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    Persecution: The Friendly Fire of Memories
    Persecution: The Friendly Fire of Memories
    Persecution: The Friendly Fire of Memories
    Ebook425 pages

    Persecution: The Friendly Fire of Memories

    By Alessandro Piperno and Ann Goldstein

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A successful Italian doctor’s idyllic life is shattered by shameful accusations in a novel by the Campiello Prize–winning author of The Worst Intentions.

    In a sprawling villa on the outskirts of Rome, the internationally revered pediatric oncologist Leo Pontecorvo and his family have gathered for dinner. For these exemplary members of Italy’s upper middle-class, the scene is perfect in every way—until a horrifying accusation airs on the evening news concerning Leo Pontecorvo himself. From this point on, nothing will ever be the same.

    An allegation of embezzling would be bad enough, but to the horror of his family, Leo is also said to have seduced his son’s twelve-year-old girlfriend. The spotlight now turned on Leo reveals every mistake, regret, and contradiction of his lifetime. The details of his private and professional life are debated by both friends and foes, ravenous reporters and punctilious prosecutors. Unable to face the suspicious gazes of his wife and children, Leo descends into the basement of his palatial home—a self-imposed exile in which he attempts to piece together the shattered remains of his life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 31, 2012
    ISBN9781609458744
    Persecution: The Friendly Fire of Memories
    Author

    Alessandro Piperno

    Alessandro Piperno was born in Rome in 1972. His 2005 novel, The Worst Intentions, won the Campiello Prize for First Novel and became an instant bestseller in Italy, where Corriere della sera described its author as “a new Marcel Proust.” The New Yorker wrote that The Worst Intentions was a “wickedly scathing début, a coruscating mixture of satire, family epic, Proustian meditation, and erotomaniacal farce.” Piperno is the author of two works of non-fiction. Persecution, the first installment of a diptych entitled The Friendly Fire of Memories, is his long-awaited second novel.

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    Reviews for Persecution

    3.5/5

    24 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Review: 8 of seventy-fiveRating: 3.9* of fiveThe Book Description: In a sprawling villa on the outskirts of Rome, the members of the Pontecorvo family have gathered for dinner. Leo Pontecorvo, an internationally revered pediatric oncologist, is forty-eight. His wife, Rachel, is a physician and the loving mother to Filippo and Samuel, two amiable pre-teens. The evening news is on in the living room but nobody pays it any attention until Dr. Pontecorvo's name surfaces from the background noise and a news item airs that will change the lives of the Pontecorvos forever. Leo Pontecorvo has been publicly accused of a vile crime. A spotlight is turned on him that reveals the mistakes, regrets, and contradictions of a lifetime. Every detail of his private and professional life is about to come under scrutiny, to be debated by both friends and foes, by ravenous reporters and punctilious prosecutors. But Leo could bear all this if it weren't for the suspicious gazes of his wife and children. Surely they, of all people, believe in his innocence! Alessandro Piperno is widely acknowledged as one of today's most talented European novelists. His voice is singular and shocking at times, yet always possessed of tenderness and enormous generosity of heart. His vision is broad and encompassing, his psychological insights penetrating and undeniable. In this deeply felt family drama, Alessandro Piperno paints a broad canvas and fills it with psychologically complex characters whom readers will instantly recognize and never forget.My Review: Words can not only hurt, not only damage...they can kill. They can annihilate, destroy utterly the target of the carelessly spoken or maliciously uttered or calculatedly disseminated words. They can blow up a life, a family, a career, a vocation, they can eviscerate the worthy and worthwhile work a person has done.And what if they're true? What if they're not true? Half true? He said, she said? It doesn't matter at all. Words, when spoken, can only be forgiven but never forgotten.Piperno's novel of a Jewish pediatric oncologist's fall from the pinnacle of his life-saving profession is profoundly unsettling. It is discursive in style, and it is peculiarly intimate because of that. Very few paragraphs lead directly to the subject allegedly at hand, but all of them, each of them, serves to build the image of the Pontecorvo world, that of Dottore Leo, la signora Rachel, the pre-teen boys, Telma the Filipina maid...all these intersecting, interlocking worlds are completely and finally and irrevocably smashed and cannot be restored, only re-formed. The tracks in the thickets of words Piperno creates are like the game spoor a hunter follows, requiring patience and attention to interpret and encouraging the reader, the hunter, to look around carefully, to attend to the landscape as much as the path.Ann Goldstein ably translates the Italian text in such a way as to suggest the varying uses made of familiar and formal address. It's a very hard thing to do, and it's impressive to see the job done so well. Part of the job of a translator is to create the mood of the original in a different idiom...never does Goldstein do this better than in the passages where the snobbery and class-consciousness that Leo faces when others refer to or speak to his wife, daughter of an observant Jew who also happens to be a businessman, in contrast to his more assimilated, haute bourgeois background.I was transported in the reading of this novel, though not to a lovely sweet cotton-candy land of milk and honey. (Frankly, that's always sounded revolting to me. Not to mention sticky.) I was immersed in the life of the disintegrating Pontecorvo family. I emerged after a catharsis feeling, oddly, buoyed up, able to see the shore and feel the water of the sad existence below me support me as I started for solid ground.Europa Editions provided this copy in a Goodreads giveaway.
    • 4/5
      After the first part I thought this was a very well written psychological novel, but in the other three parts it seemed to change genre several times. The end leaves you flabbergasted and without a clue. The author with his last words "to be continued" forces you to read the second part in the hope of obtaining answers. In the meanwhile this first part was an exciting read, reminding me of Ian McEwan.

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    Persecution - Alessandro Piperno

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