Loved it! Dieci e lode
Il Vitali ci dà un romanzo ben intrigante con una giostra dei personaggi, ricca e colorita, che respira l'Italia di una volta.
La scrittura agile ed efficace lega il lettore alla storia dalla prima all'ultima pagina, al punto che risulta quasi impossibile riuscire a staccarsi dal libro.
(I read the original Italian edition, but will write my review mainly in English.)
From the very first page, I was hooked. There's something about Vitali's crisp, clean prose, richness of vocabulary (plenty of colorful expressions and regional terms), and coyly neutral, yet amusing, tone that really grabbed me. Then of course, there are the characters! One might think that with at least a dozen "main" characters, and maybe 30 or 40 characters overall, a reader might get lost. Absolutely not. I'm still not entirely sure how the author pulled it off, but it was almost always instantly clear who was who, even when characters appeared, stepped aside to make way for others, then reappeared later. As the pages and chapters (I've never read a book with 160 chapters before!) flew by, the colorful cast of characters grew increasingly real and three-dimensional as they went about their daily lives.
The "modista" (she has her own boutique where she sells fabric samples, hats, foulards, and also does seamstress work, designing dresses) is an intriguing, yet ultimately tragic, character, a woman who's facing middle age alone (her husband was apparently MIA in the war and hasn't been heard from in years) and serves as sort of a focal point around which most the other characters and much of the action revolves.
The "guardia" from the novel's subtitle is Firmato Bicicli, a private night watchman collectively hired by local merchants to keep an eye on Bellano's "downtown" overnight. A decent and honest man, poor Bicicli isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, however, and a drinking binge leads to him not noticing an unusual break-in one night (unusual in the sense that nothing was stolen).
The "ladri" of the subtitle (Fès, Ciliegia, and Picchio) are three ne'er-do-wells, not really hard-core thieves. Oddly, they're not really central characters of the novel, in my opinion, although they do play an important role in the plot.
The forces of law and order (such as they are) seem to me the main focus of the book. Corporal (appuntato) Marinara of the Carabinieri and his superior, Marshal (maresciallo) Accadi felt like the main characters to me, if I had to choose from among the dozens and dozens of individuals who take part in the plot. The two men are quite different, with the former being younger, hard-working and conscientious and native to the area. Accadi, on the other hand, is a recent transfer, an older Sicilian man, and seems more interested in looking good (his reputation) than in actual police work. In fact, he becomes sort of obsessed with the voluptuous modista and spends much of his time and energy fantasizing about and chasing after her, letting his actual police work fall to the wayside. I loved the unsaid thoughts of each man regarding the other, and how they were always professional and polite to each other even though they didn't necessarily like or respect each other.
Too many wonderful characters to cite here, but I found the journalist intriguing as well as the sister pharmacists. Tons of subtle and not-so-subtle humor runs through the story. I especially laughed at poor Marshal Accadi's plumbing problems which he never seemed to get anyone to take seriously, despite subjecting them to live demonstrations of the odor he had to tolerate.
I found the writing style entirely appealing, if somewhat atypical for Italian prose, with short sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters (160 chapters in about 380 pages, several chapters are less than a page, the longest was maybe 4 or 5 pages). Despite the brevity and straight-forward nature of the sentences, the prose was rich, elegant, dense. No wasted words. I particularly noted and appreciated the artful blend of direct and indirect quotations which helped the story flow faster while conveying a rich sense of the characters' personalities and idiosyncrasies.
As an American, I especially enjoyed the up-close look at Italian culture and mentality and the many interesting figures of speech and uncommon (regional) words. It's wonderful literature like this that makes me feel like I understand and appreciate Italy and Italians just a bit more.
After finishing the book (which I happened to find at a used book store), I read a bunch of reviews, and was surprised to see that the average reviewer liked the book less than I did. One common comment was that it wasn't the author's best work, that it isn't up to par with some of his other books. I'll definitely check out other of Vitali's novels, although I can't imagine how they could possibly be even better than this!