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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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