When in Rome, find a dictionary

Message of Giorgio Vasta's 'Time on My Hands' lost in novel's excessive wordiness

MARGARET MOORE Mercury Staff

Remember your middle school edgelord phase? Imagine that, but in the context of rising political tensions and domestic terrorism in late 1970s Italy, and you’ve got the recipe for a fascinating novel. Recipes can only go so far, however, and the taste in my mouth after reading “Time on My Hands” leaves a lot to be desired.

You don’t necessarily need an indepth familiarity with Italy’s 1978 Red Brigades to understand this story; knowing that it was a highly visible and violent group will give you enough background, along with the book’s explanation. Growing up in an era of political turmoil has made its impact on our 11-year-old narrator, whose group of friends becomes enamored with the idea of the Brigades and performs increasingly disturbing acts to mimic them. We only know him as “Nimbus,” one of the names the young trio adopts to distance themselves from their “civilian” lives.

Perhaps the strongest point of this novel is that contrast between the relatively mundane life of an 11-yearold boy and the incredible violence he takes part in—Vasta masterfully slips in descriptions of strong emotion and brutality between regular observations of the plot. For example: you’ll hear about the horizon being artfully painted by the sunset, but by the way, here’s a boy who tried to rip a man’s face off, and isn’t the music on the radio boring today? It’s an excellent way to get across how normalized violence can become when it is as expected as the weather.

During the novel, the narrator remembers a teacher describing him as “mythopoetic:" word-making, said of one who generates many words. It’s accurate for both Nimbus’ and Vasta’s writing. While not impossible to follow, I will warn readers to keep a dictionary open—and I say that as someone who used to read dictionaries

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