A family saga that boasts ambitious, sophisticated, and controlled storytelling.
The lives of an Italian Piedmontese family are traced across generations in this novel.
In the opening to this intricate family history, the first-person narrator, Antigone, confides that “cameras have always played an important role in the lives of the Ducati family.” The book centers on a family archive, with the narrator describing various photographs and documents, then “filling in the narrative spaces with action and dialogue.” The first photo to be examined is a group portrait taken in 1908 outside the family seat, the castle of Cortalba in Piedmont. The picture depicts the narrator’s great-grandparents Pietro and Olga Ducati along with their daughter Ada, the narrator’s grandmother, and Giulia and Luca, two of their other children. The narrative springs from these characters. It is revealed how Pietro and his brother Leo traveled south to Rome for work and established a biscotti business, after which Pietro married Olga, the daughter of a Genoese ship owner, and bought the castle at auction. The work recounts the stories of numerous other family members, such as Andre, Leo’s son, who moves to Hollywood and establishes himself as a movie director, and Alma, daughter of Ada, who marries Dardo, an actor and direct relative of the pirate Sir Edward Walton. Luca, meanwhile, frequents a brothel and becomes infatuated with a savvy prostitute named Catarì. Divided into three parts spanning the late 19th and 20th centuries, the novel charts how the family copes with rapid change across Europe, such as the rise of Fascism. Featuring a cast of 15 principal characters and over 80 others, including a domesticated leopard, this tale has considerable scope that could easily have proved sprawling. Some concentration is required, particularly since a number of the players have similar names; Alma is also known as Mina, for example, and her daughter is called Nina. Yet the way in which the author refers to photos is a clever way of isolating particular stories and characters to limit potential confusion: “In all the photographs Luca is wearing the same stunned expression in his cerulean, lifeless eyes, and a faint smile seeking his audience’s approval: ‘I’m handsome, aren’t I?’ ” These passages, which exemplify Lawton’s (Amy’s Story, 2017, etc.) keen and elegant descriptive skills, also tantalizingly hint at aspects of each character’s personality, which becomes more evident as the story unfolds. The result is a patchwork of lives that have been painstakingly sewn together. There is also a deep sense of Italian regionality to the tale. The players sip Moscato di Canelli and eat Biscotti Torinesi, both Piedmontese products. Translated from the Italian by Shugaar (The Athenian Woman, 2018, etc.), the narrative occasionally sounds unnatural or ungrammatical to the native English ear. This awkward passage is an example: “It’s not as if there weren’t fraternization among them. There was.” Similarly, candies are described as being “all wrapped individually, with legends written in different colors according to the flavor.” The use of legends is not incorrect, but labels would prove a more natural word choice. Still, this marginally off-key translation detracts little from an elaborate and far-reaching tale that makes for compelling reading.
A family saga that boasts ambitious, sophisticated, and controlled storytelling.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73304-082-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: New Academia Publishing/ The Spring
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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