Me and You

Starred review from October 10, 2011
Already a bestseller in Italy, Ammaniti’s slim but immensely engaging fourth novel presents Lorenzo Cuni, a precocious 14-year-old desperate for some space of his own. He achieves this respite from reality with “Operation Bunker,” an elaborate ruse whereby his parents believe he is skiing in the Italian Alps, when actually he has secluded himself in the basement of the family’s apartment building. Settling in among dust, sheets, and other items of a “Fifties household amassed in a cellar,” Lorenzo surveys the food and video games he’s stockpiled and hunkers down for a glorious week of self-induced solitary confinement. Lorenzo describes his childhood as a friendless existence, much befitting the diminutive outcast that he’s become, and as narrative sympathy swells, Ammaniti expertly ratchets up the suspense with a rare appearance by half-sister Olivia, 23. Feigning homelessness and a mysterious illness, she joins him in an emotional reunion that soon morphs into a bittersweet, heartbreaking alliance. Both tender and emotionally arresting, Ammaniti’s novel is unforgettable.

January 15, 2012
A boy and girl, family love and family secrets come together in Italian author Ammaniti's latest (As God Commands, 2009, etc.). The author elegizes adolescence fiercely and sympathetically. His 14-year-old hero, Lorenzo Cumi, is a great character, part Young Werther, part Kurt Cobain. In the city of Bernini and Michelangelo, Lorenzo is an artless rebel, diagnosed by a dim shrink with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Actually just alienated, he relieves boredom by bullying. Busted, he retreats, like a Kafka character, into imagining he's an insect; in his case, a sort of SuperBug. Success at soccer gives him new credibility with his schoolmates, and he fantasizes about an invite to a ski trip with the popular gang. It's only a dream, though, so when trip time arrives, Lorenzo lies to his parents that he is going and retreats for a week to a forgotten cellar in his parents' home. Bliss--and he won't be missed. Solaced by Nutella, PlayStation and Stephen King novels, he's living Introvert Idyll until his mom keeps calling his cell phone, demanding to speak to the mom who's hosting the ski jaunt. And then an unlikely conspirator intervenes. Just in time to fake a convincing mom voice, Lorenzo's long-lost sister Olivia stumbles into the bunker. Luscious at 24, Olivia's just as cool, or even coldly confident, as the girl Lorenzo had once had a crush on, but there's something now different about her. A fear in her eyes. Track marks on her arms. And as this odd, intense Roman holiday unwinds, brother and sister begin to reconnect--and try to rescue each other. Scary, lovely and at last a heartbreaker.

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September 1, 2011

Social outcast Lorenzo tells his anxious parents that he's been invited on the ski trip with the snooty kids, then persuades his mother to drop him off a block from the train station so that he can slip back home and live unbothered for a week in a secret cellar in the family's apartment building. All's well until his obnoxious half-sister materializes. A best seller in Italy, and--here's the rub--Bernardo Bertolucci is directing the film version.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2012
Reprising the childish perspective and sinister psychological freightedness of Ammaniti's international best-seller I'm Not Scared (2002), this novel, already a best-seller in Italy, sees Ammaniti in familiar form. Its world is a narrow one, constrained by the perspective of antisocial Lorenzo Cumi and made up, for the most part, of only the cellar room he inhabits while his parents think he is on a trip with friends. Lorenzo, diagnosed at one point with narcissistic personality disorder, is delineated with sensitivity and skill. He is 14, uninterested in or incapable of connecting with people, and eager for a week's solitary refuge. When his troubled half sister, Olivia, shows up, though, they are both forced, rather dramatically, to confront and perhaps begin to overcome their respective weaknesses and evasions. The pacing of the novel is odd and sometimes forced, and there is something a bit false and impoverished at its center, though that could charitably be seen as an authentic expression of the narrator's sociopathic tendencies. Still, its sensational emotionalism and claustrophobic intensity make this an undeniably engaging (and quick) read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)