Shepherd Avenue by Charlie Carillo

Shepherd Avenue is billed as a coming-of-age novel about a young boy who has to deal with a heck of a lot of loss of loved ones in a very short space of time. Coming-of-age novels tend to have an episodic structure, and this book is not different. Instead of having the support of his father during this time, he has been dumped at his grandparents' place, a place as foreign to him as another country.

The loss of his wayward father hits the child as hard as the losses due to death. Much of the story is about the boy's dealing with his feelings of abandonment. The rest of the story is about the boy dealing with his exuberant relations and their in-your-face neighbors. Young love gets in the mix too at a certain point. All the characters come alive with realistic dialog and actions, along with quick descriptions that paint clear pictures.

There is some foul language, racial slurs, deaths, children playing doctor, and animals being slaughtered. To be honest, I could have done without every scene that involved life of creatures other than human. If the story were true, I would have said “so be it”, but since the story is fiction, I wondered “why was that included?”. But the accounts of animals being slaughtered are accurate and true to life.

Set in 1961, there is a big helping of segregation, bigotry and sexism. The culture clash between the boy and his very Italian-American, Brooklyn-living family is strong, but just as strong is the clash between the family and the society at large. 1961 was a time of birth-control, women's liberation movements, black power movements, changing music and clothes and a whole universe of social norms. Rich details from that era set the reader front and center as a spectator to the clashes. I enjoyed the writing style, first-person with hindsight, and being transported to another place and time.

From the book's description:

An American Library Association Notable Book of the Year

From acclaimed author Charlie Carillo comes a poignant, darkly funny, coming-of-age story set in the heart of Italian-American Brooklyn, New York, and the heat of one eventful 1960s summer . . .

Ten-year-old Joey Ambrosio has barely begun to grieve his mother’s death when his father abruptly uproots him from his sedate suburban Long Island home, and deposits him at his estranged grandparents’ house in boisterous East New York. While his dad takes off on an indefinite road trip, Joey is left to navigate unfamiliar terrain. Besides his gruff Italian grandparents, there's his teenage Uncle Vic, a baseball star obsessed with the music of Frank Sinatra; a steady diet of soulful, hearty foods he’s never tasted, and a community teeming with life, from endless gossip and arguments to curse-laden stickball games under the elevated train. It’s a world where privacy doesn’t exist and there’s no time to feel sorry for yourself. Most of all, it’s where Joey learns not only how to fight, and how to heal, but how to love—and ultimately, how to forgive.

Here's a direct link to the book at Amazon.com:

Please visit the author's website. And The East New York Project has some images of Shepherd Avenue from around the time of the book.

Under the Lion Sun by Michael Caputo

An Italo-Canadian recalls his life in Calabria before his family emigrated to Canada.  His advanced education in Canada, along with several return visits to his family's home town of Capistrano, have given him a perspective that is rich with insights about Calabria of the past and present.

I believe that Indie publishing really comes into its own with these sorts of accounts, so I'm more than willing to overlook the handful of typos that come with them (hopefully they will be weeded out soon in this quality book).

The description of the book is overly negative, in my opinion.  Most of the author's recollections are positive.  Like every life, there are bad remembrances too, but not much that is out of character for a small agricultural community in the 50s and 60s, in an area with depleted soil and a baking sun.  They were not wealthy, but:

simple joys made life in Calabria worth living

The author covers the area's traditions and way of life in great detail, including the food, festivals and superstitions.  He also presents vignettes of local bigwigs, interesting people, and his family members. 

Like all emigrants to other lands, his remembrances of food and tastes are the strongest, and luckily they can be renewed in visits to Italy, and even in some delicatessens in Canada.

The overly negative description is deceptive.  Agricultural societies in the 50s and 60s in Calabria and Canada suffered from rural accidents, violent quarrels, preventable deaths, and untreated mental illness. 

The unique elements in Calabria were the criminal sociopaths who thrived in an area with weak governmental institutions compounded by a passive fate-believing populace, and the lack of jobs that encouraged friends to help friends to jobs while excluding talented people from the workforce, and the paternalism that excluded women from societal decision-making and jobs.  Those three elements continue to hamper economic development in Calabria, where the author admits:

the civil rules of life do not always apply

One custom in particular is described briefly in the book, and I know that it continues to this day in many towns in Southern Italy:  the public slaughter of the family pig and the festival that surrounds it.  The slaughter is gruesome and prolonged, causing suffering to the animal, and untold psychological suffering to those who witness it and participate in it.

