"When you're texting you feel all strategic, but you're simply being impulsive in a whole new way." Texting, he says, gives the illusion of having all the time in the world to craft a perfect response, but that's not true. Malinconico's internal dialogues are droll and maudlin, hilarious and touching. This is a rollicking novel in unexpected ways. When Malinconico's growing sense of haplessness finally erupts into a duel of words that questions both justice and entertainment, the result is a provocative and funny rant that reflects upon how mass media shapes our lives. He becomes a fulcrum in a bizarre stunt in which a grieving father turns a grocery store into an impromptu courtroom on live TV to avenge his son's inadvertent murder by a Mafioso, which actually is comedic.
Vincenzo Malinconico suffers such regard from his kids, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, his fellow lawyers, even from himself. "Hapless" is a word that promises complications, evoking possible comedy but also the potential for uneasy self-reflection - for don't we all fear that someone may, on perhaps not one of our best days, regard us as hapless?
Through it all, he paints a devastating portrait of what it means to be a soldier and a human being.By Diego De Silva, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar. Turner also offers something that is truly rare in a memoir of violent conflicthe sees through the eyes of the enemy, imagining his way into the experience of the other. Across time, he seeks parallels in the histories of others who have gone to war, especially his taciturn grandfather (World War II), father (Cold War), and uncle (Vietnam). Free of self-indulgence or self-glorification, his account combines recollection with the imagination's efforts to make reality comprehensible. In this breathtaking memoir, award-winning poet Brian Turner retraces his war experiencepre-deployment to combat zone, homecoming to aftermath. Now he lies awake each night beside his sleeping wife, imagining himself as a drone aircraft, hovering over the terrains of Bosnia and Vietnam, Iraq and Northern Ireland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the death camps of Europe. In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner crossed the line of departure with a convoy of soldiers headed into the Iraqi desert.
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