Customer Reviews

The Hiding Place: A Novel

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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.

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.

"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.

I won't easily forget this book, which is a story about people and remembering people. The most gorgeous aspect of the writing is how a moment or a feeling becomes perfectly captured in brief, humble lines of prose. Azzopardi does not use long discursive explanations which are so often relied upon by authors. Each character becomes flesh and blood through short paragraphs and careful breaths. The sensitivty of the telling draws you in just as much as the tragedy of the story. I am grateful for writers who seek our imagination via the heart. Azzopardi appears to be one of them.

I've been making an effort to read each of the Booker Prize nominees for this year - this was the second I picked up.

Within the first ten pages I was greatly impressed by Azzopardi's use of language and the flow of her sentences. By page twenty I was enthralled by the characters and the narrative. By the time I finished "The Hiding Place" I was as moved as any novel I have ever been fortunate to lay my hands on.

This is a tremendous novel that I cannot say enough about. The story of Dol and the family Gauci is often disturbing, but is written so beautifully that I couldn't help but be drawn into the tale. I am a harsh critic of over-sentimentality, and a story like this could have easily spiraled into self-pity. Azzopardi doesn't allow that to happen. She manages to allow the characters to be utterly human, imperfect, and infected.

"The Hiding Place" is the best novel I've read in five years.

Azzopardi has taken the narrative device of Tristram Shandy or Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and used it to delve deeply into the pain of the human psyche. We see a child, Dolores, from before she is born, but instead of being welcomed into the world, her birth corresponds with the end of life as the rest of her family has known it. Her father, mistakenly believing he has finally sired a son after five daughters, gambles away everything he has. Then when he wants to gamble more, he takes away his wife's painstakingly saved funds, at the same time one of her sisters burns down the house; the mother has begun her descent into madness and forgets Dolores, who is so badly burned she loses a hand. The cost of all this is one of her sisters, whom she never knows. In turn, each of her sisters is lost, and her parents lost, in some way, until Dolores is adopted and spends thirty years away from them all.

Her mother's death brings her back, and all the family secrets are revealed, and so too are all the bonds that hold the family together and yet devour them at the same time.

To me, the key is the contrast between the prose, which is light, and the events described, which range from arranged marriage without love to arson to child battering to selling a child into prostitution. It's the kind of book that makes you want to scream at the characters, "Don't do that!" and also the kind of book that makes you want to stop and think and re-read passages again and again.

That it's a first novel is simply amazing.

This is a fairly grim debut novel about a family's deprivation in 1960s Cardiff. Frank Gauci has emigrated from Malta in the late 1940s, and gets a very real culture shock when he sees snow for the first time. However, Frank soon gets over his malaise, helped by his friendship with Joe Medora and his marriage to the runaway Mary. With his friend Salvatore, Frank is soon in business running The Moonlight. However, Maltese tradition stresses the importance of having a son. After 5 daughters, when Mary is pregnant for the sixth time, Frank just knows that his luck must be in. And Frank is very experienced as a gambling man... So sets off a chain of events that it will haunt the family and neighbourhood for forty years.

I suppose if you were to put this novel into any genre, then it would be 'Angela's Ashes'. Although Azzopardi herself was born and brought up in Cardiff, and seems to be from a Maltese background, this is a work of fiction. The setting is Tiger Bay, 'Britain's Valletta', home to many races and mixed marriages, and Shirley Bassey. Frank seems to have bought his way into the more unsettling regions of Maltese culture. The story of the Gaucis is quite grim - there's a pivotal scene where Dolores, sometime narrator, the hoped for boy who turned out to be a girl, is caught in a fire whilst still a baby. The fire has left her mutilated for life: "that soft skin is petrol, those bones are tinder". The preceding excerpt gives you an indication of what Azzopardi's subtle, lyrical prose is like. Azzopardi's words are understated, true, and original, without ever straining at the leash of credibility. The narrative moves forwards and backwards in time, and jumps from narrator to narrator, yet Azzopardi's technique is so simple and supreme, that you never find yourself lost.

One of the scenes that really ring true is the funeral. Azzopardi's observations are spot on, and make you think that you really are standing in Dolores' shoes. Time has separated and divided the sisters, only death, it seems, can bring them together. Dolores can't help but wonder about the missing details of her life. Although she was very young when the family was divided, Dolores seems to have seen everything. But there are some things, it seems, which have been blocked from her memory. Like the true physical nature of the hiding place... There's also the internal hiding place, where Dolores has closely guarded her memories, the funeral as catalyst to spark them once more. There's also a funeral atmosphere about the Cardiff streets in which she grew up. Most of the houses have been discarded, knocked down to make way for the call of rejuvenation. Memories and places destroyed. Only a few ghosts from the past are recognisable.

