Il Custode - Niccolò Ammaniti

 

Ammaniti is one of the most succesful contemporary Italian authors. Perhaps that doesn't mean much though, considering the state of contemporary Italian literature. 

With Il Custode he goes back to what he does best (talking about children and their world clashing with the adult one) and what he used to do with his first books (writing pulp/gorey stories). In here he also throws in a contemporary rendition of a well-known mythological story (in this case, that of Medusa). 

The result unfortunately is a rather unhappy mixture, essentially saved by the fact that the book is rather short and the reader doesn't really have the time to get bored of this. Had he added a further hundred pages, I would have honestly struggled quite a bit to find the motivation to finish it. 

Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad

 

One of the side-effects of relying so much on random collections of second-hand books is that I often find myself reading 19th century/early 20th century classics, and this book is obviously one of those. 

Classic, yes. But also, what an absolute struggle to get to the end of the book...

I did enjoy the opening sections, with the sinking ship that doesn't sink and the ethical/moral discussions that follow. But after that reading about Jim's colonial adventures was an obviously uncomfortable read, in part because of the implications of this fairly unlikeable and relatively unskilled white man teaching people how to leave, in part because it was just quite boring and at times hard to follow (or hard to follow with interest, at the very least). 

American Tabloid - James Ellroy

 

It had been more than ten years since I last read anything by Ellroy. It was probably a good move, as after three of his books in relatively quick succession I had reached a point of saturation. Last week though I was very much ready to get on with another one of his books and I'm glad I did. 

According to Wikipedia, for conspiracy theorists looking at the assassination of JFK "Common culprits include the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. military, the Mafia, the military-industrial complex, Vice President Johnson, Castro, the KGB, or some combination thereof". Predictably, Ellroy opts for blaming all of them. 

What comes out of this is a pretty gripping novel that just about anyone would be able to identify as an Ellroy one even without looking at the book's cover. The dialogue is (too?) sharp and (too?) irreverent, the plot intricate but somehow intelligible, and the real-life characters add enough verosimilitude that one is left wondering about the plausibility of some of these potential conspiracies. 

And the fact that, as often happens, there's enough Hollywood Golden Era glam in these pages is a marvellous thing for me and Rock Hudson's fake hookup with a female dancer to cover his homosexuality is an excellent plot device!