Time on My Hands
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When does a game stop being a game? And what would cause a young boy to commit an act of savage violence? In Time on My Hands by Giorgio Vasta, the year is 1978, and a chilling drama is unfolding in Rome. Members of a leftist terrorist group known as the Red Brigades have kidnapped the former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, and are holding him in a secret prison, while broadcasting their demands to the public.
Far from Rome, in Palermo, Sicily, a trio of eleven-year-old schoolboys are following Moro's abduction with intense interest. To their minds, the terrorists are warriors, striking a blow at the stifling conformity and propriety of everyday Italian life. Just like the Red Brigades, the boys give themselves code names: Nimbus, Radius, and Flight. They shave their heads, develop a secret language, and begin a life of escalating crime in worshipful imitation of their heroes. But when Moro's body is discovered in the trunk of a car, riddled with bullets, and as the stakes of the friends' games grow higher, Nimbus, the most innocent of the three, must decide just how far he is willing to go.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1978 kidnapping of Italy's former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, by a leftist terrorist group, the Red Brigades, provides the spark for Vasta's novel. In Palermo, Sicily, three11-year-old friends experience radio broadcasts of the terrorists' violent demands as a thrilling strike at bourgeois Italian society. They shave their heads, create a private system for communicating with each other, and form their own brigade, complete with code names: Nimbus, Radius, and Flight. Imitation of their heroes escalates, and when Moro is murdered, they must decide how far their mimicry will go. Nimbus, the narrator and a self-described "-ironic, anti-ironic, refractory little boy a non little boy," embodies the trio's detached, analytical justifications for their deadly games. But when the group targets Nimbus's first love, the mute Creole girl he worships from afar, their actions lose revolutionary symbolism and the boys must choose between taking life and preserving it. Vasta's compressed prose and close alliance with the narrator help the story's implausibilities fade away and its portrait of teenage rebellion ring true.
