- Paperback: 200 pages
- Publisher: Pushkin Press; 1 edition (30 Jun 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1906548072
- ISBN-13: 978-1906548070
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 12.4 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 780,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
The greatest addition to Italian literature for a very long time. --Il Dominicale
Pietro Grossi has written three exemplary tales three stories that you wished you had written yourself. --La Repubblica
His passion for Hemingway, Faulkner and Philip Roth can be seen in this simple, precise and intense writing. --Il Giornale
Pietro Grossi has written three exemplary tales three stories that you wished you had written yourself. --La Repubblica
His passion for Hemingway, Faulkner and Philip Roth can be seen in this simple, precise and intense writing. --Il Giornale
Product Description
Three stories, three portraits of young men learning the realities of adult life. Boxing takes us into the world of gyms, a world of bodies, of nerves stretched to the limit, of sacrifice and challenge. Two young men confront each other in the fight of their lives. One of them is well-to-do, a model student whose skills have never been put to the test. The other, although poor and deaf, is stubborn and determined . Now they face the ultimate test, the encounter on which not only their present, but their future depends. Horses takes into the wide open spaces of the countryside. Here, two brothers, both given horses by their father, confront each other sensing that two different destinies are opening up for them. The Monkey, is about the fragility of identity, the desire to escape it and disappear. When Nico discovers that his boyhood friend Pietro has made the sudden, shocking decision to become a monkey, he is led to question the basis on which he has lived his own life. In Fists, Pietro Grossi has written three epics of the everyday, in which his characters, bound together by fate, struggle to find a meaning in human existence.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I had never heard of Pietro Grossi before seeing this book, which is a slim and handsome volume from the Pushkin Press - experts in translations of European classics old and new. A quick scan of his biography revealed that he was born in 1978 and has won several prizes in Italy. His author's picture shows twinkly eyes and a nice smile, also a marked resemblance to Mark Owen from Take That, (with added straggly beard). Apparently he reveres Hemingway and J D Salinger; I'm a latecomer to reading Hemingway having read and enjoyed several over the past year so it boded well.
Fists is a set of three stories about boys transforming into young men and their emergence into adulthood. They are suffused with the nascent whiff of testosterone, combined with uncertainty about what lies ahead, but also an amount of devil may care attitude. The three tales also increase in the age of their leads: from boys barely into adolescence in the first, teenagers ready to become men in the second, and those who are just the other side and no longer boys in the final one.
The titular first story, Fists is about boxing. A nerdy rich lad does a deal with his mother - he will learn the piano and do his schoolwork without complaining if she will let him box. She agrees, but she won't let him fight. He turns out to be talented and emulates Ali, being known as the Dancer in the ring. Another talented but solid young boxer, the Goat, who happens to be deaf, hears (sorry!) about him and wants to fight - it will be match of their lives.
Told entirely in Dancer's voice, this is pure boy's own stuff. It catches the rhythm of the gym, the banter between the coaches, the tension of the fight and the euphoria of a well-aimed punch. I always feel that I shouldn't enjoy boxing, yet you can get caught up in the sheer primeval thrill of it all. If the boxing was Hemingway, the throwaway last paragraph was very much the sort of thing Holden Caulfield would have said.
Horses is next, in which a father gets his own back on two naughty teenage brothers by giving them each a horse to look after. While Natan immediately sees his horse purely as a means of escape, Daniel is more pragmatic and decides to learn about the creatures. Daniel soon becomes an expert, and when he buys a sick horse for a song that was otherwise going to the abattoir and then cures it, little does he know that the previous owner will feel cheated. Daniel learns a lesson from the school of hard knocks, and in doing so earns the respect of his brother.
In the final story The Monkey, Nico gets a call from the sister of his childhood friend Piero, asking him to come home and visit her brother who has suddenly starting acting like a monkey. Nico, while not convinced about the monkey business, is lured there by thoughts of seeing Maria again, rather than going to Naples to sort out his relationship with his girlfriend. When he gets home, he finds his parents are acting rather differently since he's left home, and that Piero is indeed becoming a monkey.
"Piero has started acting like a monkey."
"Mm," said Nico's mother. "How nice."
