Gio'
I had this book on my list for a few years. Why would a Russian writer publish a book in Italian as original language? A lot has been said about the authenticity of the facts in this book, so I'll just focused on the literary qualities. In general, the author writes well enough, but there are a couple of aspects that show immaturity in my opinion: some of the translations of the nickname of the character take a cartoonish connotation in Italian and that breaks the imagining of the story very frequently. I wonder if the translations in other languages rectify this problem of the original edition. The other issue is that, when a new character is introduced, the author always take a tangent by extensively describing the character's background. While this is interesting the first few times, it does get old and unnecessary by the end of the book.
Even though the book has evident literary limitation, it still reaches 3 stars from me because of originality and because it introduces the reader to a world that is not that known.
I had this book on my list for a few years. Why would a Russian writer publish a book in Italian as original language? A lot has been said about the authenticity of the facts in this book, so I'll just focused on the literary qualities. In general, the author writes well enough, but there are a couple of aspects that show immaturity in my opinion: some of the translations of the nickname of the character take a cartoonish connotation in Italian and that breaks the imagining of the story very frequently. I wonder if the translations in other languages rectify this problem of the original edition. The other issue is that, when a new character is introduced, the author always take a tangent by extensively describing the character's background. While this is interesting the first few times, it does get old and unnecessary by the end of the book.
Even though the book has evident literary limitation, it still reaches 3 stars from me because of originality and because it introduces the reader to a world that is not that known.