Required reading for Ferrante fans and scholars of Neapolitan literature.
Stories and essays from post–WWII Naples describe the poor and the wealthy alike.
In 1953, Ortese, an Italian writer, published a book that so infuriated her hometown of Naples that she left and only returned once over the next five decades. She was apparently a great influence on Elena Ferrante, and in this capable new translation into English, it’s not hard to see why. In stories and essays, Ortese describes both the Neapolitan poor and the bourgeois in granular detail. In “A Pair of Eyeglasses,” she writes of Eugenia, a young girl whose family has scraped together the cost of a pair of eyeglasses, which Eugenia desperately needs. While Eugenia waits, ecstatic, for the glasses to arrive, the narrator describes the unappealing sights she will soon be able to see: “Her mother slept with her mouth open, her broken yellow teeth visible; her brother and sister…were always dirty and snot-nosed and covered with boils.” Ortese can be sentimental at times, even heavy-handed with her topics. Both those habits are in display in “Eyeglasses.” But in “Family Interior,” she is more restrained. In that story, Anastasia Finizio, the nearly-40-year-old “daughter of Angelina Finizio and the late Ernesto,” supports her entire family, including a mother, aunt, sister, two brothers, as well as her soon-to-be sister-in-law. Meanwhile, a man from Anastasia’s past turns up, and she begins to doubt her choices. Ortese’s restraint gives way in the two essays that end the book. In “The Silence of Reason,” she provides a vivid portrait of a group of young Neapolitan writers despite some rather bloated pontificating (“The miserable conditions of this land are due to the incompatibility of two equally great forces—nature and reason—which are irreconcilable, no matter what the optimists say”). But the true pleasure of this book is Ortese’s penchant for strange, extended, entirely counterintuitive similes, as in this one, which appears in the essay mentioned above: “He felt the same terror as one who has flung himself at a puppet swinging from a tree and suddenly discovers that it is not a puppet but the corpse of a hanged man, and he feels something around his own neck and realizes that he himself is hanging from the branch of a tree.”
Required reading for Ferrante fans and scholars of Neapolitan literature.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-939931-5-11
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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