Italian Rehash:
FOULKE, ADRIENNE
Italian Rehash A Day of Impatience. By Raffaele La Capria. Farrar, Straus & Young. 207 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Adrienne Foulke GROWING UP is probably as difficult and hazardous a process in real...
...Several of the author's Italian contemporaries have written with imagination and insight about the struggle of adolescents toward maturity amid the dislocations of life in postwar Italy...
...La Capria has written his book as if he had discovered a reliable recipe, selecting pre-tested ingredients from the books of better-known authors on the hack theory that what worked once should work again...
...But let us hope there is more point to the experience than there is to Mr...
...Postwar fiction imports from Italy have, on the whole, been of a high order...
...La Capria's novel...
...Reviewed by Adrienne Foulke GROWING UP is probably as difficult and hazardous a process in real life as it is shown to be in fiction...
...The recipe for A Day of Impatience reads like this: Take one or more fumbling adolescent males, add a prostitute or two, mix with a few semi-criminal types, season with a dash of the standard literary perversions, and half-bake in the tepid heat of imitation...
...The result is as flat and tasteless as one might expect...
...At most, one can credit the author with having borrowed from the more distinguished of his betters, notably Moravia, of whose work La Capria's novel is an inept and pallid exploitation...
...and, by comparison, this novel is dismally outclassed...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 44