Those kinds of rituals are not the norm in civilized societies because they make citizens too familiar with how to take life, and they destroy compassion for the suffering of other living beings.

In Northern Europe, they have never been the norm.  Families would signal the local butcher with a special flag flown outside their home when it was time to butcher an animal.  The butcher travelled the local roads regularly, and stopped where a slaughter was needed.  He did it quietly in the barn, minimizing the suffering of the animal as much as possible, and sparing the family from suffering seeing the killing of an animal that was often more of a pet by then.

The governments in Muslim countries are trying to stop people from the ritual slaughter of lambs for a religious festival because they recognize the psychological harm it does to people.  The arrogant superiority shown by those who find killing easy, is reason enough to ban those sorts of festivals, in my opinion.

The author succeeds in giving the reader a good idea of what life was like in the 50s and 60s in a small Calabrian town, and telling why a few hundred Capistranesi moved to Canada in those decades.  They were in search of greater prosperity and a better future for their children, like migrants today.

But the first-world's culture has moved forward since then, and the rural communities of many of today's migrants are very similar to what the author left behind in the 50s and 60s.  That growing cultural gap does not bode well for the integration of new poor rural immigrants into the societies of first-world nations.  The importance of understanding the life a newcomer left behind, in order to help them adapt to their new home, is made all the more clear by this book written by an earlier immigrant.

From the book's description:

Join the author on a journey back through time to his beloved town in Calabria, in Southern Italy.  Accompany him through a painful mental journey to the fifties and sixties, as he was growing up in a location which could be simultaneously a blissful heaven and a brutal hell.

In this book you will meet very loving people whose whole existence was self-sacrifice, and others who had no conscience and did the unthinkable, without a hint of guilt.  The author will also dissect and expose beliefs, customs and traits which both ennoble and limit the very energetic and intelligent people of Calabria.

This book is especially of interest to people whose roots are in that special region of Italy. Anyone whose interest is anthropology will find this work very enlightening as well.

"...this book is not just an autobiography by someone who wants to share a joyful past; this is the autobiography of someone who witnessed the most wonderful acts of kindness from people who justly deserved the title of saints, juxtaposed with incomprehensible acts of violence by people who acted like devils and left behind incomprehensible pain."` (M. Caputo)

Here is a direct link to the book at Amazon.com:

Please visit the Capistrano-Canadian website.

Death and the Olive Grove (Inspector Bordelli Mystery) by Marco Vichi

Florence, Italy, in April of 1964 is the backdrop for this historical mystery, which is book two in the Inspector Bordelli Mystery Series.  The first case is mentioned in the book, so it is advisable to read the books in the series in order.  I review the first book in the series here on this site.

Police Inspector Bordelli is still cynical, a smoker (ex-smokers should stay clear of the Bordelli books!), an experienced policeman, victim to intrusive wartime flashbacks, sympathetic to the those on the low end of society, unpredictable, a binge drinker and eater, intuitive, and immature in his relations with women due to abuse in his childhood.  Although in this book Bordelli does spend the night with a woman, a dominatrix, of course, since that is what his past has doomed him to seek out.

Book 1 in the Series, reviewed on this site

Italian post WWII politics continues to leave Bordelli cold:

...the first twenty years of the republic had done more harm to Italy than the Fascists and Nazis combined.

Bordelli laments the materialistic and greedy newly-rich industrialists, the poverty-stricken underclass, the abandoned elderly, and the abandoned countryside.

The translation is missing some punctuation marks, some carriage returns, some subjunctive verbs, just like the first book in the series, which is a translation from Italian.  And it uses the British single quote in place of the double quote, which can be confusing now and then.  There are footnotes explaining some of the references to Italian culture and history, just as in the first book.

Book 3 in the series

There is more of a plotline in Death and the Olive Grove, with two main cases for Bordelli, and lots of bodies, some are very disturbingly children's bodies, but the series is more psychological novels than police procedurals.  We learn more about Bordelli's past:  his wartime experiences, his police work, and how he met certain people in his life.  The reader gets to revisit all the secondary characters from the first novel, one by one, and learn a bit more about them.

1960s Florence, Italy, was very different from today's tourist-swamped town, and the author enjoys pointing that out.  Here are 19 seconds of footage showing the main square with Fiat Cinquecentos and other mini-cars parked and driving about.  Fiat 500s are still to be seen, as a rarity, but cars are not allowed to drive in the main square any more!

