QUIET CHAOS

Name: QUIET CHAOS
Author: Sandro Veronesi
ISBN: 978-0-06-157294-4

by Sandro Veronesi & translated by Michael F. Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2011

Veronesi’s point, that Pietro is no crazier than anybody else in a world that has lost its bearings, is made sympathetically...

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Your wife dies suddenly. You’re left with your little girl. Now what? The Italian Veronesi (The Force of the Past, 2003, etc.) explores a widower’s eccentric behavior in his prize-winning eighth novel, later an art-house movie.

It was a roller-coaster day for Pietro Paladini, surfing off the Italian coast with his brother Carlo. Everything was cool until they saw two women drowning. They rescued them, heroically. But when Pietro returned to his beach house he found Lara, his common-law wife, dead from an aneurysm witnessed by their 10-year-old, Claudia. Pietro is a middle-aged, affluent executive with a cable-TV channel in Milan. He feels numb rather than overwhelmed by grief; Claudia mimics his reaction. On her first day of school, he promises to wait in his car until the end of her day, and this day-long wait becomes a months-long vigil as Pietro tamps down the “quiet chaos” of his emotions. He has no incentive to return to work. Facing their company’s merger, his co-workers and bosses are fearful in this new dog-eat-dog world. One by one, they visit Pietro, an attentive, calming presence. They range from the distraught head of HR, leaving for Africa, to the megalomaniac architects of the merger, locked in their own death-struggle. Even his kooky sister-in-law Marta gets into the act. These visits, or vignettes, form the bulk of the novel. They’re lively, but it’s frustrating that Pietro’s character is not developed, and his long relationship with Lara remains a blank. The only scene showing Pietro in action happens back at the beach house, where he has rough, risk-taking sex in the yard with the woman he saved from drowning, while Claudia sleeps inside. It’s a brave attempt to shake up the routine, but it doesn’t quite work; it’s the small, everyday occurrences that are the most telling.

Veronesi’s point, that Pietro is no crazier than anybody else in a world that has lost its bearings, is made sympathetically but at too great length.

Pub Date: April 12, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-06-157294-4

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HUMMINGBIRD
by Sandro Veronesi ; translated by Elena Pala

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FORCE OF THE PAST
by Sandro Veronesi & translated by Alastair McEwen

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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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.