Customer Reviews

Natural Disorder of Things

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2 star:		(1)
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It seems that modern Italian literature has not kept pace with other European countries----even eastern European writers are being translated and published here. I had hoped that Andrea Cobbio might be about to change that trend. I started the book with high hopes but its meandering story line, confusing and not quite developed characters, and unsatisfacory ending were a disappointment. It is about a fat and apparantly unattractive landscape architect's attraction to a very strange and shadowy widow of a patrician patriarch. Motivtation is murky and it just never pulls together. I was never tempted to abandon it because it was a pleasant though not very rewarding read.

I loved this book. I hope more of Canobbio's work will be translated to english. It is a darkly entertaining and engrossing read. The author does an excellent job of showing the chaotic inner depths of "Claudio" a garden designer living a seemingly ordinary life.

The Natural Disorder of Things is about an Italian garden designer. He gets in over his head when he becomes romantically involved with an upper-class woman who is a widow connected to a strange aristocratic family with a lot of mysterious goings-on. There is a bit of a mystery involving the gardener witnessing a murder where someone is deliberately run down in the rain in a mall parking lot. Our garden designer is much more successful at imposing order upon the landscape than he is at putting his own life in order. The interplay of modern vs. classical going on in his life is reflected in his garden designs. The book, translated from the Italian, has a lot of local color of modern (1990's) suburban and rural Italy.

The trouble with literary fiction these days is that so much of it is just plain boring. And boring ain't entertaining. This is another in a long line of literary fiction, well-received and highly recommended literary fiction, that doesn't live up to the hype (or at least the good reviews). This isn't a bad book, mind you, well written and all that, it just doesn't have that much of a plot. And then the end is so tidy that nobody has to get their hands dirty, which was kind of where this book was going...I thought. Anyway, when you're done with it you kinda go, eh? On to the next.