Time On My Hands
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
Palermo, Sicily, 1978. The Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro has just been kidnapped in Rome by members of the notorious Red Brigades. Two months after his disappearance on 9th May, Moro is found dead in the boot of a car.
A trio of eleven-year-old schoolboys, Nimbo, Raggio, and Volo, avidly follow the news of the abduction as their admiration for the brigatisti grows. When the boys themselves resolve to abduct a classmate and incarcerate him in a makeshift 'people's prison', the darkness within their world, and the world of the novel, becomes all-pervasive.
A vivid and hellish description of Sicily in the late seventies, Time on my Hands is an unforgettable novel from a significant new voice in Italian fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1978 kidnapping of Italy's former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, by a leftist terrorist group, the Red Brigades, provides the spark for Vasta's novel. In Palermo, Sicily, three11-year-old friends experience radio broadcasts of the terrorists' violent demands as a thrilling strike at bourgeois Italian society. They shave their heads, create a private system for communicating with each other, and form their own brigade, complete with code names: Nimbus, Radius, and Flight. Imitation of their heroes escalates, and when Moro is murdered, they must decide how far their mimicry will go. Nimbus, the narrator and a self-described "-ironic, anti-ironic, refractory little boy a non little boy," embodies the trio's detached, analytical justifications for their deadly games. But when the group targets Nimbus's first love, the mute Creole girl he worships from afar, their actions lose revolutionary symbolism and the boys must choose between taking life and preserving it. Vasta's compressed prose and close alliance with the narrator help the story's implausibilities fade away and its portrait of teenage rebellion ring true.
