The Hiding Place: A Novel [Paperback]

Trezza Azzopardi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 2002

This exceptional novel about family, love, and the innocence and terror of childhood was one of the most applauded and auspicious debuts of the last year. Compared by reviewers to Angela's Ashes and Wuthering Heights, The Hiding Place was the only debut work to be shortlisted for England's prestigious Booker Prize -- in the company of Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood -- and went on to become a universally praised U.S. national best-seller. Set in a Maltese immigrant community in Cardiff, Wales, and peopled with sharp-edged, luminously drawn characters, The Hiding Place is the story of Frankie Gauci, his wife, Mary, and their six daughters. With her "unusual gift for letting her characters' interior lives come forth" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Azzopardi chronicles Frankie's unforgivable betrayal: gambling away his family's livelihood and eventually the family itself. The Gaucis' story is seen through the eyes of Dolores, the youngest daughter and the embodiment of bad luck in her father's estimation, condemned to bear the mark of a family that is rapidly singeing at the edges. Dolores presents an unsparing portrayal of the fear and hopelessness of childhood amid grim poverty and neglect, of children growing up without safety nets and on sunken foundations. Sustained by a tightrope tension and a stark, youthful wisdom, The Hiding Place conjures the coarse sensuality of life among the docks, the smoky cafes and bars, the crumbling homes and gambling rooms of Tiger Bay. "Astonishing and iridescent" (The Times, London), The Hiding Place is a mesmerizing exploration of how family, like fire, can shift suddenly from something that provides light and warmth to a dangerous conflagration, sparing no one in its path. "A harrowing and remarkably self-assured first novel [that] possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a memoir...." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Frank McCourt and Mary Karr may have written definitive accounts of grim childhoods, but British first novelist Azzopardi can stand on her own as a writer of remarkable sensibility and literary prowess. A seedy dockside community in 1960s Wales is the apt setting for this memoir-like narrative. Physical and emotional abuse haunts every detail in Azzopardi's account of a poor Maltese immigrant family's misery. Dolores, the youngest of the six Gauci daughters, narrates the story of her father Frankie's arrival in Tiger Bay, Wales, his marriage to young waitress Mary Jessop, the birth of their children and the family's eventual disintegration as a result of Frankie's gambling and jealousy. In Part One, Dolores's five-year-old narration is emotionless as she relates the awful events that shape their lives. Hers is the perfect voice to unearth the family's confusing and shady secrets; because the child doesn't quite understand the emotional impact of situations, she questions and observes with detachment. On the day Dolores is born, Frankie gambles away their house and caf . When she is just a month old, Dolores loses her left hand in a fire. Frankie's jealousy and gambling debts lead him to sell one of his daughters, Marina, to gangster Joe Medora, the man he believes is her father. Azzopardi chills the blood with gruesome details as Frankie skins Dolores's pet rabbit for older sister Celesta's wedding dinner. Eventually, Frankie abandons the family to join Medora, and Mary, losing her grip on reality, also loses the remaining children to public care. Dolores's stoic perspective continues into adulthood, as, in Part Two, the sisters return to Tiger Bay for Mary's funeral. Although the narrative line can confuse as the story shifts from present to past, readers will be riveted by this brilliant psychological prose poem of a family united only in helplessness and despair, in a poverty-stricken corner of the world rarely evoked in fiction. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Growing up battered in the Maltese immigrant community of Cardiff, Wales, Azzopardi's home town. This debut is a sensation, having been sold to 11 publishers worldwide.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 282 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st edition (January 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802138594
• ISBN-13: 978-0802138590
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,233,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A TRENCHANT, SUPERBLY CRAFTED DEBUT, January 23, 2001

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Hiding Place (Hardcover)

British first-time novelist Trezza Azzopardi stuns with her accomplished portrait of childhood deprivation, a terrain where want goes begging and kindness is stillborn.

With a rundown immigrant enclave in Cardiff, Wales, as its setting, The Hiding Place is the story of the Gauci family. Father Frankie, whose "love is Chance" is a Maltese seaman. A selfish, unrepentant child abuser and thief, he values an inherited ruby ring more than his daughters whom he barters for a stake.

His wife, Mary, the mother of six girls, is sometimes forced to sell herself for rent money. Madness is her escape from an intolerable existence.

Related in the voice of the youngest child, Dolores, the saga of this family causes readers to ponder the vagaries of birth and life's inequities. As adults, each daughter is haunted by a painful past, days in which their diversions were hopscotch in a dusty alley or inflicting cruelty upon one another until they are relegated to foster care.

