When Things Happen A Novel

Angelo Cannavacciuolo

FOREWORD BY JAY

PARINI

TRANSLATED BY GREGORY

PELL

“Angelo Cannavacciuolo has long deserved U.S. publication, and this novel may be his most spectacular and beautiful. When Things Happen shows prodigious range, setting the rich and coddled across a café table from hardscrabble slum dwellers. It’s a portrait in the round, shot through with compassion and stirring poetry. Overall, it feels like Elena Ferrante’s entire Neapolitan Quartet wrapped up in one, illuminating both a city unlike any other and a whole world tormented by the rift between Haves and Have-nots.”

—John Domini, author of the Earthquake I.D. trilogy

“From Raffaele La Capria to Fabrizia Ramondino and to Domenico Starnone, we now have Angelo Cannavacciuolo’s view of Naples from a triple perspective that includes and integrates class, identity, and the harsh reality of urban life. Boldly unmitigated, When Things Happen offers a unique and necessary version of Naples to the nonItalian reader.”

—Anthony

Julian Tamburri,

author of Re-Reading Italian Americana:

Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism

Michele Campo is living the bourgeois Italian dream. Now a speech pathologist in his forties, he resides in an expensive Naples home with his partner, Costanza, daughter of an upperclass family. Michele’s own family origins, however, are murkier. When he is assigned to work with five-year-old foster child Martina, he grows increasingly engrossed by her case, as his own buried family history slowly claws its way back to the surface. The first novel by acclaimed Italian writer Angelo Cannavacciuolo to be translated into English, When Things Happen tells a powerful and intriguing story of what we lose when we leave our origins behind. It presents a panoramic view of Neapolitan society unlike any in literature, revealing a city of extreme contrasts, with a glamorous center ringed by suburban squalor. Above all, it is a psychologically nuanced portrait of a man struggling to locate what he values in life and the poor vulnerable child who helps him find it.

ANGELO CANNAVACCIUOLO is an award-winning Neapolitan writer and director. He is the author of several books, including Guardiani delle Nuvole (1999) and Il soffio delle Fate (2001).

GREGORY PELL is a professor of Italian at Hofstra University in New York, where he teaches language, translation, film, and poetry. He is the author of Davide Rondoni: Art in the Movement of Creation

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