interesting novel, bought by chance, a bit 'like almost everything I buy, after all, and that made me discover a kind of reading that I was missing a long time. This kind of novel not because you like what you leave at the end of the last page, but go for what they found while reading it. Wanting to frame in a genre, we could fit it between the novels of formation, those that tell of the growth path of a young man catapulted into the world. In fact, this aspect is present in the novel by Hannah Tinti, but it is certainly not the only and perhaps not even the most significant. Ren, an orphan raised in a convent outside of which was abandoned just born, lives his life with the other orphans, waiting and hoping for a miracle that one day someone will come to adopt it before they reach the age where it can be enlisted in the army. And just when you least expect it, that moment comes. A young man, who claims to be the uncle of the boy, takes him claiming to be the only family he has left. But, just took away the boy, Benjamin Nab is proving very different from what was told to the monks of the monastery. In fact, behind the sharp-talking and that air of one who knows the world, there is a hidden cheat licensed as Ren will discover soon will be able to see it working. Thus begins a winding path lined with shady business, replete with miraculous tonic, pitiful performances to dupe the gullible, drinking and various stratagems to pull a living, well beyond the margins of legality, a path that will be used to bring the boy that he never dared to ask even in his most secret desires.
The novel proceeds, with a linear writing and clean, impersonal narration and a rapid pace through a series of adventure stories, some humorous and other dramatic, until they merge in some cases in a grotesque. But this is not, in my opinion, the strength of the novel. Beyond Dickensian style, the interludes of fantasy and macabre of strokes and almost disturbing horror story, the ones that stand out are the characters.
everyone we meet along the path of Ren straight out of a gallery of figures well outside of the royalties of everyday life. A trickster storyteller, a former teacher alcoholic, a giant purple dress murderess in exhumed and buried alive, a deaf landlady, a dwarf who lives on a roof and down the chimney of the fireplace, damn twins, a doctor who illegally buy bodies for to anatomical studies, a shady industry with a parade of thugs to act as his bodyguards. From this absurd jumble of personalities, the young man Ren know, with great imagination and story-telling ability, get the family that in his vision of an orphan that can not be the greatest treasure. And, last but not least, the novel gives us a great truth: in those moments when Ren and Benjamin will need to get off the hook, we will discover with them the unstoppable power and the irresistible charm of a story well told.
He turned and looked at the store where you made the wine, then the chapel and then the orphanage. It was hard to believe that it would no longer worked, prayed and stayed there. Everything she had ever wanted was to leave, but now he was going to do it felt uncomfortable. He went up to the high wall that surrounded the buildings and pressed his palm on the wet bricks. It had the consistency of the time.
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