Manzoni has a delightfully snarky style that shines more at the start than towards the end, in a way that translates remarkably well in the modern age. Never treating his characters too seriously, he induces in equal measure comedy and sympathy for these sketches of personality – even caricatures – in a manner that’s difficult to balance well. Reading the book, you imagine a roving camera now trained on one character, now panning across the scenery, now diving into a second character’s bread-and-butter concerns, all the while keeping up a hilarious metafictional narrative reminiscent of The Princess Bride.
Manzoni’s craft is at its sharpest when light-hearted, enabling the reader to acknowledge the issues within society – the inequality between the haves and have-nots, the rampant lawlessness, improper governance – more effectively than a heavy-handed style would have allowed. From the middle of it, however, as the camera loses interest in the individual characters and effects a sombre tone from scenes of plague and suffering, the narrative loses its tightness, to the extent of becoming indulgent in its descriptiveness. With an almost fanatic energy in trying to capture the utter senselessness of sickness and war, the novel has perhaps overreached with its panoramic ambition, and ironically loses us when it needs our sympathy the most. At that point it became more of a historical documentation of the plague than a narrative. So — good for educating yourself on the events in 17th century Italy, not so great for literature. Would have been a better book if it were 10 chapters shorter. (It’s 800+ pages long.)
I’ll give it 3/5 which is also the proportion of how long it should have been over its actual length.
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(Got fed up with how hard it is to see your reviews on Goodreads, and inspired by a friend to put reviews up on a blog instead. I guess I’ll post on both places, to make use of Goodreads’ sorting and aggregation functionality?)
Melody stays a child 