As God Commands

Very dark, desperate characters trying to make their own beauty in the world...in their own (sometimes very twisted) way. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and didn't want to put it down at times. The author was quite successful in creating characters one would not usually care about and made them very interesting and cared for...IDENTIFIABLE. Couldn't find a flaw as I read. Great wrap-up and conclusion too.

Ammaniti's novel develops gripping characters who force the reader into their lives with juxtaposition of violence, naivety and humor. I was torn between laughter, sympathy and plain astonishment at their situations, conversations and view of reality. For some readers, the language may be a little rough but so appropriate with this group of human and biological family members.

Niccolo Ammaniti has written an extremely compelling and unforgettable novel, a love story between a father and son. The boy is thirteen year old Cristiano, sad, stalwart; the father, Rino, a down market Nazi drunkard, but a hero to his son and not undeservedly so. The setting is modern day Italy, but not a place you will ever find in the guide books. The plot rockets along with never a wasted or inappropriate scene or thought. There is much horror in this novel, but also a mordant humor. The title is quite appropriate---the novel explores various interpretations of God's will as perceived by various characters. But the philosophy is shown, not explained, as it would be in the hands of a lesser author. This is a marvelous novel, don't miss it; it will stay in your memory for a long time as a book you will be happy to have known.

Many of the characters in this gripping slice-of-life novel get their experience of the world outside their North Italian industrial wasteland from watching movies. One thinks that only the Robert De Niro of TAXI DRIVER or perhaps Al Pacino could adequately play the lives of the downtrodden poor who populate the book -- ordinary working men, if they could ever find any work. Another character, mentally deranged after a near-electrocution, is fixated on an American porn video he picked up from a garbage can -- that and a room-sized Nativity Creche also pieced together from found trash. The reviewer for Publishers Weekly quoted on the back cover says "If the Coen brothers ever wanted to go Italian, this'd be prime adaptation material." He's right; for a long time the tone of comic ineptitude laced with violence plays very like the downscale characters in the Coens' FARGO. But by the halfway point, the novel has moved far beyond comedy into something horrible yet deeper. I don't know if the 2008 Italian movie by Gabriele Salvatores made of this book follows it through its many transformations. It hasn't yet been shown in the US, but surely will be if this novel catches on as it should. The central character, Christiano Zena, is a 13-year-old boy who lives with his father Rino in a broken-down house on the edge of a nondescript town. Rino, an aging neo-Nazi skinhead, womanizer, and drunk, nevertheless loves his son and is terribly afraid that they will be separated by Social Services. In the early part of the book, which spans a week in all, Rino is roped in by two of his friends -- a once-upright man trying desperately to get his wife back, and the sweetly pathetic trash collector -- into participating in a scheme to steal a bank ATM. The novel, which is divided into three sections called BEFORE, THE NIGHT, and AFTER, looks like developing into a tale of an inept heist that goes wrong. But by the time we come to the central section, several other characters have come forward to share center stage, the robbery itself has faded into a minor detail, and the events that occur are cataclysmic by comparison. Neither the characters nor the setting -- the very antithesis of tourist Italy -- are very attractive, but Ammaniti's skill draws you in despite that. Christiano is no angel, but you can sympathize with him. And soon you get caught up in the other lives as well, reading less for the story than for the people. But with the central section, as the events of the night play out nightmare-fashion in a torrential downpour, all that changes; it is now the action that keeps you reading, horribly explicit though some of it is. And with the last part Ammaniti changes again, probing the moral implications of the story, as he asks what the place is of God in all this -- a question answered mostly with cynicism, but sometimes with awe. The book ends much more darkly than it had begun, but with far larger dimensions, and a sense of rightness and even of uplift. T