![]() We know from the beginning of the novel that although Ettore is a loving father and adored husband, he is deeply mentally disturbed and has probably committed the unspeakable crimes that are then described. His wife is sweet and self-deluding, his son distraught. ![]() Ettore loses his job at the cotton factory: “the fall of the mill was the beginning of the end.” Already erratic and prone to disappearing, he becomes a paranoid mess with revenge plans and a stinking van. A boy has been murdered, a girl has disappeared, and all is not right with Elia’s father, Ettore. Nature meets eyesore: “our eyes on the rapids, on the livid water, on the branches pressing against the concrete pylons.”Įlia is at home one hot summer in the late 1970s. ![]() Here, Varvello’s spare poetry reveals itself in masterly atmosphere and sense of place. This is Ponte, a community in Piedmont where “the road died into a path”, and gorge and woods exist alongside an old pyrite mine, a furniture factory and a dearth of opportunity. ![]() Elia lives with his parents in an Italy of small towns and abandoned industry that no Tuscan holidaymaker ever glimpses. This play with perspective can be both effective and confusing. The novel presents two stories simultaneously: a coming-of-age tale of love and sweaty lust narrated by 16-year-old Elia Furenti that contains standard rites-of-passage detail, merged with a gratuitously horrible account of a crime, its every detail imagined by the narrator, who attempts to guess the victim’s thoughts. ![]()
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