I feel like I am beginning to say this every week, but the authors of these books seem to have an almost sneaky way of illustrating and wrapping their worlds around you to keep you engaged and invested in their stories. I feel like throughout different languages and varying subjects, romance authors have an extraordinary ability to envelop readers in the setting of the novel with such vivid and striking imagery. Even through the mundane, their depiction acts to do their home country a service, and if not for the story you might want to stay just for the visualizations.
Now onto the elephant in the room. This book gave me mixed feelings while I read more and more, but not to prompt me to stop reading altogether, but more a feeling of uncomfortableness (Think of the face you make when you eat something bitter). As a person much older than Agostino, while reading I wanted to spare him somehow of his naive nature and strange circumstances (I can’t do anything about his Freudian tendencies though). It was weird for me to read about a boy who wanted his mom and only had the local gang to educate him, and I felt like the author had to be drawing at least some inspiration from his own life in order to write this book in the detail and with the feelings it had. In a way, it sort of highlighted what the absence of a father figure could mean for a kid, especially in the way that Agostino couldn’t resist the group of other boys, despite the mockery and treatment he took from them. With the novel being short in both text and time period (Spanning less than a summer), I can’t help but wonder what kind of person or “man” Agostino eventually became.
After reading I searched up the book to see what others had to say and found out that there was a movie adapted from the book. It feels strange to me that this book could even become a movie as many paragraphs of imagery can be represented with a second of a picture, and there really is not that much that happens in this book in terms of events. I haven’t watched the movie, but I imagine that it could only be worth watching if the feelings of innocence, jealousy, curiosity, and turmoil were truly expressed as they were in the book. 4/5.
For this week’s question, why do you think this book was included in the list of literature for this class?