The Heart Of A Boy
(de Amicis, Edmondo)
Translation by: femme/600/20 October 2005
The Heart of a Boy is a story that takes place in the ambiance of an Italian town at the end of the nineteenth century. It is narrated in the first person but from the unusual perspective of a child observing life with a precocious kind of sensibility through that which constitutes his world, that is to say, his home and school life, and in the case of the latter, his teachers and friends. A description of all his days in class or his teachers' explanatons of things appear in his childhood diary along with his tender reflections. The book's rhythym is melancholic and at times very sappy but it is also very digestible and inevitably causes the reader to meditate on his or her own childhood and compare these stories with the adventures they had in their own schools. But still, a circumspect, critical spirit accompanied by the sincerity that is characteristic of a child inundates the narrator's commentaries that touch whomever reads them. The themes in this book, starting with simple vanity or like common egoism, are embraced with the same delicateness and precision with which the narrator's nationalism and a friend's hypocrisy or sorrow is dealt with. Respect for the protagonists is maintained in each day's story which makes this work uniquely valuable for the formation of a child's sensibility. The compassion for each character can come to seem exaggerated and as if it has mawkish aims but the latter are so honest that they end up having a great impact on the reader who will feel captivated from beginning to end. In spite of wielding a language that is befitting of a child, whether it be on account of spontaneouos identification with the narrator by those who are younger or because of the instant nostalgia of adults, it even succeeds in crossing the barrier of time between a nineteenth-century boy and one of the twenty-first century. The Heart of a Boy is one of the sweetest stories of all time.
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