Nico gave his mother a puzzled look. "Not really," he said.
"Oh," his mother said. Then she stopped for a moment. "I'm sorry, in what way?"
"Some time this summer he suddenly flipped and started acting like a monkey."
"What do you mean, `like a monkey'?"
"Like a monkey: he crouches on the ground, grunts and smiles in a lopsided way like a chimpanzee."
Nico's mother looked at her son with her mouth open in surprise, and Nico caught himself thinking that it was her most genuine expression since she had opened the door. Then she started stirring the vegetables again.
"I always said he was a strange boy," she said.
Nico's reactions feel very real, from his initial selfishness to his studied ambivalence later rather than answer the questions his friend's condition generates. His parents, who are enjoying their empty nest too much, also confuse him. There's only one solution...
In these three stories, Grossi captures boys' youthful exuberance and transition into more serious young men looking for their place in the world perfectly, aided by a slick and witty translation - the dialogue is particularly strong. He has picked his heroes well, and produced a dramatic and entertaining set of tales that make him an author to look out for in the future. It's certainly inspired me to read more Hemingway, and I may have to revisit The Catcher in the Rye which I haven't read since I was a teenager too.
Fists is a set of three stories about boys transforming into young men and their emergence into adulthood. They are suffused with the nascent whiff of testosterone, combined with uncertainty about what lies ahead, but also an amount of devil may care attitude. The three tales also increase in the age of their leads: from boys barely into adolescence in the first, teenagers ready to become men in the second, and those who are just the other side and no longer boys in the final one.
The titular first story, Fists is about boxing. A nerdy rich lad does a deal with his mother - he will learn the piano and do his schoolwork without complaining if she will let him box. She agrees, but she won't let him fight. He turns out to be talented and emulates Ali, being known as the Dancer in the ring. Another talented but solid young boxer, the Goat, who happens to be deaf, hears (sorry!) about him and wants to fight - it will be match of their lives.
Told entirely in Dancer's voice, this is pure boy's own stuff. It catches the rhythm of the gym, the banter between the coaches, the tension of the fight and the euphoria of a well-aimed punch. I always feel that I shouldn't enjoy boxing, yet you can get caught up in the sheer primeval thrill of it all. If the boxing was Hemingway, the throwaway last paragraph was very much the sort of thing Holden Caulfield would have said.
Horses is next, in which a father gets his own back on two naughty teenage brothers by giving them each a horse to look after. While Natan immediately sees his horse purely as a means of escape, Daniel is more pragmatic and decides to learn about the creatures. Daniel soon becomes an expert, and when he buys a sick horse for a song that was otherwise going to the abattoir and then cures it, little does he know that the previous owner will feel cheated. Daniel learns a lesson from the school of hard knocks, and in doing so earns the respect of his brother.
In the final story The Monkey, Nico gets a call from the sister of his childhood friend Piero, asking him to come home and visit her brother who has suddenly starting acting like a monkey. Nico, while not convinced about the monkey business, is lured there by thoughts of seeing Maria again, rather than going to Naples to sort out his relationship with his girlfriend. When he gets home, he finds his parents are acting rather differently since he's left home, and that Piero is indeed becoming a monkey.
"Piero has started acting like a monkey."
"Mm," said Nico's mother. "How nice."
Nico gave his mother a puzzled look. "Not really," he said.
"Oh," his mother said. Then she stopped for a moment. "I'm sorry, in what way?"
"Some time this summer he suddenly flipped and started acting like a monkey."
"What do you mean, `like a monkey'?"
"Like a monkey: he crouches on the ground, grunts and smiles in a lopsided way like a chimpanzee."
Nico's mother looked at her son with her mouth open in surprise, and Nico caught himself thinking that it was her most genuine expression since she had opened the door. Then she started stirring the vegetables again.
"I always said he was a strange boy," she said.
Nico's reactions feel very real, from his initial selfishness to his studied ambivalence later rather than answer the questions his friend's condition generates. His parents, who are enjoying their empty nest too much, also confuse him. There's only one solution...
