Books & Reviews Archive

> All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. It took a long time and great, painful disappointments of my expectations to realize... that I am nobody but myself! But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man! . The protagonist is a young Black man from the American South. Intelligent and brilliant, he wins a scholarship to a college funded by philanthropists of the respectable white bourgeoisie, where the future leaders of the Black class are educated. The points of reference are, therefore, white values and a social hierarchy that consistently relegates Black people to a subordinate position. The protagonist yearns to integrate, even as he carries within him the last words—still incomprehensible to him, yet prophetic—spoken by his grandfather on his deathbed: "live with your head in the lion's mouth." One day, while chauffeuring a wealthy donor of the college, the protagonist gets lost in the town's outskirts and inadvertently embroils his powerful guest in a sequence of encounters that lay bare the hypocrisy of a social peace between whites and Blacks that cannot exist so long as squalor and segregation prevail. In the novel's finest pages, both in rhythm and irony, the wealthy white benefactor finds himself face-to-face first with a Black man who has raped his own daughter, and then with a cast of bizarre characters in a brothel. And then comes another prophecy, one that ought to shake the young protagonist: an old Black man, speaking to the rich white man, reveals to the youth that he is precisely what whites desire: > you see he has eyes, ears, and a broad African nose, but he doesn't understand the simple facts of life. Already he has learned to repress not only his emotions, but his humanity as well. He is invisible, the living personification of the Negative, the most perfect realization of your dreams, sir. The mechanical man! . The incident leads to the young man's expulsion from college, prompting him to move North, to Harlem. There he finds employment at a paint factory and is forced to witness firsthand the deep fractures within Black society, between petty departmental foremen who wield their authority with spite and a labor union that views the young Southerner as a scab driving down wages for the Northern working class. Following an industrial accident, the young man is dismissed and taken in by a Black woman. The account of the factory episodes and the discovery of Harlem are likewise magnificent pages, strikingly powerful. The protagonist is a gifted orator, and as he wanders through Harlem, he draws the attention of a political group, the Brotherhood, which recruits him into its ranks to harness his talents. It would seem the young man has finally found a compass. Yet he remains merely what others—in this case, the party—want him to be. The initial signs of conflict between his individuality and the organization's discipline emerge in the reprimands he receives from the Brotherhood's steering committee regarding his speeches, which are nonetheless wildly successful: they are deemed insufficiently scientific, overly impassioned and stirring, unaligned with party prescriptions, and liable to inflame the masses. The friction culminates when the killing of a former Brotherhood militant by a policeman ignites an uprising among Harlem's Black populace. Indeed, at the victim's funeral, the protagonist delivers a brilliant speech that is severely condemned by the steering committee. The riot degenerates into violence, looting, and clashes; the young man takes refuge in a subterranean recess of the city, where he realizes that the Brotherhood deliberately orchestrated the revolt to prove that only a "scientific"—and de facto accommodationist—approach with whites is viable. The protagonist understands that he has been exploited by the party and that, once again, "I had simply been a material, a natural resource to be used." With one departure from the past: > I now recognized my invisibility. I believed in hard work, progress, and action, but now, after having been for society and then against it, I no longer assign myself a role or a limit, and such an attitude is strongly against the trend of the times. Yet my world has become one of infinite possibilities. Do I speak for you? . The book is one of the classics of American literature. It is anchored in its historical context—the emancipation of Black people—with references drawn unambiguously from African American culture: the novel can be read as a literary extension of the blues, marked as it is by numerous poetic passages of unmistakable musicality. The theme of invisibility, however, remains universal: which of us is truly visible to those who look upon us? The book is magnificent and enthralling in its first part, up to the events involving the Brotherhood: the writer's mastery in depicting the diverse episodes and figures, shifting from a "learned" style to vernacular African American speech, yields miniature masterpieces that foreshadow subsequent authors such as Fante and Morrison. The second part is prolix, overly encumbered by political concerns (the critique of the party), and consequently slow, repetitive, and given to philosophizing. Why read it? For two reasons: the theme of invisibility as an existential condition of modern man, and its literary style—a classical English that is simultaneously rooted in its specific context, that of African American society.