Ms. Azzopardi's evocation of the littered byways and musty bars of a small dockside community is flawless, as are her portraits of those we meet there. A finalist for the coveted Booker Prize, The Hiding Place is a trenchant, superbly crafted tragedy. It is a bleak but dazzling book.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Feast for the Senses, November 29, 2000

By 

J. Brian Taylor "wedjbu" (Saint Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Hiding Place (Hardcover)

I was reminded of the memorable opening of Faulkner's story "Barn Burning," in which the little boy protagonist is present while his father is accused of malicious arson; the first sentence: "The store in which the Justice of the Peace's court was sitting smelled of cheese." The narrative point of view is that of a na?ve witness; one might say na?ve voyeur. Adult crime, adult atrocity, is filtered through the five senses of a hungry child. The child, even though abused (and because abused), cannot pass judgment on his own dysfunctional kin. Azzopardi's story bears comparison with Faulkner's not only because they share a limiting point of view, but also because both record in intense detail the sensory world of their protagonist. This technique is not new; it's Huckleberry Finn's point of view. But Azzopardi, to my mind, excels Faulkner by avoiding his departures into highfalutin editorializing but also by accepting the rigors of the present tense, which has both the artistic limitations and the immediacy of film - if film could also capture the sound of a rabbit being gutted, the acrid smell beneath the perfume, the watery taste of blackberries, the texture of mud and concrete and old linoleum. One might be reminded of Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy," an experiment in objectively descriptive fiction; but while Robbe-Grillet's attention to detail seems obsessive, even solipsistic, Azzopardi's story is set in a world whose characters are as richly diverse as any in Dickens and as psychologically complex as any in modern fiction. They are frightening. They are lovable. Yes, readers will be deeply moved by the humanity of the tale - its horror and its humor - but it is Azzopardi's language, her handling of the emotionally-charged image, her ability to capture a place, a time, a person in a totally original turn of phrase that suggests that this first novel is a remarkable accomplishment. Even though hard to put down, "The Hiding Place" is not an "easy read"; but it invites comparison with the works of major novelists. One reader wondered if this would be a "one-off" success; we hope it won't be. The challenge to Trezza Azzopardi must be daunting. But very encouraging. For lovers of both literature and life, "The Hiding Place" is compulsory reading.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars (4.5) "Third degree damage", March 6, 2005

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Hiding Place: A Novel (Paperback)

"My father's love is chance." Frank Gauci is a gambler of Sicilian-Maltese descent who has lost his half of a business and the decent home his family occupied. Now the family of two adults and six daughters live in a few crowded rooms in Cardiff, Wales, while Frank thoughtlessly loses the few possessions left and his wife, Mary, cope with what is left of her dreams. It is hard to imagine a more destitute world than that of the Gauci family.

This is the story of poverty, of the loss of family and the respect of strangers, when the weight of an indifferent world presses against hope until it is extinguished, leaving only despair in its wake. Yet, even in this hollow den of few comforts, a mother's love for her children is indestructible. Delores is born in 1960, another disappointment to Frank, who wishes for boys, only to be denied. When the new baby is burned in a kitchen fire, her left hand permanently disfigured, the family is driven deeper into a black despair. Delores senses the rampant emotions in her house, particularly the anger: "I am breast fed: I get rage straight from the source".

The few small rooms of their home are filled with growing bodies, with no hiding place. Tragedy strikes randomly, leaving all without privacy, sorting emotions that fly through the rooms with nowhere to land as the clamor of need presses the air from the dismal rooms. Four girls who sleep in one room with their mother know everything about each other, form alliances against the weaker ones, especially "the crip", and yearn for space. But even this desperate place is a home, where children form attachments and memories. A raging, cruel father is still a father, a mother meant to be a source of comfort, even as her mind is unraveling.

Eventually, the mother breaks down and the girls are given into foster care, the young girls who crowded the small rooms scattered to the winds, disentangling from sisterhood. Their poor, rattled mother cannot save her daughters from the daily violence that weaves the fabric of their lives. Delores is marked for failure, the badly deformed left hand ruined by the fire; Fran's scars are self-inflicted, a continuation of the beatings that marked her childhood, a self-tattoo etched on the inside of her arm; Celesta rises above the past, her husband's wealth a key to forgetfulness; Luca and Rose are embittered allies with shared disappointments and Marina has long disappeared.

"Children burnt and children bartered. Someone must be to blame." Finally, the girls gather at the death of their mother, Dol in the lead, as they dredge up the pain of years of betrayal, exposing the withered heart of a selfish father and the desperate soul of a mother who could not protect her children. The past must be purged of secrets, harrowing images, lost childhoods, broken promises and heartless reality.

This book is ferocious, unsparing in its honesty and relentless in search of the truth. The prose is adamant, impossible to ignore. That such a story can be told is a testament to the wisdom and courage of the author, her brilliant prose seductive, yet terrifying, awakening the monsters that root so easily in the soil of abject poverty. But the spirit of survival is not easily extinguished, the innocent, battered souls released to the light. Luan Gaines/2005.