In these three stories, Grossi captures boys' youthful exuberance and transition into more serious young men looking for their place in the world perfectly, aided by a slick and witty translation - the dialogue is particularly strong. He has picked his heroes well, and produced a dramatic and entertaining set of tales that make him an author to look out for in the future. It's certainly inspired me to read more Hemingway, and I may have to revisit The Catcher in the Rye which I haven't read since I was a teenager too.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Really looked forward to this but am mystified as to how it garnered so many awards - Boxing is by far the best story of three, building the tension steadily, and shows real promise but the other two stories are make-weights. Perhaps it's the translation, but there are some truly awkward similes 'a look full of unspoken feelings that darted out of their thoughts like carts going down hill' the following paragraph loads no less an three on top of each other, the final one being the absurd: 'he was like a Greek statue in motion'.
The second story Horses feels like a lengthy allegory - possibly about the risks of commitment, but aside from a genuine moment of drama the characterisation is flat. The final story The Monkey is glossed on the jacket as being about the 'fragility of identity' but text doesn't support this reading, or go as far to suggest it. It seems to be about the different paths and opportunities that life offers, but the jokey, slightly surreal tone seems at odds with any desire to convey anything beyond 'other people are a bit of a mystery aren't they?'
Grossi shows real talent on more than one occasion - it would be a mistake to write him off on the basis of the last two stories - and I have hopes that the best he has to offer is yet to come. He is a contender but to describe him as 'the greatest addition to Italian literature for some time' says more about the present state of Italian literature than the success or failure of Grossi's own stories.
The second story Horses feels like a lengthy allegory - possibly about the risks of commitment, but aside from a genuine moment of drama the characterisation is flat. The final story The Monkey is glossed on the jacket as being about the 'fragility of identity' but text doesn't support this reading, or go as far to suggest it. It seems to be about the different paths and opportunities that life offers, but the jokey, slightly surreal tone seems at odds with any desire to convey anything beyond 'other people are a bit of a mystery aren't they?'
Grossi shows real talent on more than one occasion - it would be a mistake to write him off on the basis of the last two stories - and I have hopes that the best he has to offer is yet to come. He is a contender but to describe him as 'the greatest addition to Italian literature for some time' says more about the present state of Italian literature than the success or failure of Grossi's own stories.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
"That's what growing up means: realizing how things really are. If you think about it, it's as fascinating as it is sad."
5 Dec 2011
Amazon Verified Purchase
Because the three works in this collection ("Fists," "Horses," and "The Monkey") occupy 52, 45 and 41 pages respectively, some critics want to consign them to the category of the novella. I reject that label. It is too easily misunderstood as a warning to the reader to expect an awkward or forbidding reading experience -- that the work will not have the quick digestibility of a short story nor the embracing sweep of a novel. Instead, I think the pieces of Pietro Grossi included in FISTS are best considered simply as "stories."
All three of these tales boast an uncommon degree of "readability." Grossi's unadorned prose drives forward a trio of plots that, while wildly different, share the common theme of young men discovering themselves at crossroads in their lives. Most notably in the title story, the reader is carried into an engrossing story you will long remember.
The first story, "Fists," is the only one told in the first person, and the winning personality of the unnamed, adolescent narrator grabs you from the start. Though he is at heart "studious, nerdy, conventional, obedient," echoes of Holden Caulfield can be heard in his rebellious talk ("I hated the piano. I hated Mozart and Bach and that deaf freak Beethoven") and his simultaneous, sentimental acquiescence ("I don't know, maybe if you convince yourself of something, in the end you get it"). His major act of rebellion that sets the plot in motion is demanding his mother permit him to take boxing lessons. She reluctantly agrees. Soon enough, as a amateur junior welterweight, he excels in sparring, acquires the nickname "Dancer," and is lavished with praise ("so accurate and fast and technical"). But he remains ambivalent about fighting a regulation bout -- until, that is, he watches the work of someone with an opposite style ("all hunched and as closed up as a ball of granite").
Midpoint in the narrative, training begins for the 7-round fight between the Dancer and the Goat, and even if you've had your fill of "Rocky" movies I defy you not to be swept up in the momentum. Boxing stories of course can sink under the weight of metaphorical and symbolic meaning -- life, fate, destiny and all the rest. Yet Grossi masterfully avoids cliché and nimbly negotiates through the formula. The author keeps the reader's focus on the uneasy transition from child to man. As the young narrator explains: "Suddenly reality had put itself back together in front of my eyes just as it was, at its own speed, and that terrified me."
