
It starts off as a sort of teen movie: a group of friends, children, in Tuscany playing together during the summer when a dare, a race, produces an unexpected surprise for one of the friends. The child characters can be said to be somewhat stock characters, a bully, a loser, an everyman (the boy from whose viewpoint we see everything), a fat girl, a clever kid. A house encountered by the group reveals the secret which the main boy keeps to himself and nurtures throughout the rest of the book.
The extraordinary world, if you want to use that concept, is the new imaginative world created by the discovery. They don’t move to a different town, country, whatever, but the world in the boy’s head is changed utterly.
Also, where a lot of novels start with a sort of stasis and return to it changed at the end, this novel never resolves in that way, ending on an intensely dramatic point. We can imagine what the world after this will be like but the author doesn’t conduct us back to that world.
The lay out of the paragraphs on the page reminded me of James Ellroy or David Peace as it has very short paragraphs sometimes only a sentence long. However, it does not use their rhetorical repetitiveness to have an effect and gets enough of the internal world of the boy into this style. Not that Ellroy and Peace don’t achieve this, they do, but like them a lot is conveyed by a little, the style is pared down, simple but still full of colour and visual power. It also reminded me a bit of Paul Auster because it is so plot driven and compelling. I imagine the author created his premise, his situation, and then pushed to see where it would go. Auster’s books seem like this, not always concerned with thematic material but with plot and the pleasures of it.
I haven’t analysed the stages of the plot but may do in time.
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