What a great refreshing book after my recent gloomy Hornby experience! How different the world seems when you look at it through nine-year-old boy’s eyes. I would like to use the word “innocent” here but Ammaniti made sure his book couldn’t be described in any obvious way. Nine year old Michele lives his childhood life in a tiny village somewhere in Italy spending his time playing football with the other kids, riding a bike, sitting on a carob tree never rushing home for dinner – things each of us would do if we were nine years old again and lived in an Italian village. Until he makes a startling discovery in an abandoned house near the village...
Kidnapping kids for ransom has been a real plague in Italy during the 1970s which spread from Sardinia to the mainland. Typically kids from wealthy families from the north were kidnapped by poor desperados from the southern parts of the country. Many of them never returned alive. The Italian government tried to deal with the issue by blocking the bank accounts of the targeted families, which ended the epidemic at the time. In the recent years the crime has been on the rise again.
Important national issue as it is, seen through boy’s eyes, shows how surreal and cruel our world is and how adults can choose to be blind to obvious things like child’s right to live their childhood at home with their parents instead of a dark hole in the ground. How much better the world would be if ghosts really were around us and little wash-bears would tell us what would happen next.
I won’t tell you how the story develops as that would spoil the experience of reading this book. Suffice to say it keeps you glued to it until you finish. Beautiful. Moving. Unnerving in the subject but calming through the simplicity of Michele’s life. Made me want to be a child again growing up in the countryside.
A movie has been made based on this book and it had quite good reviews (IMDB) - has anyone seen it?
PS. There were no tractors in Michele’s village... ;)
My rating: YYYYY
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