Ardizzone's new novel, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu (Picador, $24), should win new fans and expand his following substantially. The book deals with an extended Sicilian family and their emigration to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. The title's Papa Santuzzu is an impressible man whose principal ambition is that his children escape a tyrannical landlord and reach the fabled Land of Opportunity.
The book is set up as a series of stories which relate incidents that occur in pursuing Papa's dream. The book becomes a virtual storyteller's dream, as various chapters offer fanciful versions of the efforts required to reach America and to establish a new home, which turns out to be far from the stories told back in Sicily.
In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu is a delightful book for the most part, eventually bogging down slightly in its dreamlike accounts of what it meant to these settlers to work hard to achieve their dreams.
SMALL HOTEL
When Leaving Small's Hotel (Picador, $14 paperback) came out in hardcover last year, many critics praised it highly. The New Yorker called the novel "wonderful" and the New York Times found it "just right."
This modest little tale of a man and his wife trying to keep their heads afloat while running a small hotel on a picturesque island contains frequent chuckles and introduces a number of agreeable characters. But the book moves at such a leisurely pace, and seems in no particular rush to complete its narrative.
As a result, Leaving Small's Hotel may be one of those books abandoned by the reader long before the last page has been turned. It's pleasant, but hardly compelling.
WE'RE RUDE?
Are Americans too rude for their own good? That's one of the questions asked by Mark Caldwell in his new book, A Short History of Rudeness" (Picador, $23).
Caldwell points out that while most Americans feel that good manners are important, 89 percent of those responding to a survey found that "the nation was bacially uncivil."
In a book that's readable and packed with interesting facts and historical tales, Caldwell observes that manners "are so cosisting confusing that one comes to suspect this is essential to their proper functioning. Civility in one context may be barbarism in another; what's superficially political can be covertly rude, and vice versa."
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