I Hadn't Understood
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This “sharp-edged comedic novel of a semi-hapless Italian lawyer” who finds himself employed by the mob was a finalist for Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize (Kirkus Reviews).
Vincenzo Malinconico is a wildly unsuccessful lawyer who spends most of his time at the office trying to look busy. His wife has left him. His teenage children worry him to death. And he suffers from a chronic inability to control his sentence structure.
When he is asked to fill in as the public defender for alleged Mafioso Mimmo ’o Burzone, Malinconico seizes the opportunity to turn his life around. Without dwelling too long on what it might mean to be employed by the mob, he rushes to re-learn the Italian criminal code. Soon, Malinconico’s life becomes a comic battle to finish what he has started without falling further into the mafia’s clutches.
Diego De Silva’s rollicking, Naples Prize–winning comic novel orbits the irresistible mind of one of contemporary Italian fiction’s most beloved characters. Throughout his travails, Vincenzo contemplates every aspect of the life he sees before him in a wry voice that seduces, entertains, and moves the reader from the first page to the last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Meet Vincenzo Malinconico, "master of the improvisational jazz of complications" (as in creating, rather than controlling, them). He's sleeping with his ex-wife, has two kids he barely communicates with, a law practice set on low simmer, and a tendency toward digressions. He confesses to an inability to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and, in fact, this one is all middle. But then again, so is most of life, and Vincenzo, whose last name in Italian means "melancholy," is an amiable, observant, and often funny guide to the contradictions and confusions of life's long mid-section. The fact that this is all happening in Naples adds interest; he takes a court-appointed case that could lead to real work, for a client involved with the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. Will he be killed if he takes the job? If he doesn't? When his clients provide him with a stalker/bodyguard/guardian angel, how should he feel? And what about Alessandra Persiana, the hottest lawyer in the clubby, corruption-riddled Neapolitan courthouse? Vincenzo may, as he says, "lack conclusions," but as he grapples with alternating disasters and even more bewildering strokes of luck, he's a likable everyman relatable, but with his own fully human specificity.
