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ALIBI
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Henry Holt and
Company, April 2005
Reviewed by Joy
Calderwood
Italy After World
War II
Venice doesn’t look
like it has been through a war. Adam Miller’s charming, magnetic mother
Grace returns to Venice believing she has returned to the city of her
youth. She embraces the international set of expatriates with whom she
and Adam’s father used to enjoy their days, before death and war
intervened. When Adam is discharged from the US army in Germany, Grace
urges him to join her. Adam has been an investigator, chasing down Nazis
for the war crimes trials. He has seen wagonloads of bodies from the
death camps, cities flattened by bombing, ragged German civilians
fighting for food in the streets. Hazy, beautiful Venice seems unreal to
him, until he meets a young Jewish woman who survived a Nazi death camp.
Claudia lives and
works in a personal kind of isolation, having no common ground with
people who have not lived through hell. She keeps herself separate even
from the folk of the ghetto where her home was. Falling in love with
Claudia, Adam becomes aware of Venice’s underside. For Venetians to keep
their lives as undamaged as possible, it was necessary to cooperate with
the Nazi Occupation. Afterward, everyone put a smooth face on things. No
one helped the Nazis, everyone was a secret sympathizer with the
Resistance. Claudia makes it impossible for Adam to ignore what his
mother’s friends want to veil out of existence.
The very worst
example of cooperation with Nazis, the man Adam would most like to make
face the consequences of his wartime actions, is Gianni Maglione,
powerful head of an ancient family. Dr. Gianni Maglione is about to
marry Adam’s mother. The ability of Venice to put on its best disguising
face is about to be severely tested.
This cast of
characters could have played out their inevitable confrontations
anywhere, but it would not be the same story without the veiled face of
Venice casting its illusions. The lights on the waters, the ancient
marble palaces, the morning haze with sunrise sifting through, all of
these harmonize with “beautiful people” who wish to make ugliness go
away. The city seems almost a fellow conspirator, certainly a
participant.
Where Grace is the
magnet, pulling together all the contestants to the unavoidable clash,
Adam is the flint. Everything would have fizzled quietly out if it
weren’t for Adam’s compulsive sense of justice. Without Adam, Claudia’s
wrongs, family friend Bertie’s unrequited loves, partisan Rosa’s
undercover war, police officer Cavallini’s ambitions, all would have
stayed in their channels of civilized craving. Once they are released,
who will win, Venice or Adam?
As a reader, my one
problem with ALIBI is that I can’t like anyone. The dominant motivations
of its people are vengeance and secrecy. When I met him at his reading,
author Joseph Kanon told me that he wanted to show obsession and its
effects. There can be no doubt who we are rooting for, through all the
turns of the plot, but how much can we really excuse? This is a question
that Kanon wants us to consider.
All this, and I
haven’t given away the single explosive shock which makes the plot of
ALIBI what it is. An irreversible event sets readers up for one surprise
after another. While Adam is learning to know the characters of the
people most important to him, readers undergo such suspense that I found
myself wishing the book were shorter, so I would know sooner what was
truly going on. “Do we really have to go through this police chase?” I
would wonder, but yes, indeed we did, for the sake of the revelations at
the end. These characters and their dilemmas are so real that they will
continue to reverberate, secretly, in the lives they live after we turn
the last page.
April 2005 Review
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