Beneath a Scarlet Sky - great read

[klondike]

Terrible review alert, but this book about a young boy coming of age in Milan during WW2 has an emotional depth seldom found. The boy, Pino, becomes the driver for Nazi General Leyers, Potentate for Hitler in Italy, and is a witness to much of the war in Northern Italy. Because he so well placed as General Leyers' driver and interpreter he is able to pass on to the Allies what he is seeing each day.
We are left at the end with a mystery about this Leyers and his real role in Italy. Pino saw him as a monster but the Allies saw him as a hero and released him after his capture.
Really a great read.

Mark Sullivan - Official Website

 

[mtgianni]

I also enjoyed this book. The author lives 50 miles away and i had never read him previously. This is not fiction.

 

[BB57]

I liked it...but with some reservations.

The author based it on facts obtained from hours of interviews over a period of weeks during several visits with the hero of the story.

Consequently he based it in fact and invented the narrative - and thus called it a historical novel.

My first reservation is that he gets a lot of details wrong. For example Pino sees a v formation of British night bombers going over. They didn't do that. They flew individually in bomber streams going over the target for an hour or more (depending on the size of the raid).

My second reservation is that I suspect the story he heard was altered by the memories that were perhaps revised over the years. I don't want to provide a spoiler, but you can see the ending of one of the major sub plots coming at the end from at least the middle of the book. It's also obvious there were lots of other options that were not even considered.

Now...one explanation might be the age of the hero at the time, but would still require really poor judgement and a level of irresponsibility that is at odds with the rest of the story. Possibly, it was a massive line of either total BS or substantial embellishment of the facts created by Pino as he recalled the events and told them to the author. That element of the story, if invented or embellished by Pino, would also serve as justification for some similar failures later in life. (Best I can do without spoiling it.) It's also possible the author made up that whole sub plot, given that Pino never saw the book in print.

However it got there, that element of the story was so at odds with what a prudent person would have done in the same situation that it kept jerking me out of the story line. It was so out of character with the rest of the character.