> She sees herself sitting in her lovely living room, in the lovely villa Olof inherited, with the lovely furniture she bought because he earns well. (...) The plaid skirt turns into a striped prisoner's dress, the stockings vanish and her shoes slide into nothingness, the parquet floor beneath her feet suddenly becomes raw concrete, (...) and Miriam screams, screams and hears herself screaming, clapping her hands over her mouth to force herself silent. It is not merely that memories of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz continually resurface; Miriam carries the weight of a lie, and of betrayal. To everyone, even her son and granddaughter, Miriam is a Jewish woman who found refuge within hospitable, orderly Swedish society; in reality, she assumed the identity of a dead girl who bore a brand similar to that of Malika, her young Romani self; no one would have welcomed the deportee Malika, belonging as she did to a people considered the lowest among all the world's pariahs (thieves, perjurers, child-abductors, violent, and so forth). She is eighty-five years old when she is gifted a bracelet—a piece of Gypsy craftsmanship. > Tears well up in her eyes, forcing her to blink them away, and words flash through her mind, (...) then she lets those words rise to her lips. The truth, instantly retracted, sets in motion a narrative that unfolds along two parallel strands: the long walk with her granddaughter, who seeks to probe what lies behind her grandmother’s cryptic declaration, and the inhumanity of the concentration camps, which must be banished from the soul if one is not to be overwhelmed. > You cannot talk about everything! (Miriam cries) You have to understand that. Not if you are eighty-five years old and belong to the wrong race, (...) Do you understand or not? It really happened. It was all real. It was another world, and I do not want to go back there. And so Auschwitz bursts into her mind—where her cousin was murdered immediately, where her little brother was used as a human guinea pig, and where the Romani people revolted, only to be exterminated en masse in the gas chambers; then the Ravensbrück labor camp, where, alongside the ruthlessness of the female guards, she—so mistrustful—encountered friendship and solidarity. Yet the dead always return; they stand behind doors easily pushed open. > All right, then. Let them come. She may be old, but she is still capable of slaying a few ghosts of the past. (...) Yes, it is her, it really is Anuscha (the murdered cousin). She is ten years old and nothing bad has happened yet. (...) When she reaches for the handle her hand moves clumsily and tears lurk in her throat, but then the door opens, swings wide, and Else appears (her friend from the concentration camp). She is still tall and thin as a rake, but she looks healthy and full, wearing clothes that are intact. (...) We are destined to lose everything, even the people who matter most to us. And so she no longer tries to hold back her weeping; reaching toward the fifth door, she lets the tears flow. Inside, Didi awaits her (the little brother reduced to a guinea pig). (...) She is a traitor. (...). Hence her shame. She betrayed the dead. She betrayed her people and her language. (...) On one side are them. Yet on the other remain those she never betrayed. Anuscha. And Didi. (...) I still miss you, every single day. As Elsa Morante writes in *Menzogna e sortilegio* (see the review on this site), > the past and the future are two realms of mist and vertigo, which the living can explore only through imagination and memory. What purpose is served by plumbing this palace of death? > No, said her father in a voice that came from a distant place. No, do not remember. Forget and look forward. To do this, one must deceive and betray. And Morante once more: > a lucid insomnia takes hold of me, and in this hushed, depopulated room, from now on I shall interrogate nothing but my true memory. Keeping her secret her entire life, shrinking from the temptation to reveal the truth, is the only way to safeguard her grief: the immense suffering born of the loss of her loved ones, and, bound up with them, her belonging to a people—the Romani—despised and trampled upon. The narrative structure follows a circular arc: the author returns repeatedly to the same themes, situations, and characters, pursuing a social and introspective investigation through successive approximations. The section dealing with life in the concentration camps relies on documentary sources and often takes on the qualities of a chronicle; perhaps it could not have been otherwise, given that the author is not recounting a true story, nor did she experience the camps firsthand. Interviews with survivors allow her to lend depth to the narrative, particularly when depicting the daily lives of the female inmates and the relationships woven among them. Elsewhere, as in the depiction of the Romani uprising, the prose falls flat and predictable. By contrast, the section concerning Miriam’s life in Sweden strikes a different chord: fiction grants the storytelling room to breathe, taking on color and substance because the author knows this social and cultural landscape intimately. A subtle irony emerges regarding Swedish customs, brought into relief by Miriam’s mimetic gifts: a young woman adept at reading body language, vocal inflections, and the behavior of a people—the Swedes—otherwise so utterly foreign to her. What causes disarray is the relentless shuttling between present and past, between reality and remembrance; perhaps a more linear narrative structure would have served the reader better. Why read it? An important, groundbreaking book that reaches far beyond the conventional history of the Holocaust.

