It feels like this book was written for the author and not for the reader. A huge cast of family and friends are introduced without any context or continuity. I found it nearly impossible to keep track of them all and the author does nothing to aid the reader. I suppose the intended effect is one of familiarity and intimacy but my overwhelming feeling was one of confusion.
The prose is good, straightforward and uncomplicated. Occasionally it captures the feeling of family life so perfectly it’s impossible to say the author isn’t an extremely gifted writer. However, there is absolutely no structure to speak of. There are no chapters and the double spaced line breaks that provide the only pauses may as well have been placed at random. The narrative, if there is one, is jerky and staccato. Characters and themes are introduced and then dropped again after a few sentences without rhyme or reason. A typical section might run something like, “My father had a lab assistant who liked fish on a Friday. My father called it nitwittery. Mario was never a nitwit. He once moved to Pisa to sleep with his friend’s ex. Mother never liked communism but used to have a dress maker on so-and-so street.” It’s more or less a stream of consciousness. The text does have a feeling of intimacy and authenticity, as well it should given the author says she is writing from memory, but ultimately I found it sloppy and self-indulgent. I wanted someone to think about the characters and present them to me in an intelligible way, not just dump out the waste paper basket of their memory onto a page.
The family seems to have lived an interesting life, collectively, in Italy during the run up to WW2 and its aftermath. Nonetheless, I would struggle to tell you even how many brothers or sisters the author has after nearly 300 pages (4?). It’s a chaos of loosely connected associations and is barely comprehensible as a novel, which is how the author claims they want the book to be read.
The book also had the annoying habit of repeating family jokes, catch phrases and poems ad nauseam. I felt like I would have preferred it if the author could have reminded the reader who’s who a bit more often and left the hackneyed jokes unrepeated. There was also a huge amount of name dropping, presumably to show how important and wonderful they all are.
Another aspect of the book that really pissed me off was the disrespect the author has for the privacy of her family. She writes uncomplimentary things about all of her family and never writes anything about herself. Given she was already a successful author by the time she wrote it, I felt like she is using the lives of people she allegedly loves to draw attention to herself, further her career or earn money - which is pretty shitty in my view. If one of my siblings had written a book like this about my family, I’d give them a good slap! Why not change the names and say it’s a novel? This seems to me to be what many other authors do, with good reason!
A final gripe is why Daunt books chose an American translator, with all the consequences this entails for vocabulary and syntax, when it’s a British shop and Ginzberg’s father is stated to be an Anglophile. I felt it would have been much more appropriate to the book’s nature to have a British translator. What kind of Anglophile would ever use a word like ‘jackass’ for heaven’s sake?!
I didn’t get much out this book at all and didn’t enjoy reading it. I suppose I could have gone through the book and constructed a family tree or list of characters but I felt, ‘why should I bother if the author can’t even be fucked to organise their own thoughts?’ It was more or less a waste of time. I think it would take someone with a colossal ego and extremely high opinion of themselves to write a book like this, which made me like it even less!
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