Praised in Europe as a satire of modern Italian decadence, Busi's picaresque adventure may pose a conundrum to American readers. Its hero, peevish intellectual Angelo Bazarovi, has dozens of homosexual escapades, grows obsessed with a very young girl, and fantasizes constantly about revenge and ideal love. He simultaneously idolizes and disdains his boss, Celestino Lometto, a boorish con man who parlays his panty-hose factory into a fortune. Bazarovi seethes with condescension or contempt for married men, most women and the nouveaux riches; Lometto is cool toward his own homoerotic impulses, his controlling wife Edda and Jewish businessmen (portrayed in ugly stereotypes). This odd couple embarks on sales trips that show us a seedy world of transvestites, swinish saleswomen, addicts, fast-talking salesmen. When Lometto dispatches his pregnant wife to New York, hoping the baby will be a future U.S. president, she gives birth to a mongoloid. Attempts to dispose of the baby result in blackmail. Because the author rarely makes clear his own viewpoint, the satiric effect is blunted as we wallow through a decadent milieu. (August)
Busi's irreverent novel concerns the picaresque adventures of Angelo Basarovi, a university student who prowls the homosexual beaches of Lake Garda. Basarovi's life changes dramatically when he is hired by the unscrupulous pantyhose profiteer Lometto, to whom he becomes indispensable as conscience and chief business asset. If style is restraint, this book should have been half as long; even then it's hard to imagine to whom Busi's morbid themes would appeal. His characters are grotesque parodies of the ``nouveau riche,'' the ``Southern Italian,'' the ``rapacious businesswoman,'' the ``pederast.'' After a long series of moral skirmishes, neither Basarovi nor Lometto prevails and the novel ends essentially where it began. Lisa Mullenneaux, Iowa City
