Word: mainardis
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...most readers, The Red Carnation will seem to be simply a tale of adolescent love, writ in neon. Hero Mainardi is a 16-year-old schoolboy who falls in love with a girl student. She gives him a red carnation. But on visiting the local brothel, Mainardi promptly loses both his unstable heart and his symbolic carnation to a prostitute. In her, Mainardi sees all his boyish dreams of confident maturity come true; she sees in him the innocence and naturalness that she has lost...
This is one of the oldest stories in the world, and Author Vittorini, like most of those who have retold it, has failed to avoid seamy sentimentality. His prostitute, aflame with love on one burner and cooking up illicit narcotic deals on the other, seems to Mainardi to be "The Madonna on Horseback"; but to the reader she is just a pipe dream. When the cops put her away at the end of the book, it is no more poignant than a decision by the gas company to lock up the meter...
Where Vittorini excels is in matters that are more real than romantic. He brings to life the hostel in which Mainardi and his fellow boarders eat, sleep, gossip, quarrel, and exchange adolescent dogma on everything from Homer to modern politics. He gets down pat the earnest remarks that bubble from sophomoric lips ("I absolutely agree with the ancient Greeks"). He knows how hard it is for any boy to keep a secret, and how the fears and fond hopes of a father and mother cling like leeches to a boy's guilty skin. He knows just how rumor rules...
Brahms: Double Concerto in A Minor (Georg Kulenkampff, violin; Enrico Mainardi, cello; L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Carl Schuricht conducting; English Decca, 8 sides). This performance of Brahms's fussy but formidable work is not up to the Thibaud-Casals or Heifetz-Feuermann versions. Recording: good...