It is Dolores' misfortune that she had a superstitious father. Ugly subplots about disease, children's homes, and debt collectors, boil subtly under the surface. Poverty exists even when you own a TV set in the early sixties. Yet despite all this grimness, you sense that there is still a reason for living, for holding on. The resolution is neither uplifting nor particularly downbeat. Life just is, Azzopardi seems to be saying. Dolores doesn't have a friend like Shug Avery in this novel, but she seems to have found her own way, even though the details of her current life in Nottingham are absent. Dolores cannot think of anything but the past. Life is difficult, suicide even more so. Azzopardi does not dwell on the misery. Dolores cannot but help going back to the bad memories of her childhood, to be nostalgic despite the pain. And people do live with the pain. We all have our own hiding place, as Azzopardi readily acknowledges.

There is an amazing amount of pain and emotion compressed into the pages of this novel. The resilience of children in the face of unbelievable cruelty and poverty shines out of it like a beacon -- and it's just about the only light in their lives.

The story concerns a family living in Cardiff in the 1950s -- the father has recently immigrated from Malta and married a local girl, and they procede to have child after child in his vain and misguided attempt to produce a son. Six daughters -- indeed, children of ANY gender -- should be seen as a blessing, but Frankie Gauci is increasingly despondent with each new arrival. When the youngest, Dolores (called Dol by her family) is burned in a housefire as a baby, and loses the fingers on one hand as a result of her injuries, Frankie calls her a demon, blaming her for every ounce of his bad luck. Even her sisters taunt and torment her.

The problem is that Frankie is a compulsive gambler -- he gambles away their home, the business in which he owns a share, even his eldest daughter. Rarely in literature will you come across a character so lacking in redeeming qualities as this man. As if the gambling were not enough, he's a complete brute to his wife and to his children.

Dol narrates the story, looking back from adulthood. By the time of her telling, the family has been completely destroyed and torn apart, the children put into care separately, losing touch with one another as well as with their mother. The pain and longing that Dol feels -- without seeing its sources clearly from her perspective -- build and build until the gates of her memory are opened, and the horrors of her childhood are once again available for her to view.

The story is a heart-wrenching one -- but a journey well worth taking. The author's writing -- despite the dark events and subjects -- is aglow with understanding, and beauty found in some of the most unlikely places.

In trying to capture the essence of this book, I find all the adjectives I come up with already present on its dust jacket. Exceptional...Luminous...Lyric...opens up ordinary-looking doors...Ms. Azzopardi has woven a story that we've read before, but the result is fresh and original. She has also managed to create wonderful thumbnail character studies, with each daughter in this family having a distinct identity. Stripped to the essence, yet flowing in detail, the book is filled with repressed memories, some which rise, and others which are too painful to surface.

The novel begins with our narrator, the adult Dolores, telling us about a moment in her childhood when she was 5 looking out of the upstairs window watching for her father to return home from the betting shop. She is supposed to warn her mother when she sees him so that Mary can shepherd her friend and neighbor Eva out the back door. It will not be until the very end of the novel that we learn the special significance of these moments of watching. And it is only then that we will learn the significance of the title.

The novel tells a harrowing tale of about 5 years in the life of a Welsh-Maltese family, the Gauci's. The voice of the narrator is obviously an adult's voice but much of the novel is written in the first person tense of a 5 year old. The author is playing tricks here with tense and voice that we will not understand completely until Part Two of the novel. Obviously a 5 year old cannot fashion such lush prose, but we will see that the 5 year old doesn't have to when her older counterpart can reminisce. But the tricks and traps of memory are one of the prime undercurrents in the novel that can be missed due to the compelling narrative flow. Azzopardi cuts back and forth in time creating the illusion of a past that is as present as it is gone.

It takes an especially sensitive voice to tell this story of dispair and heartbreak without falling into sentimentality. Azzopardi never gets sentimental and in fact, manages to find moments of sly humor. Never at the expense of her characters, but she finds humor in the way that Shakespeare found a way to say some his profoundest thoughts in his comedies.

You would think that with 6 children, a mother and father, a friend and neighbors, enough characters populate this novel. But we are not overwhelmed by the proliferation of characters because each one if given special, if brief, attention. Eva is personified by her ocelot coat. The Jackson woman across the street by her disapproving stare. It is a technique used brilliantly by D.H. Lawrence in his book of short stories, "Twilight in Italy".

The narrative drive is compelling and this is a book that you want to read and keep reading. You are transported into a world that is tough but so beautifully rendered you do not want to leave it. Part of sheer joy of reading this novel is the glorious writing. One can find evidence of a fresh perspective on metaphor and image on almost every page.

While this novel is not for the faint of heart, nor for the casual reader, it does us the great service of trusting us. Pay careful attention to the details and read the book in as few sittings as possible because you will miss too much if you try to dip into this book at bedtime. Details are important and while the story can be appreciated on many levels, including as a family mystery, its full resonance will only come with careful attention.

A remarkable novel made all the more remarkable by its being a first novel. Such assurance and subtly is usually the mark of a more experienced writer. I eagerly await the next one.