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Chp. 11: Alberto Ratto isn’t exactly a doppelgänger, but he and Tony are exiles together. When “Tonio” asks “Albè” to reveal the show’s magic trick, my skin begins to crawl. Magicians never reveal the trick to The Audience. Does that mean the favela was a performance (307)?

Chp. 11: in Brazil, TP gives a long meditation on cockroaches (“scarafaggi” 262-6) and meets Alberto Ratto (267) and his wife Bella Coimbra dos Santos (283).

Chp. 11: Tony lets the band go and never sings or phones Italy again. Is this like Jep turning 65 and deciding not to do anything he doesn’t want to again?

Chp. 10: Tony leaves Maria. Is the decision sufficiently motivated? What was the Rita Formisano interlude about? I get that the baroness turns him on to cocaine, but other than that, they are no reason to sing. They aren’t Beatrice.

I have to say Hand of God revises Chp. 9 admirably where Tony’s beloved is concerned. It’s good to see a writer working through his or her obsessions (225).

Chp. 9 begins with a lot of philosophical musings. Do I take them as Sorrentino’s through the prism of Tony’s unreliable persona? Baroness Eleonora Fonseca “was lazy as a band of Mexicans” appears as its own paragraph. I’m searching for clues in nearby paragraphs to let me say the racism is limited to the character and not his author. No luck.

Chp. 8 follows Tony’s sermon on education with a scene of reconciliation in Rituccia’s kitchen where she feeds him zucchine alla scapece and arouses him with a confession of infidelity with two traveling salesmen. When she ruins his fantasy by approaching him, he ruins hers by saying she reminds him of his mother and by holding her to become a “truly good man” (189).

Chp. 8 begins with Tony at his most philosophical: “ what is fabulous about adulthood, is precisely the scholar, the humiliation, the heart, Scrabble, and the grimness…. We wanted poetry, what we got was a bag, full of aches and pains…. A university professor is always a coward” (163-6)

Chp. 7: Disappointed at the soccer game, Tony visits Rita Fomisano, who disappoints him again, so he throws her around, flees to his lawyer cousin’s office, en route tells story about his brother in law shooting the cousin in the leg for shitting in his hallway. At the law office Mr. Heavy shoots an employee for calling Tony a “minstrel” (161).