Pietro Grossi

A solid literary performance from Pietro Grossi. More style than substance, Grossi's short novel The Break is written in a taut, simple prose that makes it very quick and easy to read. The book breathes well. That said, it was hard to piece together what the point of the story was. The characters are sometimes too lightly drawn and there is a bit of pomposity to the endeavour. Grossi weights everything with metaphor and literary meaning, with everything from the confusing billiards game to road-laying and cooking eggs being analogous to some wider principle of life. Sometimes it feels as though the book isn't deep enough to take the strain.

Even so, the literary performance stays on the side of agreeableness, and the reader can dig out a message by the end: take life as it comes, because you can never gauge with precision where things will fall. Bear in mind it is the reader who has to do the digging, and this won't be satisfactory to many. The book only makes sense after you have read it (the final scene is key), which can make it a frustrating read, but the book's so short and earnest that it's not a futile one.… (mere)

A collection of three bildungsromans of varying quality. Pietro Grossi has an obvious Hemingway influence, and 'Fists', the first and best of the three short stories in this book, is the most enjoyably Hemingway-esque. The honour and challenge of competitive boxing is a fine setting for a coming-of-age story, and Grossi draws on the sport in the same way that Hemingway drew on bullfighting. The story is rather gripping, and the character arcs believable and organic. It also has a heady ending: man's business" indeed.

However, one should not put Grossi on a pedestal alongside Hemingway just yet, as the other two stories in Fists are not as strong. 'Horses' is a good story well-told, but still a step down after the first story. Its ending is also appealingly ambiguous, as one does not know where Natan is going (i.e. is he seeking revenge, despite Daniel's contentment?). 'The Monkey' is rather poor and muddled and its characters less fleshed out (though respect for the Tom Waits reference!). Furthermore, I am not sure whether it was meant to be humorous or profound, or what its moral was.

Overall, Fists demonstrates that Grossi is a writer to take notice of, and I fully intend to read his first full-length novel, The Break. Kudos should also go to Howard Curtis, who translated this book into English seamlessly; the prose loses none of its bracing Hemingway-esque brevity."… (mere)

Sparse and gentle, a short tale of Italian Billiards, inertia, poverty and the prisons we make ourselves.

Dino follows in his fathers footsteps as a stone layer, a repetitive task that makes him ask "How many stones do you think it takes to make a person? " he obsessively plays Italian Billiards and talks dreamily with his wife about packing up and leaving to seek adventure. Of course things are about to change, social unrest and redundancy being only 2.

It could be seen to be too sparse for some, and sometimes a bit formulaic (that ending!) but I found it a quiet and at heart charming book, the fragility and ennui of every day life, our self centred blindness. Characters are carefully constructed brush strokes, just enough there to paint the tale and somehow this fits and is in no way frustrating. They mimic the large dramatic events in Dino's life, rendered background against the small intense moments of life. It's the size that ensures none of this gets tiresome 220 pages of an understated, packed life story.

“I can’t do it. I can’t spend every day in that black shit. It was different before. Before, everything seemed the way it ought to be. Before, I didn’t ask myself any questions"

Recommended to lovers of understated novellas and fans of Italian tales.… (mere)