 

The themes of the book feel much more important to the author than the police cases:  war reverberates through a society, damaging psyches, bodies and family ties.  You could describe Death and the Olive Grove as a study in the various forms of grief.  If you enjoy your police procedurals with high suspense, you may not enjoy the Inspector Bordelli books.  But if you enjoy getting into the head of a very messed up man who lived through some very interesting times in Italian history, you may enjoy the Bordelli books, like I do.

Book 4 in the series

From the description of Death in an Olive Grove:

The sequel to the critically acclaimed Death in August, which finds Inspector Bordelli facing a nightmarish murder mystery

It is April of 1964, and the cruelest month is breeding bad weather and worse news.  And plenty of disturbing news is coming to Florence detective Inspector Bordelli. Bordelli’s friend, Casimiro, insists he’s discovered the body of a man in a field above Fiesole.  Bordelli races to the scene, but doesn’t find any sign of a corpse.

Only a couple of days later, a little girl is found at Villa Ventaglio.  She has been strangled, and there is a horrible bite mark on her belly.  Then another young girl is found murdered, with the same macabre signature.  And meanwhile, Casimiro has disappeared without a trace.

This new investigation marks the start of one of the darkest periods of Bordelli’s life:  a nightmare without end, as black as the sky above Florence.

These are the books in the Inspector Bordelli Mystery Series so far:

• Death in August (set in summer 1963)
• Death and the Olive Grove (set in April 1964)
• Death in Sardinia (set in December 1965)
• Death in the Tuscan Hills (set in 1967)

Here are direct links at Amazon.com to Marco Vichi's Death and the Olive Grove:

Please visit the author's website. 

This review is by Candida Martinelli, of Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site, and the author of the cozy-murder-mystery novel AN EXTRA VIRGIN PRESSING MURDER, and the young-adult/adult mystery novel series THE VIOLET STRANGE MYSTERIES the first book of which is VIOLET'S PROBLEM.

Death in August (Inspector Bordelli Mystery) by Marco Vichi

Death in August is a book with an identity crisis:  it is a psychological novel dressed up as a police procedural but marketed as a cozy mystery novel.  The original Italian books, less bound by genre, have dark covers reflecting the dark themes in the series.  The English translations offered as Kindle editions sport cozy mystery watercolor covers with a nostalgic tint that completely misrepresent the books' contents.

The series is set in the past, in the 1960s to be precise, and it is set there for a reason:  to allow Italians to laugh, sometimes wryly, at their former selves, with the benefit of hindsight from the perspective of the world today looking back on a seemingly ancient time.  So much social, political and economic change has occurred since the 1960s that looking back on those years really does feel like we are observing an ancient culture.

 Book Two in the Inspector Bordelli Mystery Series

In Death in August, we get to observe how women were non-existent in the workplace, men smoked like chimneys, one could drink alcohol at work, safely married women could flaunt themselves at men for self-validation or to make their husband jealous and attentive, men could ogle women as if they were going to attack them without anyone thinking it odd, drunks were left to wander neighborhoods until they died of the disease, DDT was used in most every home to kill mosquitoes, veterans of wars suffered their PTSDs without any help and with people just looking the other way when they acted odd, and so on and so on...

The scene that is likely misunderstood the most by English-speaking readers is one in which an old bomb-maker for the Italian WWII Resistance laments that young people in Italy lack the courage to fight with violence, if necessary, for the country and for their ideals.  Non-Italians might see the scene as a lament by a retired soldier for the lazy, luxury-loving youth he sees around him in post-war Italy.  But for the Italian reader, the scene would produce a wry laugh, because they know that within a decade or so, young Italians would be planting bombs, killing people, kidnapping people and posting manifestos all over Italy, calling themselves the Red Brigades terror group, and acting against all they see as bad in their country.

 Book Three in the Inspector Bordelli Mystery Series

Much is lost in the translation, although the translator provides some footnotes collected at the back of the text to explain some cultural reference.  I was not happy with the translation.  There were errors in punctuation, paragraphing, and phrasing.  There were a handful of typos.  And the translator seemed oblivious of the subjunctive form in English.

The protagonist of the series is a police inspector named Bordelli.  We learn that he was a sensitive, dreamy boy who was repeatedly sexually abused when he was eight years old, by a household maid.  The scenes are excruciating to read, and I am amazed that I see no mention of these scenes in any reviews, nor any mention of them in the book's description. 

