bookshelf

DON’T MOVE

Name: DON’T MOVE
Author: Margaret Mazzantini
ISBN: 0-385-51074-8

by Margaret Mazzantini & translated by John Cullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2004

The pull of the darkly irrational: it’s a fascinating theme, but Mazzantini doesn’t do it justice.

bookshelf

Can you imagine a love affair beginning with a rape? That’s the challenge an Italian actress/second-novelist sets herself in her American debut.

Timoteo is the top surgeon at his hospital in an unidentified Italian city. His teenaged daughter Angela is brought in after a traffic accident. Her desperate condition frames his confession of an affair he had 16 years earlier. It begins as the 40-year-old surgeon is traveling to join his beautiful, elegant wife Elsa at their beach house. His car breaks down in a squalid working-class neighborhood. A woman lets him phone for help from her house. She’s the wrong side of 30, somewhere between trashy and ugly, yet Timoteo, suddenly inflamed, moves into her “like a raptor in a captured nest.” When he returns later to apologize, she doesn’t seem angry, and he takes her again. Italia, a hotel chambermaid, has no surviving family. Her father abused her sexually when she was 11. She is filled with self-loathing: “Weeds are hard to kill,” she says of herself. Italia becomes an unlikely love object for Timoteo, whose father has recently died, leaving him an “orphan.” He never liked his father, who was also attracted to solitary, unattractive women. Is Timoteo simply repeating the pattern? Or is it slumming that’s the thrill? Mazzantini leaves us guessing. Italia becomes pregnant and goes to the gypsies for an abortion. Then Elsa becomes pregnant with Angela. Split down the middle, Timoteo joyously attends the birth of his daughter but then returns to Italia, who’s hemorrhaging from the botched abortion. After her drawn-out death and funeral, Timoteo goes back to Elsa, although his feelings for her have always blown hot and cold. She doesn’t remark on his absence, which is strange, but after the rape nothing in this novel has seemed altogether believable.

The pull of the darkly irrational: it’s a fascinating theme, but Mazzantini doesn’t do it justice.

Pub Date: May 25, 2004

ISBN: 0-385-51074-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MORNING SEA
by Margaret Mazzantini

- BOOK REVIEW
TWICE BORN
by Margaret Mazzantini

bookshelf

CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

bookshelf

Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
PRECIPICE
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
ACT OF OBLIVION
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
V2
by Robert Harris

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.