Bakunin's Son

This disappointing Italian novel arrives in brief sections that are meant to be interviews with different characters about a man named Tullio Saba, the son of a shoemaker nicknamed Bakunin because of his loyalty to the anarchist (""In those days there lived a famous arsonist whose name was Bakunin.""). Atzeni (who drowned last year, having written several novels) cleverly retells Italian history through the recollections of people in numbered interviews. A woman who went on to give birth to 17 children claims she had a hot affair with Saba when he was 16 and that her own husband disgusted her afterwards. A fellow miner recalls Saba as a hero to working men who wore a French beret on the job rather than a rag or simple cap. One acquaintance swears Saba earned a silver medal during the WWII while another insists that Saba, far from being a war hero, ""sleazed around like an American"" with prostitutes and black marketeers. In 1947, a mining engineer was killed and Saba was suspected of the crime. The mine manager who fired Saba reports that, at the time, ""there was the widely held belief that the Communists were preparing for a great revolution, a notion held by the Communists themselves."" The voices of the interviewees are similar to each other, save for the infrequent and therefore jarring colloquial translation (""The ones with more balls used to come up from behind and whisper crude little innuendoes. I paid no nevermind to any of 'em.""). All in all, Bakunin's Son reads more like a synopsis, than a fleshed-out novel. (Nov.)