Jukebox Queen of Malta (Paperback)

Alix Wilber of AMAZON.COM: "In the annals of great literature, Malta's one potential claim to fame is that it might have been the location of Calypso's island in The Odyssey; apart from that, this tiny, windswept island midway between Italy and Libya makes itself scarce on the fictional front. But Nicholas Rinaldi brings it front and center in his remarkable second novel, The Jukebox Queen of Malta, and if his descriptions of the place leave you cold, his characters won't. Set during the early years of World War II, the story begins with the arrival of American soldier Rocco Raven, late of Brooklyn, during an air raid. While running from an attacking Messerschmitt, Raven is rescued by Jack Fingerly, a shadowy character who may--or may not--be an Army intelligence officer. To Rocco, a car mechanic in civilian life with a taste for Melville, Nietzsche, and Edgar Allan Poe, nothing about Malta makes sense--except his feelings for Melita Azzard, the eponymous heroine whom he meets during one of the incessant bombings that punctuate life on the island:

There was a freedom to the way she moved, a confidence and self-assurance. She paused to look up as yet another Stuka swept by, this one trailing a plume of black smoke from its fuselage. Then she looked back, over her shoulder, and saw him coming along half a block behind her.

Though the romance between Rocco and Melita is at the heart of the novel, Rinaldi has more than wartime love on his mind. His island is a marvelous place populated by unhappy pilots who get promoted every time they're shot down; repairmen who have turned jukeboxes into a wartime industry; old men who dream of a "Greater Malta" composed of an annexed Italy ("Sicily we don't want, it's too full of thugs and mafiosi. Rome we give to the pope, but the rest of Italy is ours"); and ordinary people who carry on their quotidian lives in the midst of not-so-quotidian carnage. There's a dreamy, disturbing quality to this novel, as though Catch-22 and Alice in Wonderland met and married. Rocco blames it on the island: "Malta was doing this--everything shifting, turning, uncertain"; the reader, however, knows better. This jewel of a novel owes everything to Nicholas Rinaldi's tilted imagination and considerable prose talents." --Alix Wilber

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: "Just when you think there are no new genres, along comes the poet and novelist Nicholas Rinaldi with what might be called an incendiary-pastoral novel of life during the Axis bombardment of Malta... World War II is big right now, but Rinaldi is not out to glorify it. If anything, he undercuts the recent reverence with humor, philosophical speculation, and a consistent awareness of the way that military designs acquire folly as they filter though the ranks." --Tom Drury

THE NEW YORK TIMES: "...a funny, melancholy, romantic, disturbing, character-rich window on the war... Rinaldi handles the love affair between Rocco and Melita with a patient sort of prudence and around it weaves a marvelous tapestry of Malta trapped in the ludicrous drama of war... With Rocco and Melita at the center, Rinaldi follows events on Malta to a moving and satisfying end in a novel that upholds a literary tradition of the war and adds to it as well." --Richard Bernstein

FROM THE LIBRARY JOURNAL(Starred Review) "This masterful second novel paints a rich and compelling portrait of the war-torn island, serving as a literary counterpoint to the modern-day madness in Kosovo. More readable than Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, it is no less a skilled tour de force and equally prize-worthy. Heartily recommended."

FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: "In fluid prose and with subtle psychological insight, Rinaldi writes of wartime love as a kind of complex anesthetic, or as a soul-saving form of amnesia during violent times... Readers may find echoes of Louis De Bernieres's Correlli's Mandolin here, in the juxtaposition of local history, island romance and senseless violence, but Rinaldi's voice is distinct in its honest portrayal of a people--long deprived of food, information and entertainment--struggling to reconnect to the world...This is a compelling tale of lovers straining to hear the music through the din of a war-ravaged planet."

FROM JOSEPH HELLER: "A beguiling, romantic story in an illuminating and surprising setting." --Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22

FROM RICHARD RUSSO: "I hope this year will offer us another novel as smart and hilarious and magical as Nicholas Rinaldi's The Jukebox Queen of Malta, but I'm not holding my breath." --Richard Russo, author of Straight Man and Nobody's Fool

FROM DAILY TELEGRAPH: "Much to enjoy...Rinaldi has tremendous fun evoking the rich cultural pudding that was Malta in 1942, its weird combination of superstition, fatalism and grafted-on anglophilia, of ricotta and stiff upper lip." --Patrick Gale

FROM MAIL ON SUNDAY: "Under the heat and the hammering of bombs, Rinaldi paints the essence of the Second World War in exciting miniature." --David Hughes --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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