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Voices

Dacia Maraini,

Dick Kitto (Translator)

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Jul 30, 2014 Bogdan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: latin-and-neo-latin

It is an atypical crime novel with a deep social kernel in substratum and a feminist message. Due to this it can be read in various ways. I can compare it with an onion. The detective story is the first layer available to most readers. Then the feminist message would follow and lastly the sociological piece regarding women vulnerability.

And exactly this core message about women's place in contemporary society is the premise of the novel. Although I am not entirely agreeing with this premise, I b It is an atypical crime novel with a deep social kernel in substratum and a feminist message. Due to this it can be read in various ways. I can compare it with an onion. The detective story is the first layer available to most readers. Then the feminist message would follow and lastly the sociological piece regarding women vulnerability.

And exactly this core message about women's place in contemporary society is the premise of the novel. Although I am not entirely agreeing with this premise, I believe it has some historical and regional substratum. Especially in those societies where women discrimination was or still is part of religious or traditional beliefs. Still, in many modern (especially western) societies, I strongly believe that women have exactly the same rights and status as the men. Due to this reasons, I will rate it with a 3.

Regarding the form, the first person narration is interesting as it shows that the narrator believes are also the ones of the author. Also this strong author belief in the cause she pleads is obvious in many other ways in the novel. But the first person narration has his limitation and it is extremely difficult not to let this be visible for the reader when you are using in such a novel. Otherwise, I liked the chapters structure as they eased the reading process. Anyway, the novel is well constructed but it is not exceeding the average. This is why, I will rate it with a 2 for form.

In terms of originality, I appreciated the decision to use a detective story for transmitting this sociological message. Albeit, on the other aspects the novel is fairly common thus, I will give it a 3 for the level of originality.

The characters are quite intriguing. I think there is one of the first novels where none of the characters are as they initially appear. All, including the narrator, have some things to hide which get to be revealed later in the story. They are extremely good characters and I'll rate it for this with 5.

Regarding the complexity and difficulty, as I already mentioned, the novel can be read in several different ways. And it can appear a shallow one if you are only focusing on the detective story, but it is not so. I don't think though that it was pretty difficult to be written, as the detective story is, at best, average and the remaining seems to be a deep author belief. As it is known it is easy to discuss about the topics dear to you, I will rate it with a 3 for complexity and difficulty.

In terms of credibility, I was not convinced by the novel core message. Also the consistency of the story has few minor leaks, but it is nothing important that cannot be overlooked. Therefor my rating for credibility is 3.

The last criteria is edition. There were couple of pages (at least 4) that had a clear typographical error. Perhaps an entire paper sheet was printed with this error (the font was blurry and looked as it was printed during an earthquake. I also spotted couple of proofing errors and several language construction not quite accepted in literary form. I Will rate it with a 1.

To summarize, this was a decent read that I enjoyed, although it did not impressed me too much. All in all, my final rating for this novel is 2.86, which I will round it to a 3 on Goodreads system.


+--------------------------+-----------------+
| Criteria | Rating |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Premise | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Form | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Originality | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Characters | 5 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Difficulty/Complexity | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Credibility | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Edition | 1 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Total | 2.86 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+

For more details on how I rated and reviewed this novel, please read these guidelines. ...more

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