February 1, 2022
Leaving 1920s Italy for Los Angeles after inadvertently causing her father's arrest, movie-besotted Maria eventually becomes an associate producer at Mercury Pictures. As World War II dawns, Maria is struggling with her personal life even as the studio struggles fi nancially, but soon it's flooded with refugee European artists--modernist poets writing racy movie scripts. Then a stranger who knew her father arrives to remind her of his fate. From the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
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April 11, 2022
Marra’s meticulously crafted latest (after the collection The Tsar of Love and Techno) follows a host of outsiders as they try to make it through pre-WWII Italy and wartime Los Angeles with some of their morals intact. Teenage Maria Lagana and her mother leave Italy for Los Angeles after Fascists exile her father. By 1941, Maria is B-movie producer Artie Feldman’s second-in-command. Artie, a toupee-wearing loudmouth with a heart of gold (he’ll hire any down on their luck European exile), is at war with the censors, his twin brother/business partner, and the bankers with a stake in Mercury Pictures. Marra skillfully switches between small-town Sicily and a still-small Los Angeles where, post–Pearl Harbor, Maria must register as an internal enemy and her Chinese American boyfriend, Eddie, has to flee assailants who are convinced he’s a Japanese spy. The plot is intricate: Artie tries to release a political movie and fend off creditors, Maria and Eddie plot to make a film, a Berlin-born model-builder recreates her city, a Sicilian photographer flees Italy. While Marra’s pleasure in the details and argot of the past occasionally feels like overkill, this tough-minded, funny outing exemplifies what Maria calls the democratic promise of “the miniaturist’s gaze,” in which “all were worthy.” Thanks to Marra, the pleasure is contagious.
April 15, 2022
An ambitious young Italian woman makes her way among the �migr�s of 1930s and '40s Hollywood. Maria Lagana has come to Los Angeles after her father is sentenced to confino--internal exile--for his anti-fascist advocacy in Mussolini's Italy. Living with her mother in the Italian American neighborhood of Lincoln Heights--also home to a trio of no-nonsense great-aunts forever dressed in black--Maria finds work as a typist at Mercury Pictures International, working in the office of studio head Artie Feldman, a fast-talking showman with a collection of toup�es for every occasion. In time, the letters from her father stop, and Maria becomes an associate producer, Artie's trusted right hand, as well as the secret lover of Eddie Lu, a Chinese American actor relegated to roles as Japanese villains. When a young Italian immigrant turns up at her door introducing himself as Vincent Cortese, Maria's past--and the mystery of what happened to her father--crashes into her present. Like the author's earlier novels, the award-winning A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013) and The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015), this one builds a discrete world and shows how its denizens are shaped--often warped--by circumstance. But the Hollywood setting feels overfamiliar and the characters curiously uninvolving. While the prose frequently sings, there are also ripely overwritten passages: At a party, the "thunking heels of lindy-hopping couples dimpled the boozy air"; fireworks are described as a "molten asterisk in the heavens to which the body on the ground is a footnote." The World War II Hollywood setting is colorful, but it's just a B picture.
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Starred review from May 15, 2022
In 1941, Maria Lagana has risen to the rank of associate producer at Mercury Pictures, a fledgling movie studio run by Artie Feldman, the fast-talking, quick-witted impresario of B-movies constantly seeking the imprimatur of the Production Code. Maria's ascent from the typing pool is partially due to her moxie but is largely owing to her lifelong passion for film; she attended the cinema instead of church every Sunday with her father, Giuseppe. Maria fled Italy with her mother years earlier when Giuseppe, once a prominent defense attorney in Rome, was imprisoned for subversive activities against Mussolini's fascist regime. Award-winning and best-selling Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno, 2015) skillfully alternates between Hollywood and Italy, dexterously weaving the two threads together when a young man, Nino Picone, arrives at Mercury Pictures fresh from San Lorenzo with news of Giuseppe. Marra's prose is fluid and sprightly; each sentence is imbued with wit and heart and dances to its own internal rhythm. The dialogue is crisp and filled with ripostes and underline-worthy bon mots. The characters are simultaneously larger than life and all too human, utterly memorable. The historically iconic settings are brought sensuously to life by Marra's cinematic eye. Marra has ascended to the top of the literary ranks.
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