Live Bait: A Novel

It is rare when it happens but when it does you forget never that time. The time when you walked down the stairs at MOMA and saw Brancusi's sculpture "Flight" and turned a corner and saw a De Chirico painting, walked into a movie theater on a whim and saw "The Seventh Seal," Antonioni's "Blow Up" or Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" or came across Ezra Pound, Hemingway, or Celine, these are moments when the unexpected enhances the wonder of these works. So it was with me again with Fabio Genovese's "Live Bait."This is a masterpiece. It is the picaresque story of a superbly comic anti-hero 19 year old Fiorenzo and his three friends from a backwater Tuscan village called Muglione. Their greatest aspirations are to be a successful heavy metal band and to leave the town, in that order. there are many obstacles and detours along the involving fireworks, fishing, girls, sex or lack of knowledge concerning, bicycling championships,fishing even the Vatican.Now if this sounds like farce, it is not. Farce cannot be great art. This is a sublimely written satirical masterpiece. reminiscent of a Max Beerbohn or Kingsley Amis but with the laughter volume up because there are moments,, quite a few actually, when the reader will actually burst out laughing. Now if you had any difficulty with those two gentlemen because of their subject matter coming from another milieu i.e. England be assured that this is not the case. This story's milieu while being set in modern day Italy is set in a pop culture Italy and for good or bad, pop culture means American pop culture, so to the American reader, the obsession with heavy metal bands, teenage angst, the appropriate t shirt to wear, will not only ring true but familiar.Yet the writer never lets us forget that we are in a modern day Italian village that has not totally caught up with the times. the elderly men still play cards and drink their wine while taking over the painfully under-utilized "youth center" much to the chagrin of Tiziana its youthful administrator who doubles as the typical Italian goddess and symbol of the plight of modern day educated provincial Italian women. Mirko, the eighth grade bicycling phenomena introduces us to the world of European bicycle racing and what his success means to a backwater village. And always the leitmotif of the irrigation canals, always the canals which dominate the region and the environment.Yes it is all there. Each character has its own personality and unique depth from childhood dreams and tragedies, to middle age disillusionment and old age stubbornness that makes us cry and laugh with them. At times ribald like Boccaccio and at other times sentimental like Giovanni Guareschi in his Don Camillo stories, this book will stun and haunt you.At 336 pages the book is lengthy but I would not omit a single one, only wishing there were more. If there is one quibble I have, and this is not with the author, it is that in my opinion the cover of the book on a Kindle is cheap looking and not indicative of what the book holds.Now if only his publisher can generated the amount of publicity and the platform this book merits, the reading public will be well served.

Desperate to find overall meaning in this life, but has to settle for the day to day events that bring suffering and happiness, disconnected from any hope in a future world. Well written as an authentic Italian biography. Subtexts were brilliantly placed throughout. Highly recommended.

still halfway through but super enjoyable and LOL funny at times.

Even if you have spent three weeks in a Tuscan villa, eaten lunch at Harry's Bar in Venice, read all the novels of Moravia and Pavese, and seen every film of Federico Fellini, chances are good that you have never encountered an Italian like Fiorenzo, the unforgettable "hero" - and I use the term loosely - of Fabio Genovesi's novel "Live Bait" ("Esche vive"), wonderfully translated by Michael Moore. Fiorenzo is a 19-year-old motormouth, metalhead, fisherman, cycling enthusiast, and self-described "moron," whose major accomplishment in life thus far has been to blow off his right hand with a cherry bomb while trying to stun fish in a ditch near the crummy little Tuscan town where he lives. Needless to say, that was a very bad scene, but Fiorenzo has taken it in stride - or pretends to. He makes no secret of the fact that he takes a certain amount of pride in the manner in which he has managed, despite the accident, to learn "lots of important things" - how to tie his shoes, wash up, and eat with one hand. Some people think he is a loser, but he is not sure that he cares. His hand may be gone, but his voice is still there, and it is the voice that matters in the end. Holy fool that he is, Fiorenzo likes to sing, but what he really likes to do is talk, and it is the talk, the tone of voice, the manner in which he dreams aloud that stick in the mind. That voice is like no other this reader has encountered in Italian literature. Think Huckleberry Finn, Augie March or Holden Caulfield. Like those legendary dreamers, Fiorenzo ultimately comes to understand that all soul journeys are destined to end up exactly where they begin and that maybe - maybe - that is the way life is supposed to be. Introduce yourself to Fiorenzo. Enter his world. But be warned. If you do, you will never think of Italy in the same way again.

