'The Volunteer' Is A War Story Unlike Any Other
Salvatore Scibona's new novel is a generational saga, an epic of Vietnam and other places rendered in language that makes even simple things sound mythic. But first, a boy is abandoned at an airport.
It begins with a lost child in an airport — a very particular modern nightmare. The boy is hysterical, hungry, wearing a coat patched with peeling tape, his pockets stuffed with cash. When the officials at the Hamburg airport approach him, he speaks no language known to any of them. He has been abandoned there by his father. We know that, but the boy doesn't. He believes that he is just waiting there for his father to return.
This is , the new novel from Salvatore Scibona. It is a war
