Books & Poetry

Niccolò Ammaniti is a writer who specialises in mind-blowingly explosive endings – endings that leave you shocked and desperate for more.

This second novel – his first was the beautiful ‘I’m Not Scared’, recently filmed – is more complex and ambitious, and experiments with narrative techniques such as the ‘Tristram Shandy’-esque narrator who pops up from time to time to advise us how we should view a scene and debate how he should go about describing the action to the reader. Instead of providing us with background and context at the beginning, Ammaniti throws us right into the action and leaves the narrator to digress quite deliberately on preceding events and local history whenever he feels like it.

The characters constantly draw parallels between their situations and those of other characters in films (particularly those involving Sylvester Stallone). They do this at the most unlikely times, such as when Mielo, a policeman, discovers his father beaten half to death by vandals – ‘He couldn’t help thinking of that marvellous film where the cop Kevin Costner finds the corpse of Sean Connery, who had been like a father to him… What the hell was the title?’ These asides act like a director’s notes – as guidelines that Ammaniti hopes his characters will follow.  The action takes place in a rural Italian village, which in some ways is itself the protagonist. Ammaniti explores the overlapping lives of its inhabitants and gets right into the psyche of each of them, from the young schoolboy nervously checking his exam results to the neurotic mama who forbids her son from sitting on the sofas for fear of spoiling them.

Ammaniti has an extraordinary gift for empathy, and you will quickly become immersed in ‘Steal You Away’, finding yourself anxious to get back to it every time you put it down.