Amazon.com Review
One might expect a coming-of-age story set in a small Italian fishing village in the 1950s to wax idyllic, but Erri De Luca confounds expectation. Though the novel has more than its share of halcyon days in the sun, a troubling undercurrent runs through it. The unnamed narrator, a 16-year-old boy summering with his family on an island off the coast of Naples, is confronted with Italy's fascist past when he meets Caia, a young Romanian Jew whose family was decimated during the war. As the boy learns more about her circumstances, he demands answers from the adults around him--answers they are increasingly reluctant to give. Only Nicola, a local fisherman who served with the Italian army in Yugoslavia, offers any clues to Italy's complicity:
The war lived on in a few odd details that he would relate over and over again: an empty window seen from the street, and behind the window no house, not even a roof, and you could see the sky. Windows are made to see the sky, but not like that. And there was a market square where grass grew because there was nothing to sell and no one ever went there, not even to exchange a few words. Grass can be a sad thing when it grows between the cobblestones of a market.De Luca hangs his story on two mirror images: the wartime invasion of Italy by German forces followed, just a few years later, by another incursion--this time of tourists--from the same nation. As Caia relates the realities of life during the German occupation, it becomes harder and harder for the boy to reconcile his country's past with its complacent present. Part love story, part ghost story, Sea of Memory is a haunting tale rendered in evocative prose. --Margaret Prior
From Publishers Weekly
This short, moving but slightly strained coming-of-age tale brings the aftermath of the Holocaust to an idyllic Italian island off the coast of Naples. The nameless narrator recalls a summer vacation there during the 1950s; at the age of 16, he learns to fish, falls in love, and discovers the long aftermath of World War II. Eschewing the company of foreign tourists and younger children, he finds a teacher of life in Nicola, a local fisherman who communicates his love of the sea and his memories of war to the boy yearning for knowledge. Attracted by the older, more mysterious girls on the island, the narrator falls in love with Caia, who shares her secret with him: she's Jewish, saved by Italian soldiers from the Nazis who killed the rest of her Yugoslav family. Caia thinks that the narrator shares her father's mannerisms, and may be his reincarnation. Initiated into seamanship by one vicious fish bite and a torrential night expedition, the boy is finally inspired to manifest his newfound manhood, his passion for Caia and his ardent Italian patriotism in a flamboyant, cataclysmic act of destruction, during which his youth, his summer and his tale come to an end. Without Caia's mystic feeling that he embodies her father's spirit, he might lack sufficient motive for the ambitious destruction with which he brings a sort of Armageddon to the island. Nevertheless, the psychic bits hinder what is otherwise an alluring and poignant story about an adolescent in love, in search of himself and of history. Brombert's translation ranges from clear to shimmeringly lyrical. De Luca's other works include three translations from the Hebrew Bible as well as five novels. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
