SECOND ITALIAN REVIEW OF THE DEATH THE SILVER KING (Retitled from THE DEATH OF TARPONS)

 Hi Folks,

Just received the second Italian review of  THE DEATH OF THE SILVER KING

REVIEWS

Les Edgerton / An American history of violence and fishing

Les Edgerson, The Death of the Silver King , tr. Marco Piva, Elliott , pp. 224, 17.50 euros printed

The bildungsroman is a genre widely used in literature, starting from the

 end of the eighteenth century

 Term originally coined in Germany, Bildungsroman , the first text

 defined as such is Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre  , published in

 1797. Over time the genre has evolved, adapting to the various social

 and technological transformations of the short century and the first

 twenty years of the new millennium by changing the settings and 

psychologies of the characters. There are many masterpieces of this

 literary genre, the first two that come to mind are Salinger's Young 

Holden and Someday this pain will be useful to you, by Cameron, and 

this novel too, while not reaching such high peaks, is an excellent example of it.

ROBERT STURMPULP - books daily

PULP - books daily

REVIEWS

Les Edgerton / An American history of violence and fishing

Les Edgerson, The Death of the Silver King , tr. Marco Piva, Elliott , pp. 224, 17.50 euros printed

ROBERT STURM

DECEMBER 27, 2022

Corey John returns to the town where he grew up thirty years after leaving it, in 1955. His family (only his sister is still alive) emigrates to Texas from Indiana where his maternal grandparents live. The father, Robert, begins working for the grandmother, Lucille, who runs a restaurant bar and various other businesses. He almost immediately regrets having moved - Lucille's promise to make him a partner is rejected -, the dream of becoming an airline pilot turns into an obsession and suddenly becomes violent with Corey, giving improbable excuses to punish him violently. Her mother is incapable of reacting and she seeks solace in religion by reading the Bible and attending a community of fanatical believers: she distances herself from her husband and withdraws more and more into herself. The teenager has a friend, Destin, with whom he shares the experience of domestic violence and spends much of his time dreaming of fishing trips with his father, an occasion that for one reason or another almost never materialises. The boy's lifeline is his grandfather, Toast, who introduced him to reading. “It was he who gave me my first book by Mark Twain, and with it also novels by Dos Passos, by Steinbeck, even by Kafka and Camus. […] I was probably the only fourteen-year-old in town who read Céline, and only because I was lucky enough to have a grandfather who was passionate about literature”. “It was he who gave me my first book by Mark Twain, and with it also novels by Dos Passos, by Steinbeck, even by Kafka and Camus. […] I was probably the only fourteen-year-old in town who read Céline, and only because I was lucky enough to have a grandfather who was passionate about literature”. “It was he who gave me my first book by Mark Twain, and with it also novels by Dos Passos, by Steinbeck, even by Kafka and Camus. […] I was probably the only fourteen-year-old in town who read Céline, and only because I was lucky enough to have a grandfather who was passionate about literature”.

But Corey's real goal is to be well liked and loved by his father, who always accuses him of only knowing how to read, a passion that will prevent him from finding a real job and extricating himself in life and for this reason he decides to secretly build a boat to give him. on your birthday: study all the techniques, raise money by collecting glass bottles throughout the city and mowing the gardens of the houses. But things in life don't always go as they should or as we hope, and the mother's fall into severe depression, her grandfather's illness, yet another misunderstanding with her father and a murder, bring down the castles in the air she was chasing. . The Death of the Silver King –proof of debut of Les Edgerton -, originally published in America in 1996, is a novel narrated with a smooth and dry style (apart from perhaps a couple of passages), capable of entering in a precise and profound way into the psychology of all the characters . Period, the one in which the story unfolds, in which domestic violence was considered an evil to bear, in which society still lived in the most sinister racism, in which the balance of power (as still today, to tell the truth) was dictated by the oppression of the weakest: unresolved problems but which, after long and terrible struggles, perhaps we have begun to partially mitigate. Corey makes peace with himself by returning to the places of his adolescence and untying the knot of his last fishing trip with his grandfather in the beautiful and teeming Gulf of Texas: episode that he had hidden in his mind for thirty years but which resurfaces forcefully. And his life, in spite of everything, seems a little more acceptable.

Les EdgertonAmerican fiction