I picked this book up on a whim at my local independent bookstore and I really wasn’t expecting much. But from the moment I started reading it I was blown away and completely taken hostage by the main character Fiorenzo. This is one of the most unique, visceral, raw characters to come along in literature in a long time. His voice, sings, he has a lot to say, plenty of angst and anger but also plenty of charm and perhaps most important a lot of guts! One reviewer here compared him to Holden Caulfield and that is the one that rings most true to me as well, yet at the same time Fiorenzo begs off any comparisons. This isn’t middle class America but rather a small town in Italy. This is a town where Fiorenzo’s father spends days fishing in the town’s ditch, where Fiorenzo sleeps in the bait shop falling asleep to the sounds of maggots squishing together in their containers, where old men hang out at the town’s youth center drinking wine and pretending to be the town’s guardians, and the town’s cycling hero, Mirko, is afraid to win because every time he wins he loses. There is also Tiziana, the older woman and administrator of the youth center who bewitches Fiorenzo. There are his two untrustworthy friends from his metal band, Metal Devastation. Yet, Fabio Genovesi pulls it all together miraculously. I keep trying to think of another book that I have read recently or even this year that I have liked as much as Live Bait and nothing comes to mind. Before Live Bait I read Bone Clocks with its hundreds of reviews and mostly glowing reviews. I thought it was a huge disappointment and I will take Live Bait and its three reviews, now four, over Bone Clocks and its hundreds of reviews anyday!

Live Bait is set in a fictional inland Tuscan town of Muglione. It is a sleepy, unattractive town; the main recreations seem to be fishing in the irrigation ditches and cycling. The cover, showing a stunning coastal town is somewhat misleading.The star of the story is 19 year old Fiorenzo. He had been a cyclist until he lost his right hand in a fishing accident. Fiorenzo, who narrates most chapters in first person, is acutely self-conscious of his missing hand and resents the inconveniences it presents – whilst trying to persuade both himself and the reader that he is managing with stoicism.Fiorenzo’s father is a cycling coach and he was disappointed when Fiorenzo was no longer going to be a competitive rider. However, his disappointment is tempered by the arrival of a young cycling prodigy, Mirko, who seems to be pushing Fiorenzo out of the nest. As the novel progresses, Mirko starts to become the second significant character, sometimes narrating his own chapters and sharing his school essays.The third main character is Tiziana, Mirko’s thirty year old teacher. Tiziana is very bored and Fiorenzo is in need of, um, companionship… Tiziana narrates variously through her blog and through the irritating use of second person present. She pops up after several chapters of Fiorenzo narration and it is not immediately clear what is going on or that this is a new narrator. Tiziana offers Fiorenzo an opportunity to explore his angst, but as a character she feels like a bit of a dead weight. All the spark is between Fiorenzo and Mirko.So what actually happens? The answer is not much. This is a kind of bored teenager in a village kind of rambling – the kind of thing William Trevor or Patrick McCabe might have written. Fiorenzo is endearing, sometimes very funny, but he doesn’t do or say anything profound. He does teenage things like rowing with his father, hanging out with his mates, helping out in the family shop that sells fish bait – mostly worms and maggots that make a disgusting noise as they writhe and climb on top of one another only to give up when they realise there’s no benefit to being on top (metaphor, anyone?).Live Bait is a gentle novel, pretty long and undemanding. I doubt readers are going to learn terribly much about the human condition from it, but it is a pleasant read.