I Hadn't Understood

January 30, 2012
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.

February 15, 2012
Despite the less-than-scintillating title, De Silva has crafted a sharp-edged comedic novel of a semi-hapless Italian lawyer, Vincenzo Malinconico. Vincenzo is 42, and his life is unraveling. He's an unsuccessful counselor with a failed marriage (to Nives, a psychologist) and two adolescent children he doesn't understand. But then things begin to happen. He has an opportunity to defend a member of the Mafia, Mimmo 'o Burzone--though at first he turns down the case. He then spends some time brushing up on his law skills, which have sadly deteriorated from years of desuetude. About this same time he finds out that a knockout celebrity lawyer, Alessandra Persiano, might be lusting after him--and he can't quite believe his good luck. But the book doesn't present a tight narrative line. It's really about the comic perception of Vincenzo, whose skewed vision of the world is both insightful and wry. Early in the novel, for example, he notes: "I'm an inconsistent narrator. I'm not a narrator you can rely on. I'm too interested in incidental considerations that can take you off track"--and, one might add here, way off track. He fantasizes for pages about what he'd like to say to his estranged wife, and when he finally beds the comely Alessandra, he starts thinking about St. Francis of Assisi. De Silva's strength lies in the creation of Vincenzo's unique and self-deprecating voice; his awareness of his status as a cuckold (because his wife is having an affair with Emilio, an egregious architect); and his ultimate triumph over the pettiness that has consistently marred his life. Comic exuberance on a grand scale.

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