When Alex Lago, trapped in an unhappy marriage and already mourning his late mother, finds out his father has terminal cancer, he travels to Italy to say goodbye. Among his father’s things, he finds a photograph with three unknown men and his long-lost uncle Alessandro, who disappeared in Russia during World War II. He posts the photograph online, not thinking much of it, but it immediately attracts the attention of a mysterious woman named Sofia—who demands he take it down. When she offers him the story behind the photo in exchange, he goes to meet her. He is given the writings of two men: the report of an Italian-American Lieutenant, John Casanova, sent to a small town called Schio to investigate the mass murder of prisoners deemed “fascists” and “collaborators” by their partisan neighbors; and the confession of a man he interrogates under torture, a wartime deserter named Renzo Balbo.
Sandro Martini’s CIAO, AMORE, CIAO emerges with careful pacing and multiple perspectives, giving us not only the mystery unraveling itself but also a multifaceted emotional commentary on the brutality bred by war and politics. Casanova’s cynical, calloused account, as he sweeps into the small town—threatening and torturing his way to the truth—and then willingly suppresses it in favor of his superior’s preferred narrative contrasts with Alex’s quiet vigil by his father’s side, grieving losses that go back generations while watching death take its inevitable toll. There’s also Balbo’s desperate struggle to survive hell and then figure out how to build a life in the world left behind after the chaos and corruption, among the bleeding wounds of personal and village grudges manipulated in service to more distant political goals.
This is not an easy book to read, and the author does not hold back when describing horrific ways for human beings to die. CIAO, AMORE, CIAO is not for the squeamish, or at least not before bedtime. Balbo’s confession is perhaps a bit unbelievably eloquent and extensive for a hasty account written after torture, but it’s intensely powerful and heartrending. On the whole, this book provides a deeply thoughtful commentary on how individual, personal struggles and losses interact with larger political and military battles. On one hand, the grand national goals are reduced to “just little grunts fighting and dying, and it’s all personal in the end,” but at the same time, those “little grunts” (along with their personal quarrels and grudges) are used and manipulated for larger political contests. Love and loss, survival and struggle, political and personal goals weave together in threads throughout CIAO, AMORE, CIAO. The result is profoundly moving and thought-provoking.
An engrossing historical mystery that unravels before the reader layer by layer, Sandro Martini’s CIAO, AMORE, CIAO explores the depth of cruelty and human suffering caused by war and the exploitation of ordinary people for political interests.
~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader