"A master of political satire infused with a dose of the fantastical."-World Literature Today
Stefano Benni's enormously popular and distinctive mix of the absurd and the satiri-cal has made him one of Italy's most important and best-loved novelists. This is his twelfth best-selling book of fiction.
Fifteen-year-old Margherita lives with her eccentric family on the outskirts of town, a semi-urban wilderness peopled by gypsies, illegal immigrants, and no end of bizarre characters: a reassuring and fertile playground for an imaginative little girl like Margherita. But one day, a gigantic, black cube shows up next door. Her new neighbors have arrived, and they're destined to ruin everything.
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Stefano Benni is widely considered Italy's foremost satirist and a dramaturge of considerable note. His many novels, collections of essays, poetry and short stories include: Bar Sport, The Company of Celestials, and The Cafe Beneath the Sea. He lives in Bologna.
*Starred Review* Benni is renowned in his native Italy as a shrewd and entertaining satirist. His inventive style must be daunting for translators, but Shugaar's English rendering is dazzling. Margherita Dolce Vita is the 14-year-old narrator's nickname, and the allusion to Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) hints at the uncanny chaos and angst Margherita so ably and drolly chronicles. She is happiest frolicking with her dog in the meadow surrounding her family's modest house, where her father repairs old bicycles, her mother watches her soap opera, one brother obsesses over soccer while the other plays mad scientist, and her grandfather ingests toxins in the hope of becoming immune to pollution. It's a sweet life, all right, until a giant black cube is erected next door, the forbidding high-tech mansion of a wealthy family up to no good. Soon Margherita's once frugal and content parents are caught up in their neighbors' passion for excess and sinister clandestine activities, while the once fecund meadow is poisoned with pesticides. What's an observant, outspoken, and nature-loving girl to do? Benni's seriocomic vision of the drastic consequences of unchecked consumerism, environmental decimation, and End Times mania is at once fantastic and believable, delightful and chilling. Donna Seaman
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