The second story, "Horses," is set in an unspecified territory and traces the path to maturity of two adolescent brothers whose father has given each of them a horse. Here the code of masculinity takes its cues from the American West. Elements in the story reminded me, favorably, of John Steinbeck's The Red Pony (Twentieth-Century Classics) and Denis Johnson's Train Dreams: A Novella. Some readers may say Grossi tries to stuff too many ideas into this framework, but I myself was entranced from start to finish.
The final story, "The Monkey," again switches setting, style and tone. In contemporary Rome, a thirty-something but still adolescent screenwriter is asked to come to the aid of childhood friend. As in many a sex comedy (especially those of the late 1950s and early 1960s), Nico is a man lost among women, frazzled by his needy girlfriend, his wacky mother, his abusive female agent, and his too-understanding ex-wife. Grossi orchestrates the proceedings with droll wit and laugh-out-loud vignettes (he's a master of the satiric telephone conversation).
If there is a lesson common to all three parts of this splendid book, it is found in the observation of one of the brothers in "Horses":
"Life was always like that, Daniel thought: something was always missing, whereas the nice thing about stories was that everything that should be there was there."
All three of these tales boast an uncommon degree of "readability." Grossi's unadorned prose drives forward a trio of plots that, while wildly different, share the common theme of young men discovering themselves at crossroads in their lives. Most notably in the title story, the reader is carried into an engrossing story you will long remember.
The first story, "Fists," is the only one told in the first person, and the winning personality of the unnamed, adolescent narrator grabs you from the start. Though he is at heart "studious, nerdy, conventional, obedient," echoes of Holden Caulfield can be heard in his rebellious talk ("I hated the piano. I hated Mozart and Bach and that deaf freak Beethoven") and his simultaneous, sentimental acquiescence ("I don't know, maybe if you convince yourself of something, in the end you get it"). His major act of rebellion that sets the plot in motion is demanding his mother permit him to take boxing lessons. She reluctantly agrees. Soon enough, as a amateur junior welterweight, he excels in sparring, acquires the nickname "Dancer," and is lavished with praise ("so accurate and fast and technical"). But he remains ambivalent about fighting a regulation bout -- until, that is, he watches the work of someone with an opposite style ("all hunched and as closed up as a ball of granite").
Midpoint in the narrative, training begins for the 7-round fight between the Dancer and the Goat, and even if you've had your fill of "Rocky" movies I defy you not to be swept up in the momentum. Boxing stories of course can sink under the weight of metaphorical and symbolic meaning -- life, fate, destiny and all the rest. Yet Grossi masterfully avoids cliché and nimbly negotiates through the formula. The author keeps the reader's focus on the uneasy transition from child to man. As the young narrator explains: "Suddenly reality had put itself back together in front of my eyes just as it was, at its own speed, and that terrified me."
The second story, "Horses," is set in an unspecified territory and traces the path to maturity of two adolescent brothers whose father has given each of them a horse. Here the code of masculinity takes its cues from the American West. Elements in the story reminded me, favorably, of John Steinbeck's The Red Pony (Twentieth-Century Classics) and Denis Johnson's Train Dreams: A Novella. Some readers may say Grossi tries to stuff too many ideas into this framework, but I myself was entranced from start to finish.
The final story, "The Monkey," again switches setting, style and tone. In contemporary Rome, a thirty-something but still adolescent screenwriter is asked to come to the aid of childhood friend. As in many a sex comedy (especially those of the late 1950s and early 1960s), Nico is a man lost among women, frazzled by his needy girlfriend, his wacky mother, his abusive female agent, and his too-understanding ex-wife. Grossi orchestrates the proceedings with droll wit and laugh-out-loud vignettes (he's a master of the satiric telephone conversation).
If there is a lesson common to all three parts of this splendid book, it is found in the observation of one of the brothers in "Horses":
"Life was always like that, Daniel thought: something was always missing, whereas the nice thing about stories was that everything that should be there was there."
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