Not All Bastards Are from Vienna
A Novel
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4.5 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The international bestseller and winner of the Campiello Prize for Literature—"Moving and lyrical writing . . . Belongs in the canon of great war fiction" (Paste Magazine).
Andrea Molesini's exquisite debut novel portrays the depths of heroism and horror within a Northern Italian village toward the end of World War I. While a family's villa is requisitioned by enemy troops, they are forced to intimately confront war's injustice as their involvement with its sinister underpinnings grows more and more complex.
In the autumn of 1917, Refrontolo—a small community north of Venice—is invaded by Austrian soldiers as the Italian army is pushed to the Piave River. The Spada family owns the largest estate in the area, where orphaned seventeen-year-old Paolo lives with his eccentric grandparents, headstrong aunt, and a loyal staff. With the battlefront nearby, the Spada home becomes a bastion of resistance, both clashing and cooperating with the military members imposing on their household. When Paolo is recruited to help with a covert operation, his life is put in irrevocable jeopardy. As he bears witness to violence and hostility between enemies, he grows to understand the value of courage, dignity, family bonds, and patriotism during wartime.
"Wonderfully alive—often terribly so—as a wartime adventure and story of youth arriving at manhood." —The New York Times Book Review
"War and Peace meets The Leopard in a novel set among Italian aristocrats during the Great War . . . Rich and moving." —The Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Italian author Molesini's award-winning debut novel is set during World War I, amid the bitter fighting between the Germans and Italians in northern Italy in 1917 1918. Inspired by his great-aunt's wartime journals, Molesini tells of the Spada family's stoic efforts to survive the German occupation of their villa and their village of Refrontolo, north of Venice. This is a powerful tale of endurance, sacrifice, love, and war's suffering and cruelty, as the villa is looted, village girls are raped, and the resistance effort becomes increasingly risky. Paolo, 17 years old, lives at the villa with his grandparents, his aunt Maria, and their servants, including the mysterious steward Renato. German soldiers are everywhere after the Italian army is routed. Frightened and starving, Paolo, his family, and Renato devise a coded system for passing information to the Italian soldiers. They rescue a downed British pilot and spy on German generals, but when an aristocratic Austrian major takes possession of the villa, the Spadas' resistance activities become even more vulnerable to betrayal. This is an excellent war novel, as well as a powerful depiction of a family's strength and mankind's justification for war's barbarity, movingly told and full of vivid imagery.
Customer Reviews
Excellent
What an unexpected surprise, very good historical novel about WWl Italy.
Elegantly Simple
This first person tale is told simply, directly, and honestly from the point of view of the books main character Paolo. As the youngest of a patrician family in a small town in Italy during WWII, he is uniquely positioned to look at war and family from a sense of both innocence and honesty.
With no reference point to guide him he simply absorbs the events surrounding him and apples what little experience he has, tempered by the wisdom of his family, to make what sense of it he may.
This is a very straightforward read with little use, or need, for allegory or metaphor. We see what they see, hear what they hear, and feel what they feel, and that is more than enough to provide a very satisfying emotional and intellectual ride.
This is both a coming of age story and a depiction of war told from the perspective of the people that war happens too as opposed to the participants. We simply see the soldiers on both sides as flawed characters, doomed and compelled to play a part that can only result in their, ultimately, futile deaths.
The civilians, on the other hand, are depicted as landscape for the war. They live, and struggle, and do their best to continue life with some semblance of self-respect and sense of family but in the end, the war around them strips them of all. The only thing left is the sense of their own insignificance and the futility of resistance. Somehow it seems this realization is both brave and honorable.
This is a book that well deserves reading. You will spend time thinking about it long after you've put it down.