L'Uomo Verticale - Davide Longo

 

What a great dystopian novel. I'm increasingly persuaded that Davide Longo is one of the very few Italian writers able to both write well and actually interest me. L'Uomo Verticale shows us a country literally going to the dogs (unlike many other similar novels that seem to start in a setting already looking post-apocalyptic) and the quest for survival of a father and his improbable extended family. 

Or, if you are familiar with McCarthy and The Road: been there, done that. Half of the ideas of this book are more ore less openly borrowed (and/or they are a tribute from Longo to one of his favourite authors), including the relationship between a father and his child and the desperate attempts to get to the sea at all costs. 

A really good read though. Just not an original one after all.

Così Giocano le Bestie Giovani - Davide Longo

A book that I read while on holiday in Italy, and something that I used to break up the never-ending task of reading Paul Auster's "4321" - something that hopefully will end at some point this weekend.

As I said in my last post, Longo's prose remains unparalleled in contemporary Italian literature, and this dark detective story is extremely captivating. There are a couple of characters I could have lived without (the counsellor/psychiatrist/psychologist, and, erm, the dog), but other than that it remained a very enjoyable read.

Enjoyable because it's again about Turin, because it's about Italy's dark recent past, and because it made me love the character of Corso Bramard, something that his previous book hadn't managed to do.

Il Caso Bramard – Davide Longo

I hadn’t read anything by Davide Longo – one of the most celebrated writers from my region – since my teenage years, and actually didn’t even know he was translated into English until I found this book of his at an Amnesty International book sale. Needless to say I made it mine.

Longo writes extremely well (too well, according to my mom, in order to be appreciated by the general public) and in this case the translator does quite a good job of preserving his beautiful prose. The book itself is a very dark crime story set between Turin and the Piedmontese Alps (it reminded me of Furttero&Lucentini’s La Donna della Domenica, but considerably gorier). I’ve read some reviews that criticized the author’s bleakness, but this worked just fine with me.

However, after saying that “the translator does quite a good job of preserving his beautiful prose”, I must also point out that in one case he took a sentence absolutely out of context and made me wanted to cry a bit: Bramard’s dad belonged to the Decima Mas, probably the most bloodthirsty faction of the Fascist military corps, but the translator calls them partisans (auch!) and translated the name using the roman numeral “X” – making it the X Mas, which is accurate in Italian, but sounds just way too festive in English.

Ah, and one of the Fascist thugs has got my surname, which stings a bit…