Book Review: As God Commands



Thirteen-year-old Cristiano Zena adores his father's longtime pal and working mate, Quattro Formaggi, nicknamed after his favorite pizza and daily diet. Quattro Formaggi is locally famous as Electric Man for having survived his fishing line getting caught on overhead electrical cables, leaving him with a staggering gait and facial spasms. His personal pride and obsession is a room-filling miniature Nativity scene. He's the village idiot, but he also knows how to cut ignition wires and steal cars.

Cristiano's skinhead father, Rino, is a pathological brute whose idea of funny is to make his son miss the school bus and who thinks nothing of ordering his son to shoot a dog whose fits of barking are keeping him awake at night. The only thing that keeps Rino law-abiding is his one fear in the world: the social worker who has the power to take his son away from him. As the novel opens, Rino, Quattro Formaggi and their pal Danilo discover that they have all lost their construction jobs to African and East European workers and come up with an insane scheme: to bash through the wall of the local bank with a tractor and steal the ATM.

Niccolo Ammaniti is one of the bright stars of modern Italian fiction, the author of the thrilling 200-page tour de force I'm Not Scared, which he adapted into a prize-winning film. As God Commands is another exercise in nail-biting suspense by a master at raising anxiety, but on a much larger canvas. From a cluster of a half a dozen houses in the middle of nowhere for his first novel, he now takes on the entire village of Varrano, drawing on characters from all economic levels and social strata.

Told in 244 short chapters and juggling over 90 characters, the central set piece is a highly orchestrated disaster night, when a storm hits Varrano and multiple plot lines intersect resulting in several deaths: the village loony proves he isn't harmless, the social worker betrays his best friend, a stoned girl on a motorbike decides at the last minute to take the forbidden road through the San Rocco woods, an African immigrant crosses the road at the wrong time and a drunken divorced man, abandoned by his friends, decides to commit a robbery by himself.

It's compulsive reading, with the helpless reader gobbling up hundred-page chunks at a time, the stuff of soap opera told with gusto by an Italian Dickens, in a plot that's never going where you think it's going, plunging along eagerly from climax to climax, littered with poetic moments and human touches. Ammaniti offers up a fascinating gallery of flawed, unpredictable human beings pondering how their impulsive mistakes, unexpected opportunities, misunderstandings and defiant braveries reveal the inscrutable will of God, who "comes down hardest on those who are weakest."--Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: A story of suspense and surprise by an Italian Dickens, filled with flawed and sometimes brave people.

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