Sandro Veronesi is the most dazzling pyrotechnic stylist of Italy's upcoming generation. Until now, only one of his novels has been translated into English, the unforgettable and now out-of-print The Force of the Past. But even that wonderful novel can't prepare you for Quiet Chaos. Four years in the writing, this most recent novel is a flat-out masterpiece, so skillfully orchestrated it successfully juggles several dozen plot threads all at once, with astonishing, profoundly moving results.
Veronesi is, above all, a joy to read. His exhilarating, frequently hilarious technique is in the Saramago tradition--blocks of paragraph-less print spanning several pages, with dozens of semicolons and often no period in sight--but in Veronesi's work, these long, luscious, run-on sentences are often audacious literary comic stunts, witty interior monologues of moral struggles, urban angst and candid human observations. There's no one else like him.
The novel opens with a tour-de-force set piece: Pietro Paladini, the narrator, a 43-year-old executive at a cable TV channel, is spending the day surfing with his brother, when he unexpectedly finds himself swimming with Carlo to the rescue of two drowning women. The brothers save the women, but Pietro returns from his heroic act to discover an ambulance in front of his home and his own wife dead.
Suddenly a widower, unable to connect with his own grief, Pietro begins to spend every day parked in front of his 10-year-old daughter's school. He watches the windows of her rooms in the building, waiting for Claudia to wave, and attends her gymnastics team practices instead of going to the office, where tensions and anxieties are mounting in the face of an impending corporate merger to create the biggest telecommunications group in the world.
As more and more people find out about the widower parked every day in front of his daughter's school, others are drawn to him to share their pain--his brother, his sister-in-law, his work associates, the financial titans of the merger, an old man in a nearby window, a mother with a Down syndrome child, a woman with a dog.
These characters grow and change before our eyes, deepening and opening up with surprising new dimensions, all connected thematically to Pietro's inability to grieve over his loss. With a narrative spanning three months, from a lingering, scorching summer to an Italy whitened by a snowstorm, the novel builds steadily in intensity to its deeply moving, resonant, perfectly pitched finale. Like a literary Fellini, Veronesi brings to life the larger-than-life human comedy as only an Italian would dare, uproariously funny in the face of stark tragedy. It's a reading experience not to be missed.--Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: A dazzling novel about love and loss, uproariously funny in the face of stark tragedy, by one of Italy's most brilliant stylists.