Time on My Hands

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. Agent: Lorenza Pieri, Minimum Fax.(Apr.)