compelling.

Henry Molise is the son of a tyrannical, drunken father. Summoned by his siblings because their parents appear poised for divorce after yet another of the father’s abusive outbursts, Henry finds himself roped into helping his father build a small stone shed at an out-of-town motel. During the journey in the company of his father’s old friends and by working alongside him, Henry rediscovers, with horror, his own familial matrix and his affection for his father. The shed, scarcely finished, is destroyed by a windstorm, starkly demonstrating that the aging father, once a renowned and skilled craftsman, is no longer physically and intellectually capable of carrying out a job, however simple. At this point, the story hurtles to its crisis: the father falls ill, is hospitalized, and subsequently flees the hospital to die at the home of an old friend who owns a vineyard and produces excellent wine. The overarching threads of the book are fundamentally two: the familial context, from which Henry sought to escape, only to rediscover through this homecoming that he belongs to it indelibly. This familial context is composed not only of the characters (the mother, the siblings, the father’s friends and the barroom regulars, the neighbors who endure the father’s excesses), but also includes objects (above all, wine and food) and the memories of a childhood deeply shaped by Italian roots. *The Brotherhood of the Grape* is the setting of a series of primordial relations that forge profound bonds among men. Emblematic in this regard is the figure of Angelo Musso, a sublime winemaker deprived of speech, who represents a “Greek god” to the members of the brotherhood, and who, when Henry comes to retrieve his father to return him to the hospital, proclaims with wise fatalism: “it’s better to die drinking than to die of thirst” and “it’s better to die among friends than among doctors.” Evident here is a nostalgia for an ancient time in which the rhythm of life and the bonds between men were determined by an authentic wisdom; the relationship with the father, who shaped the lives of all his children without ever succeeding in fulfilling his desire to pass on his craft as an artisan. This is not merely a question of traditional bonds, forged of conflict and affection toward the paternal figure; the core of the narrative lies primarily in the trade of stone quarrying and masonry, handed down to the father by his parents. The children reject this trade, which has weighed heavily upon their lives. The father’s failure in his final endeavor exposes all his fragility and weakness, thereby reopening the relationship with his son, who rediscovers an affection and a bond with his parent, but also with his craft, which had been lost over time due to the presumed omnipotence of the paternal figure. The style recalls that of the great American writers, such as Faulkner and Chandler, yet it is grounded in the deliberate use of words, in their careful juxtaposition so as to articulate a poetic and musical rhythm. The meaning of the narrative emerges not so much from the plot, nor from character study and the description of settings, but above all from the sensations that arise from the sequence of words and sounds.

The year is 1873 and Butcherʼs Crossing is a Kansas town, in reality a small settlement of buffalo hunters. Andrews is a twenty-year-old youth; he has abandoned Boston for a vague notion of freedom. > Sometimes, after listening to the hushed voices in church and school, he would pass beyond the borders of Cambridge into the lands and woods lying to the southwest. There, in some solitary place, standing motionless upon bare ground, he felt his mind fill with the clear air and plunged into infinite space: the emptiness and constraint he felt were dissolved in the wild nature that surrounded him . The young man meets a hunter and allows himself to be drawn into a venture: to go beyond the Great Plains, into the mountains, where thousands of buffalo still graze. > He realized that the hunt was merely a stratagem, a deception practiced upon himself. (...) No business impelled him... he was going there for freedom . An odd team is assembled: Miller the leader, a paranoid hunter who kills buffalo for the sheer pleasure of it, and not merely out of greed; Schneider, a pragmatic and cynical man, tasked with skinning the beasts with Andrewsʼs help; and with them an old alcoholic madman, Charley Hoge. With this group, Andrews ventures into the Wild West—at once an adventure and a physical and spiritual transformation. They represent another vastness and another horizon, yet the young manʼs mind remains “full of the wonders he had known as a child.” Francine, a prostitute, tells him affectionately, smiling gently: > you will come back; but you wonʼt be the same. You wonʼt be so young; you will become like the others. Andrews looked at her, confused, and in his confusion cried out: I will only become myself . The stages of his transformation, from youth to adulthood, are marked by the different phases of the journey. First, they travel for many days across the Great Plains, and Andrews must accustom himself to the long hours on horseback in a flat and monotonous landscape: > he felt like the earth, identityless and formless (...), he sensed his body slowly becoming lean and strong: he thought at times that he was entering into a new body, or a real body, previously concealed by an unnatural softness, whiteness, and delicacy . The second phase consists of the buffalo hunt: the merciless slaughter, the beast skinned and butchered. > To Andrews, the entire business seemed like a dance, a dark minuet ; the endless slaughter like > a mechanism, an automation, (...) like a cold, senseless response to life. (...) He realized he was turning away not out of some womanish nausea at the blood, (...) but from the shock of seeing the buffalo, moments before proud and noble and full of dignity, now stripped and helpless, an inert piece of flesh. (...) Its being had been killed, and in that killing he felt the destruction of something within himself, and he was unable to face it . And finally, there is the long winter: the group finds itself trapped by snow until spring, freezing and completely isolated. > He came to accept the silence in which he lived, and no longer sought any meaning in it. (...) He vaguely recalled the comforts of his home in Boston; but that seemed unreal and distant, and of those thoughts there remained only faint ghosts of remembrance : a sort of alienation, a loss of consciousness and identity. The wilderness, inscrutable and indifferent, gets the better of the young manʼs dreams: it creates a hard man, incapable of affection, solitary and individualistic. And when the party finally returns to Butcherʼs Crossing, having lost their entire cargo of hides while crossing a swollen river, and when Miller and his men discover that the price of hides has collapsed, that their toil was for nothing, Andrews wonders what the meaning of it all was. Where had he been, and why? Nothing remains but to leave, to take to the road again, alone. > Even now, in the light of dawn, the town was like a small ruin; the light struck the edges of the buildings and made all the more evident a emptiness that was already there. (...) He did not know where he was going; but he knew that (the direction) would come to him later in the day. He rode on unhurriedly, and felt behind him the sun rising slowly and warming the air . One must not be deceived by the story, by the meticulous descriptions of the landscapes and the buffalo hunt: the subject of the narrative is not the Wild West. Nor are we dealing with a *Bildungsroman*, because Andrews has not truly become an adult—borne out by the fact that he abandons the woman, Francine, who welcomed him with love upon his return from the long journey. The subject of the novel is estrangement from the world: the sense of not belonging to anything, a solitary man in an incomprehensible world, devoid of friendships and values. If the great conquest of the West, the American myth, had been this, what would become of the values of community and freedom that nevertheless underpin American society? The novel does not speak of this, though it might seem to; the narrative unfolds within the authorʼs own consciousness, addressing the failed search for a balance between individuality and sociality. The story is very well written. The style is elegant, the sentences flow smoothly and pleasantly, and the documentary element is well integrated with the plot and characters. One senses, however, a pronounced intellectualized quality, something contrived—the product of research rather than a lived world, at least in its ideals. It speaks of wilderness, of men struggling against a hostile environment, but if one compares the novel to the works of Jack London, and in particular to that masterpiece *White Fang*, it becomes quite clear how John Williams is merely yet another intellectual, writing about himself and—why not?—about men and environments he knows only from books, because he has studied them. Why read it? Fine prose, superb descriptions of setting, admirably etched characters.