White as Silence, Red as Song- Alessandro D'Avenia

My Rating: 4 Stars

Description: International bestseller White as Milk, Red as Blood, has been called the Italian The Fault in Our Stars.

Leo is an ordinary sixteen-year-old: he loves hanging out with his friends, playing soccer, and zipping around on his motorbike. The time he has to spend at school is a drag, and his teachers are “a protected species that you hope will become extinct,” so when a new history and philosophy teacher arrives, Leo greets him with his usual antipathy. But this young man turns out to be different. His eyes sparkle when he talks, and he encourages his students to live passionately, and follow their dreams.

Leo now feels like a lion, as his name suggests, but there is still one thing that terrifies him: the color white. White is absence; everything related to deprivation and loss in his life is white. Red, on the other hand, is the color of love, passion and blood; red is the color of Beatrice’s hair. Leo's dream is a girl named Beatrice, the prettiest in school. Beatrice is irresistible - one look from her is enough to make Leo forget about everything else.

There is, however, a female presence much closer to Leo, which he finds harder to see because she’s right under his nose: the ever-dependable and serene Silvia. When he discovers that Beatrice has leukemia and that her disease is related to the white that scares him so much, Leo is forced to search within himself, to bleed and to be reborn. In the process, he comes to understand that dreams must never die, and he finds the strength to believe in something bigger than himself.

White as Milk, Red as Blood is not only a coming-of-age story and the narrative of a school year, but it is also a bold novel that, through Leo's monologue - at times easy-going and full of verve, at times more intimate and anguished - depicts what happens when suffering and shock burst into the world of a teenager, and the world of adults is rendered speechless.

My Thoughts: I am always up for a novel that has been translated into English, both because it helps support the arts from other cultures and because it allows a glimpse into life outside of the English speaking worldview.

This book is told solely from the perspective of Leo, a teenage boy who starts of the book behaving like all the children who made me give up substitute teaching. And for that reason, I definitely had a hard time getting into the beginning of the story. However, as the story progressed and life started to challenge Leo's perceptions, the personality he had began to change, and this Leo I liked much better.

The narrative of the novel is a poetic one, with most of the story told in introspective metaphors. And this introspection was what drew me to the later part of the story, despite the fact that I usually do not care for poetic narratives. However, while being beautiful analogies, many of the metaphors rely on sound or look alike words. And since this book was translated from Italian, those words no longer look or sound the same. Unfortunately, there was likely a lot that was lost in the translation simply because of the way the author used language to tell his story the first time and not by fault of the translator.

In the end, this book may take some getting used to. The reader needs to be alright with a poetic narrative which does not hold up as well in English. As well as overlook how well the adults in the story recognize Leo's teenage angst for what it is-- a cry for help as he struggles to understand a world that is no longer as simple and colorful as he thought it was, and how easily he accepts their attempts to help him.

I did enjoyed it by the end and would be interested in reading other translated works of D'Avenia's, should any of those be made.

I have provided an honest review after having received a copy of the book through the Fiction Guild.