Unlike the oblivious writer of the Stephanie Plum novels, who put a similar abuse scene in her first book in her series, the author of the Inspector Bordelli Mystery Series understands the long-term effect this kind of abuse can have on a person, and he links it directly to his protagonist's character. 

 Book Four in the Inspector Bordelli Mystery Series in its cozy-covered form

So, Bordelli is often self-destructive, destructive of his emotional attachments to women, infantile-like and passive in his more prolonged relationship with a woman who is a former prostitute who pampers him no doubt because she has had her fill of macho men.  Bordelli is fifty-three, unmarried, lonely, unhappy with the state of Italy, scared by the war and his PTSD and by the childhood abuse he suffered.

Bordelli is haunted by his time in the Italian Resistance during the Italian Civil War that was low-level at the beginning of WWII, and very hot following Italy's surrender to the Allies.  He suffers chronic insomnia and flashbacks.  His colleagues accept all this with good grace, but also with deep concern for the man's health.  Bordelli is a haunted, disturbed man who will probably never find much peace.

The colleagues and assorted group of walking-wounded friends of Bordelli's know that the man may be damaged goods, but he is good at police work.  He also has a very moral perspective on the law that allows him to bend it when justice would be better served that way.  Here is Bordelli telling his boss why he lets some poor criminals walk, now and then:

"Let me tell you something, Dr. Inzipone.  When I returned from the war, I hoped I had done my small part to liberate Italy from the shit we were in; but now all I see is mountains of shit, everywhere..."

...  

Inzipone eyed him, clenching his teeth.  He knew there was little he could do about Bordelli's methods, because he was, after all, an excellent inspector, he was loved by the entire department, and everybody knew that, in the end, he was right, there was too much poverty about.

I enjoyed the author's prose style.  The narration is third-person limited, so we get to see into Bordelli's mind, memories, fleeting thoughts, daydreams and nightmares.  Here are some examples:

It pleased him to see that things, and not only people, suffered the wear and tear of age.

The young were all fleeing the countryside to work in the city.  Nobody seemed to want to live any more between the soil and the cow pats.

Nominally, the book is a police procedural, with the usual introduction of a case, the forensic details, the victims, the suspects, the investigations, etc.  But these are just things to give some structure to a novel that is really about the man, Bordelli, and his demons.  The murder case is not very challenging or mysterious.  We spend most of our time just hanging out with Bordelli and his odd group of male friends, and roaming the 1960s.

There are long sections in the book about the war and Bordelli's war experiences.  There are just as many parts of the book about meals and especially one, long, elaborate dinner-party that Bordelli throws for his buddies, that is little more than a long drinking bout interspersed by some food.

Like Andrea Camillieri's books featuring police commissioner Montalbano (Camillieri writes an endorsement of the series on the cover of the book), the universe in Death in August is richly male, with women appearing only as disruptions to the delicately balanced workings of male-ville.  The women are described from the outside only, since the insides are a complete mystery to the men.

About the book's identity crisis... I enjoyed the book for the psychological novel that it was; it was meaty, intelligent, honest, and wryly funny.  For a police procedural, it was lacking in suspense and mystery.  And it is in no way, shape, or form a cozy murder mystery.  Know what you are buying if you choose to buy this book!  I hope this review helps.

These are the books in the Inspector Bordelli Mystery Series so far:

• Death in August (set in summer 1963)
• Death and the Olive Grove (set in April 1964)
• Death in Sardinia (set in December 1965)
• Death in the Tuscan Hills (set in 1967)

From Death in August's description:

A new crime series full of Italian flavor – the first novel in the Inspector Bordelli series, set in 1960s Florence.

Florence, summer 1963. Inspector Bordelli is one of the few detectives left in the deserted city. He spends his days on routine work and his nights tormented by the heat and mosquitoes. With the help of his young protégé, the victim’s eccentric brother, and a semi-retired petty thief, the inspector begins a murder investigation.  Each suspect has a solid alibi, but there is something that doesn’t quite add up...

Here are direct links at Amazon.com to Marco Vichi's Inspector Bordelli books:

Please visit the author's website. 

This review is by Candida Martinelli, of Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site, and the author of the cozy-murder-mystery novel AN EXTRA VIRGIN PRESSING MURDER, and the young-adult/adult mystery novel series THE VIOLET STRANGE MYSTERIES the first book of which is VIOLET'S PROBLEM.