This book is crazy good. By Niccolo Ammaniti, it won the Strega Prize in 2007.
It's been described as a gritty crime novel — and grit and crime certainly abound — but there's so much more: tender, refined character studies, brilliant plotting, beautiful language, sharp satire and superb moments of comedy (imagine two Italian kids trying to decipher the meaning of Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." What does "nokkin" mean? one asks. Hmmm. Hard to say).
The book centers on 13-year-old Cristiano, who lives with his alcoholic father, Rino, in a dilapidated industrial town in Italy. The father has two close friends: a fellow Grappa-swilling alcoholic named Danilo and a mentally challenged boy-man named Quattro Formagggi (after his favorite pizza).
These people make up Cristiano's family and, really, his whole world, aside from an ineffective and self-involved, but ultimately sympathetic, social worker.[Alcohol note: Grappa, which I've heard of but never tasted, is an Italian brandy distilled from the pressed grapes left over from wine-making. Cynar, which I've never heard of and which intoxicates a desperate Danilo in the book — when he runs out of Grappa! — is an Italian liqueur made mostly from artichokes. Yes, artichokes. Wikipedia says the Swiss especially like to mix it with orange juice. (Uh, really? Can that be good?)]
Ammaniti's characters are pathetic, hard-bitten, poorly educated, macho, racist. They think immigrants are stealing all the jobs and all the Italian women. They effusively praise Cristiano's school essay that calls for a "new Hitler" to drive all the foreigners out of Italy. They admire the sleazy Silvio Berlusconi, that self-made industrialist from the North who became the richest man in Italy and prime minister (despite the "commie" judges working incessantly against him).
The crime they concoct to get rich is staggeringly idiotic. At some level they seem to realize this, but their lives are so empty and formless that the direction provided by even a terrible idea is something to cling to, something to fill the days.
And yet, for all their dreadfulness, you feel for them, you want to know what happens, you even root for them a little, maybe because their rage feels so impotent and isolated and pathetic — and even false. It's not so much a belief system to act upon as, again, something to cling to, something to fill the days. And something to keep painful self-awareness at bay. It certainly bears little resemblance to the organized, well-oiled brutality of the Mussolini era seen in "The Conformist" or in my most recent read, Giorgio Bassani's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis."
"As God Commands" has also been made into a film. Two other novels of Ammaniti have been translated into English: "I'm Not Scared" and "Steal You Away." I hope to read them both, though not, for diversity's sake, as part of this project.
This is a beautiful review. You really make me want to read the book!
ReplyDeleteI think you'd like it a lot, Erin! It's suspenseful and intriguing and so well-written. (I may pick one of his other novels for the book club sometime.)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback on this. I'm mainly trying to briefly document each book without giving too much away — and trying to extract a few culture crumbs with the literary.