A book that I’ve read over the weekend as I found myself in the Italian
north-east (where the novel is set) for a wedding.
Maino’s first novel has been fairly widely acclaimed (I mean, as widely
acclaimed as an Italian novel can be…) and with this the author won the Italo
Calvino Award. To me, that’s definite proof of the desperate scarcity of young
Italian literary talent.
The novel is interesting for about 30 pages, then the stream of
consciousness grows predictably stagnant (seriously, isn’t it outdated as a
literary device/style at this point?!?) and the reader realizes that the book
doesn’t even have a hint of a storyline (and as a rant against the system it
gets to be fairly boring fairly quickly).
That said, I have to give credit where credit is due, and I have to
admit that I really enjoyed Maino’s cultural references (Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees,
Thelonious Monk, Giorgio Morandi – an artist who has to be “respected” if not
necessarily “loved” – and, most of all, Drazen Petrovic). Yet, this is not
enough to make me say that I liked the book.
Plenty of Italian readers will disagree and tell me that I don’t understand
the subtlety and the actuality of this novel. Maybe that’s true, but I also
think that most of them read about 3 books a year.
