Bambino

Mattia was born in Trieste in 1900. His restless childhood, is already an omen: a brother who leaves for America, a friend who soon abandons him. When he discovers that the woman who raised him is not his real mother, something inside him breaks, and a cold fire blazes in his chest that he will never know how to tame. Joining the ranks of Fascists is an almost natural consequence. Despite his nickname for his boyish face, “Bambino,” Mattia flaunts an executioner’s ferocity. But even before ideology, before brutality, the reason he dons the black shirt and beats the disputed lands palm to palm is the hope of finding that mother without name or face. The search for a woman he never knew becomes the meaning of everything. His father, an old watchmaker sure that people can be repaired like gears, is the only one who knows the truth but keeps it sealed in a silence as armored as a safe. In Italy’s most torn frontier, Bambino’s life slips on an inclined plane: every day a new expedition, a new assault, a new robbery. And then, all at once, the outbreak of war, the Nazis in town, the Yugoslav occupation of Trieste, the foibe. An existence lived as a maverick, punctuated by a relentless countdown. A throbbing novel in which judgment-even in the face of the most extreme actions-is always offstage. With dragging and sharp writing, Marco Balzano returns to investigate the relationship between the individual and the collective, between personal choices and the great upheavals of History. “Life is to attack or to defend, to destroy or to care.”