Editorial Reviews
Small Press Review (USA)
... The narrator of Albert Russos new novel, Zapinette, is a little girl of our time, very knowledgeable about the outside world, but also enormously ignorant of the language commonly used about it, and, as a result, very funny. Her phonetic transcriptions of what she hears and her malapropisms make of her a powerfully distorting lens but, strangely enough, also a reliable witness.
Albert Russo has thankfully spared us all the clichs of the genre, and what we read in his novel is a genuine portrait of a genuine child. Zapinette tours through Italy with her uncle, but it is obvious that she has not read Baedeker. She tells us about some of her impressions, as her utter boredom at a concert at the Roman ampitheatre in Verona, with a prima donna as big as a cow, or some anecdotes linked to places that are already getting blurred in her memory. What really interests her is how many ice-cream cones her uncle buys her everyday.
Zapinette is a child of our time. Her nickname tells it all: she absolutely loves television. And she is in the novel the echo of the outside world, which she understands in a confused and patchy fashion. She is at the same time the recipient and the victim of the information poured out by the media and which, on account of its very nature, can never become knowledge or Culture. Zapinette's references are often humourous or unexpected, full of the anarchy that her nickname reveals to us. She talks about Bosnia and John Paul II, politicians and media stars, with the same kind of ignorant confidence. If the young lady is surprisingly convincing, it is because in this domain as well as in that of memory, Albert Russo has given us a truthful portrait of a child of the nineteen-nineties.
World Literature Today , USA
... This book is a great ramble, rather like a chapterless Montaigne popping from one subject to the next, drawing connections no one else would ever have thought of, but with Groucho Marx, say, passing on hints over the writers shoulder as to how to go about it. We readers chuckle along and even burst out laughing as we advance through this hilarious book, but we gather, we too willy-nilly, the serious messages underlying the frolicking bounce and jocular mode of the writing.
Zapinette Video
Zapinette Video,Albert Russo,Xlibris Corporation,0738800147,Fiction,Fiction - General,General,Horror,Humorous
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