> Wars end. Hate lasts forever. Hatred harbored for years had driven a man to litter a city with bombs. Hatred had driven another to detonate them . The consequences of that insane game that is war provide the ideal backdrop for a thriller. The novel’s premise is the return of a Vietnam veteran, surviving yet monstrously disfigured by napalm, the incendiary weapon widely used by the Americans during the war. As one would say today in polite terms, it was "friendly fire" that reduced the man to the horrific state in which he finds himself: taken prisoner by the Viet Cong and used as a human shield, he was struck by units of his own army, despite their having clearly recognized him. Hatred and vengeance are unleashed against his own fellow citizens, as he confides to his only friend: > I believe it would take the lives of many men to feel the pain I felt in those few months in the hospital . Many years must pass until a series of explosions strikes New York, claiming numerous victims. The investigation is assigned to a young detective, Vivien, who is partnered with Russell, a failed writer from a wealthy family who has come into possession of information crucial to identifying the culprit. As is typical in thrillers, the novel unfolds along two parallel narrative threads: the unraveling of the police investigation, full of plot twists and intricate developments, and the personal lives of the two protagonists, who ultimately fall in love. Among the story’s many offshoots, there is also a priest who reportedly took the killer's confession regarding the murders: the conditional mood is necessary here, as this very confession is the novel's pivotal juncture, one that might allow an attentive reader (certainly not the undersigned, who failed to grasp it) to deduce the killer's identity. The novel is undoubtedly the finest Faletti has written: the story is well-constructed, the plot rich with incidents and characters that nonetheless weave smoothly into the overarching narrative. The prose is even and composed, simple yet effective at the same time. If a criticism must be made, it concerns the novel’s finale, which, as is often the case with thrillers, is insufficiently developed and arrives devoid of tension and suspense. Perhaps the author should have devoted greater care to the conclusion, even at the expense of trimming some of the book’s redundant passages. Why read it? It reads exceedingly well, and the narrative commands the reader's attention.

The novel concerns a string of murders committed in Monte Carlo by a psychopath who slaughters a series of celebrities in the grip of a vengeful delirium, seeking to restore a face to his brother, born ill-fated and murdered by their father. An American agent finds himself heading the investigation amidst a tangle of subplots and plot twists. It is a quintessential genre novel, echoing the style and narrative pace of books by Ludlum, Le Carré, and the like: a detective story that relies neither on setting (here reduced to the bare essentials) nor on in-depth character development, nor, ultimately, on suspense. Instead, it relies on narrative velocity and, in this case, on pleasant, lucid prose. It is a good book, perhaps overly long (as novels of this genre tend to be), redundant (for instance, from the discovery of the killer’s identity up to his apprehension), hurried (in how the protagonist uncovers the killer’s identity), and ultimately rather implausible regarding the final confrontation between the protagonist and the “villainous” general. Other passages firmly capture the reader's interest and attention: the initial murder aboard the boat, the phone calls to the radio station, the French commissaire’s search in Aix-en-Provence, and, finally, the killer's capture. At last, Italian literature too has entered a literary genre that has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—immense success both abroad and in Italy.