Reviews for First Execution

The average rating for First Execution based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-08-15 00:00:00 Brandon Lee This is an absolutely *fabulous* book, and since nobody here seems to know of it, I'm going to pound the table a bit. It's a six-star book. A political thriller and metafictional, it works brilliantly and seamlessly. Starnone has a deep and haunting grasp of the world. The translation, moreover, is stellar - it sounds/reads as if it were written in English. No higher praise is possible. Highly recommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-11 00:00:00 John Phillips First Execution begins as a tale of political intrigue. Domenico Stasi, a retired teacher, goes to meet a former student, Nina, who has been arrested on a charge of 'armed conspiracy'. He's convinced this must have been some kind of mistake, and hopes to find her contrite, but instead, the unapologetic Nina sets him a task: he is to go to the apartment of a friend of hers, find a certain book and copy out a specified line, which will be collected from him by a stranger. When he complies, he finds himself drawn into a dangerous chain of events, in which he's unsure of the exact function he's performing; is he aiding the activities of terrorists? But then the story becomes metafictional: another Domenico, the author himself, appears in the narrative, talking about how he's writing this book, where he wants it to go, and how his own experiences and memories are feeding into it. The two stories run alongside and into each other, as Stasi's dilemma becomes more and more pronounced - he digs himself into an increasingly deep hole in near-comic fashion - and Starnone rewinds and reshapes his story, exploring the different directions it could take. The Stasi story is an examination of the effect of a certain style of education on young minds, with two extreme cases represented by Nina and another ex-student, Sellitto, who has become a police officer. The other narrative is a meditation on the nature of writing and the evolution of one's political beliefs. Both Stasi and Starnone seem tortured by the fact that they have remained outwardly apathetic in a time of upheaval, while feeling inwardly conflicted about their ability to empathise with both the oppressors and the oppressed. Stasi ruminates on whether his life has been wasted, having chosen to teach rather than to act - and how much responsibility he has to bear for the development of his students' ideals and, consequently, their choices. There is something brilliantly economical about the way First Execution is written. It's bursting with ideas - about politics, education, writing, ageing, justice and injustice, the nature and definition of 'terrorism', pacifism vs direct action... - and is filled with philosophical digressions, but they are expressed so clearly and beautifully that the book is a pleasure to read. I frequently found myself marking pages to remember, or highlighting passages that struck a chord with me (see the list of quotes below). It's intensely thought-provoking and challenging - but it's also a story I struggled to tear myself away from. --- p.28: 'When had I tamed myself? It had been a lengthy apprenticeship, begun when I was as young as ten, and continued relentlessly throughout my adolescence, when I had discovered to my own terror that I wanted to murder somebody: my father, a sarcastic friend, my professor of Latin and Greek, even a rude passerby. It was not until I was almost twenty that I began to suspect that, along with the repression of my violent impulses, I had repressed everything, even my ability to experience a profound emotion, even my impulse to do good deeds and help others. I had become as good as I had hoped to be, but good with the cautious detachment of one who never indulges in excess.' p.39: 'His radical beliefs had always been considered a form of mental honesty. His own life story was first and foremost a history of the books he had read, and he eagerly recounted that story to himself, often with a note of self-deprecation.' p.57: 'Aging is the slow process of becoming accustomed to the end of real life. One must slowly abandon one's image, one's role, and resign oneself to fading in the memories of others, and in our own. How long had it been since he stopped learning the names of novelists, essayists, directors, singers, artists, and notable people in general? When had he begun to cling to his customary books without trying to read new ones, to his old movie stars without curiosity about the rising ones? Five years ago, or three years ago? His daughter Ida would toss out a name of someone who, in her view, was famous, and he'd shake his head uneasily: he'd never heard of them. Becoming grey, melted wax, formless. Perhaps that was the best way to prepare to die.' p.62: 'The mists of the Underworld evoked the hypothetical canopy of the Overworld. And that's where I've lived my life, he thought, saddened. In this den, reading, learning. Learning what? The mists of the Underworld, studied and pitied from a comfortable chair, in safety, at the edge of the canopy of the Overworld, in a distant warmth. He had spent a life without great luxury, but without serious privations.' p.67: 'It was as if'he realized'his blood was running cold, as if his ardor had cooled. He sensed with increasing clarity that the ferocity of political and military behavior, the deplorable actions of the world around him and the world that extended out in the distance, the scandalous poverty of the many and the scandalous wealth of the few, no longer instilled that old sense of determination in him. The very idea that demons don't war against demons, that one Satan never exorcises another Satan, but that there are always hosts of devils on one side and hosts of angels arrayed against them, now struck him as a piece of rank sophistry. At the heart of the battle it is not always so clear where good lies and where evil lies.' p.96: 'Real images (a ticket taker or the station sign'Genova P. Principe'or the station bar the way I'd seen it at four in the afternoon the week before) set off mental sequences and I lived in a state of distraction for a period that felt endless, but might last only a moment, a fleeting instant. Everything seemed to press in upon me with a vigorous coherence. But as soon as I attempted to marshal everything into written form, the story seemed to lack realism, sociological detail, a fundamental narrative syntax in a way that depressed me.' p.117-8: 'All the same, a secret part of me... was unable to avoid feeling affinity with the killers rather than the killed, with the kidnappers rather than the kidnapped. I deleted words of condemnation from my vocabulary, I tried not to use current labels. I was careful, even in my thoughts, to avoid using the words murderers, criminals, torturers, terrorists; I felt that they were somehow inadequate. I really thought of them as combatants. Of course, their actions filled me with horror, even fear, and yet the stand they were taking, the determination with which they were attacking, wounding, taking prisoners, and taking life as if they were metaphysical surgeons doing battle with a tumor, led me to feel somehow, I'm not sure how to put it, indebted to them, almost as if I owed them something for having acted in my place, sparing me, at least for the moment, tensions, anxiety, and disgust. That "so?" from Nina, that sign of the impossibility of any reconciliation, both frightened me and fascinated me. What a beautiful day, I thought. So? So? So?' p.121: 'Good job. You did a good job of shedding blood. In order to eat. In order to occupy someone else's land. To defend yourself. To drive off invaders. To defend sources of water or oil wells. All of these things on this huge verminous ball that day and night a malevolent scarab beetle rolls through a vicious circle, an obtusely fixed orbit in which war follows upon war, massacre follows massacre, and genocide is succeeded by fresh genocide. I carefully swept the balcony, raising clouds of luminous dust.' p.122-3: 'I had grown old without understanding, and there was nothing to understand. In the final analysis all that mattered was the warm March breeze, springtime, the light striking the wall across the way, the consoling colors that conceal the indecipherable nature of the world. A stream of images'actual, fantastical, dreamed, and remembered. A word, fired by the vocal cords out through the mouth, in a volley of sounds: gutturals, palatals, dentals, labials, nasals. Conciliatory sounds and signs. Or perhaps not, perhaps conversation does not reconcile, does not pacify, does not keep company. We use handsome words to record ugly things, we agree on plans of attack, ambushes, mockeries, genocide, destruction-reconstruction-destruction. We speak violence and we call it the quest for food, hunting, caste, class, competition, market forces, liberation, and the new world order. Perhaps the culminating horror is the seed of the words that describe it.' p.164: 'Both of us'we discovered'had long and secretly suspected that Stasi was a gullible impostor, that his way of depicting himself was seductive precisely because it was invented out of whole cloth, for our edification and consumption, and for his own.'