Spina’s literary oeuvre is one of the few non-celebratory accounts of a chapter in Italian history ... Spina’s masterwork is timely commentary ... The way Spina understood the cultural logic of colonialism remains enlightening ... an invaluable source for those interested in tracing the resurgent scourge’s roots.
An unjustly-neglected Libyan novelist captured the twisted logic of colonialism, past and present ... a deep and singular account of the great historical fractures that preceded the establishment of Moammar El-Gadhafi’s Jamahiriya in 1977 ... Spina saves his sympathy for those who wish to force their way into Libyan culture, even as they know their wish to be foolish and culpable ... Spina’s prose itself is theatrical. He can set the stage quickly ... His stories have great beginnings and endings, the curtain snapping open and shut upon dramatic scenes; his characters make memorable entrances ... Spina’s descriptions are sharp and elliptical, but his dialogue can belabor the point ... For hundreds of pages, time stands still.
The English-language publication of Alessandro Spina’s grand, historical novel about twentieth-century Benghazi is a welcome antidote ... Spina’s colorful tales of unrequited love, betrayal, and revenge spring from a cacophony of diverse voices.
A host of minor characters lends a sense of completeness to the fictional world ... The 'multigenerational family epic' often fails to evoke the breadth of changes affecting more than one society, because the perspectives of its narrative aren’t different enough from each other. The technology of such novels often interposes a false distance between authorial voice and subject matter, a distance that’s actually a proximity, which the author attempts to make up for with various forms of irony ... The unadorned suppleness of Naffis-Sahely’s prose prompts the surmise that Spina’s lack of emphasis sets him apart from all but a very few other novelists writing in Italian. The next two installments are eagerly awaited.
Don't expect from Spina polished late-imperial romance of the sort that fans of the twilight-of-the-Raj school, from Paul Scott to Vikram Seth, know and love ... these stories also experiment with alternatives to realism ... Even though Naffis-Sahely tracks these shifts of register with skill, you feel that Spina may be finding his feet as a narrator.
