La Superba

La Superba is the nickname for the city of Genoa in Italy. Just one of the many little interesting facts I learned about from reading the novel La Superba. There is certainly an element of the absurd in this novel which may take a bit to get used to but after a bit it’s a nice change in current world literature. One thing about this book that took some time to get used to is I went in expecting a novel and then I realized(or thought) the long chapters were just really independent stories all involving the same main character…Leonard, has many misadventures, the first of which is a severed leg that he grows an attachment to. After that nothing is normal even when you think that his life is settling down or this is just a struggling foreigner in a strange exotic city coming to grips with his new home but such a description would be doing this book an injustice and not properly preparing the reader for the for the wild journey that is La Superba. However, as much as I liked this book don’t expect an easy ride or straight forward narrative. Also if your offended by explicit sex, language, drugs, drinking, or any other moral constraints this book probably isn’t for you as there is all of that and more in this book.At times I found Leonard to be almost an anti-hero and yet there is something compelling about him, something that makes me root for him despite his horrible decisions and tendency to sink to low levels of moral debauchery. At times this book makes me groan with some of the things he does, or the chances he takes and at times there is a heaviness to some of the neglect of character, or the fact that this book seems to navigate to all the lost souls, immigrants, thieves, hookers, drug dealers, mafia, etc. There were times when I longed for a ray of sunshine or hope or one good honest character that triumphed over it all. But that is a different book. La Superba is a great book by an exception writer just prepare yourself for a wild ride!

Some books you are glad you read, others are a pleasure to read. La Superba is one of the rare books that is both. I enjoyed the Italian setting, the overlarge characters, the personal introspection against the jarring background of the immigration crisis. These pages are presented as notes for a novel that ultimately will not be written. This conceit helps to enlarge one of the book's themes, the dissonance between the world as it is and how we constantly strive to reinvent it to fulfill our own needs. Through a lens of ambition, loneliness, and libido, we get a picture of the world full of comedy and tragic beauty.