When Things Happen
Michele Campo is living the bourgeois Italian dream. Now a speech pathologist in his forties, he resides in an expensive Naples home with his partner, Costanza, daughter of an upper-class family. Michele’s own family origins, however, are murkier. When he is assigned to work with five-year-old foster child Martina, he grows increasingly engrossed by her case, as his own buried family history slowly claws its way back to the surface. The first novel by acclaimed Italian writer Angelo Cannavacciuolo to be translated into English, When Things Happen tells a powerful and intriguing story of what we lose when we leave our origins behind. It presents a panoramic view of Neapolitan society unlike any in literature, revealing a city of extreme contrasts, with a glamorous center ringed by suburban squalor. Above all, it is a psychologically nuanced portrait of a man struggling to locate what he values in life and the poor vulnerable child who helps him find it.
Angelo Cannavacciuolo has long deserved U.S. publication, and this novel may be his most spectacular and beautiful. When Things Happen shows prodigious range, setting the rich and coddled across a café table from hardscrabble slum dwellers. It's a portrait in the round, shot through with compassion and stirring poetry. Overall, it feels like Elena Ferrante's entire Neapolitan Quartet wrapped up in one, illuminating both a city unlike any other and a whole world tormented by the rift between Haves and Have-nots.
When Things Happen is a vivid story suffused by the indifferent air of Naples. Gregory Pell's translation captures the urgency of Cannavacciuolo's prose as he reminds us of how the unexpected encounter with innocence can draw us back to the refuse of our own childhoods.
From Raffaele La Capria to Fabrizia Ramondino and to Domenico Starnone, we now have Angelo Cannavacciuolo’s view of Naples from a triple perspective that includes and integrates class, identity, and the harsh reality of urban life. Boldly unmitigated, When Things Happen offers a unique and necessary version of Naples to the non-Italian reader.
There is no refuge in Cannavacciuolo's captivating novel, and, yet, it is so difficult to put down. You want to know where it's going, you need to get there, and you'll do so in a story that wrenches your heart and shows you a city you might not have found in any other book before.
When Things Happen is a mesmerizing tale that explores the intricate layers of human relationships and the cost of leaving one's roots behind. An eloquent portrayal of society's stark inequalities and a poignant portrayal of a man's quest for identity, Cannavacciuolo's novel is a must-read for anyone in search of a captivating story. He reminds us of the importance of understanding our own histories and of the potential for connection and growth even in the most unexpected places.
Cannavacciuolo is accomplished at vibrating the delicate string of his tired heroes—inveterate dreamers who, though vanquished, look forward to that moment when they will regain everything...His pages are crafted with the skill of an artisan and with the love of someone maniacally dedicated to them, because every word, every turn of phrase rewards the attentive reader with a world, a whole universe governed by the iron law of truth.
In these pages, we realize that Cannavacciuolo's narrative engine is marked by his obsession with the presence of suffering in the world and by the moral obligation to portray it—to translate it into words.
An interesting, incandescent book that offers a ruthless examination of the same Neapolitan reality in which it directly participates.
Cannavacciuolo has written a jarring novel, set in his own Naples, of which, in unexpurgated fashion, he observes and describes the most problematic aspects, such as the divide between the rich bourgeoisie and the working classes that are in perpetual difficulty.'
When Things Happen is a touching and unconventional journey into the heart of Naples. It is a novel that reveals a great virtue: the sociological acumen to acknowledge the contemporary underclasses in Italy...It is a novel written about a society from the bottom up.
When Things Happen is a book of debris...because it burrows deep into everything that Michele Campo had previously expunged from his life.
This is the story of two Naples: the one of daily trafficking and crime, with no expectations of anything better; the other a deaf, indifferent world of the bourgeois, incapable of solidarity and civic commitment. Michele Campo knows both: he was born in the first; he wants to belong to the latter at all costs.
In his fourth novel, more than just a narrator of storylines, Angelo Cannavacciuolo confirms himself as a narrator of emotions and states of mind.
GREGORY PELL is a professor of Italian at Hofstra University in New York, where he teaches language, translation, film, and poetry. He is the author of Davide Rondoni: Art in the Movement of Creation.
Author's Preface
When Things Happen
Acknowledgments from Original Author
Notes on Contributors
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