ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

To be honest, as I always try to be here, I don’t know what the fuss is about this novel.  Carofiglio is apparently a best-selling author in Italy.

This is the blurb:

Antonio is on the cusp of adulthood, trying to work out who to be and what to do. His father, once a brilliant mathematician, hasn’t figured much in his son’s life since the divorce from Antonio’s mother, a beautiful and elusive woman. A diagnosis of epilepsy and hope for a cure takes father and son to Marseille, where they must spend two days and two nights together, without sleep. In a foreign city, under strained circumstances, they get to know each other and connect for the first time.

Elegant, warm and tender, set against the vivid backdrop of 1980s Marseille and its beautiful calanques, Three O’Clock in the Morning is an unforgettable story about illusions and regret, about talent and the passage of time and, most of all, about love.

Three O’clock in the Morning is just another *yawn* relationship story, about a father and an adolescent son reconnecting when they’ve been somewhat estranged after the marital breakdown some years before.   Over a 48 hour period without sleep (for a ridiculous reason) they have deep-and-meaningful conversations.  They eat, they go to bars, a party and they visit a porn shop in a Marseilles for which some might feel nostalgia.  It’s not entirely plotless. Other things happen that I won’t mention in order to avoid spoilers.

It’s another book with the central message is that it’s a good idea to communicate.

It’s another book that shows that, no, we’re not very good at it.

It’s possibly a fantasy depicting the author’s yearning for a similar kind of father-son relationship, either as a father himself or as a son.  A could-have-been— should-have-been— so different version of his own or his father’s failures.

Is that all there is?  Have I missed something?

(I did notice the inclusion of a character making racist remarks about the advent of people of colour in Marseilles. Unnecessary, IMO).

(I also noticed the shame attributed to the initial diagnosis, and that there is no need to address this shaming because lo! the boy is cured.)

The reviewer at Kirkus Reviews thinks differently:

Here those dark nights arrive with shimmering, unforced beauty, filling the pages with jagged moonlight like the finest neorealist film.

A journey by foot: crisp, lean, yet quietly mournful.

You can read an excerpt here, to see what you think…

Onto the next book!

Author: Gianrico Carofiglio
Title: Three O’clock in the Morning (Le tre del amttino)
Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2021, first published in 2017
ISBN: 9781922268792, pbk., 212 pages
Source: Kingston Library