Casa Rossa Book

After reading a novel like this and others I have read this year, for example, the Goldfinch, I do not understand why there should even be any debate about the death of the novel. Based on my reading experience novels and novelists are alive and and healthy, apparently doing quite well in the old art of story telling.

Ms Maricano writes about a particularly interesting part of the world, southern Italy, namely Puglia near Lecce and Rome, and a particular time in history which is that period in which Italy became fascistic and afterward experienced the birth of the republic and the horrible years of the Red Brigades.

This is one of those fascinating looks at three generations of a family that was strongly affected by all these currents of history. On a more intimate level it is about three women, the grandmother, her daughter Alba, and Alba's two girls Isabella and Alina. The youngest daughter is the voice in the novel, and a most interesting voice it is, a voice of a girl who becomes a woman through dealing with all the family pathology of three generations as well as her own particular period of coming of age.

I found the book a fascinating read. Although Italian is not my first language (actually it can be read in English as the author actually wrote the book in English first but found that she had to change the Italian version as the first one was so much influenced by the english language) , I found the book to be one of those that I could hardly put down as the character development and plot development are well done, so true to life..

The grandmother, Renee, is only written about, never a character but who appears throughout the book in the form of a mural painted on the garden wall of the Casa Rossa (The Red House), the family home in Puglia. Even though the mural was painted over by the grandfather's second wife, the faint image remains and appears more clearly on the last page of the novel. Her daughter Alba, beautiful, seemingly uninvolved with her two daughters throughout emerges as a life force and a fascinating character as she grows and develops. I will leave it to the reader to find out what happened to the daughters, one of whom is the storyteller.

It was a book which I never wanted to end and missed the characters and the storyteller, Alina, a lot the next day.