Location: United States
Member Since: Oct. 29, 2010
Tom Hester
Books
This member has not published any books.Smashwords book reviews by Tom Hester
- Saraceno
on Oct. 29, 2010
America has given the world three great literary/film genres: the cowboy six-shooter, the gangster story and the detective. Two of the three are exhausted, like peelings from a squeezed orange. The third--the detective--is on a respirator. How fascinating it is, then, to experience how a poet can transform the gangster story, being even more subtle and oblique than E.L. Doctorow in Billy Bathgate. The ironies--a hit-man autodidact, absorbing civilization from a victim of Hitler's concentration camps, and a college educated member of the Altobene crime family staggering through an identity crisis--make Saraceno an intellectual puzzle. That our hit man uses an exploding toilet to wreak revenge on an enemy and traces his Saracen roots on a map of Europe, while the author muses about a 16th century Italian heretic and the hit man's best friend, Matt, retains an artist who quotes Auden as he completes the heavenly engine on Matt's bedroom ceiling should keep any refugee from the Godfather and the Sopranos fully engaged. Saraceno's mysteries are life's mysteries, but Saraceno's language does not wield life's worn words. "Luck has bad breath," the narrative begins. "She wasn't happy, but she was better than unhappy," it concludes about Billy's lover. "The good he did was soiled by circumstance," it concludes about the trapped Matt. Would that poets could tell all of our stories.