The Human Body

Starred review from September 1, 2014
Giordano follows The Solitude of Prime Numbers with a stunning exploration of war. The novel revolves around a platoon of Italian soldiers stationed in Forward Operating Base Ice in the dangerous Gulistan district of Afghanistan. Giordano makes the tedium of combat fascinating with his well-drawn characters. Included in the cast is Lieutenant Egitto, a medical officer escaping his perilous home life; girlfriend-obsessed First Corporal-Major Torsu; and the boisterous Cderna. Giordano covers everything from preparation for deployment—the weekend before they leave, all the soldiers’ girlfriends want to watch movies, but the soldiers want to “tank up on sex for the upcoming months of abstinence”—to the ways soldiers stay in touch with those left at home. The first page indicates that the platoon’s experience was particularly horrible (“In the years following the mission, each of the guys set out to make his life unrecognizable, until the memories... were bathed in a false artificial light”), but the fact that the mission runs off the rails is almost secondary to the beauty, texture, and acuity with which Giordano captures the day-to-day routines of the soldiers, and their efforts to make sense of both their lives in Italy and their military assignment.

October 1, 2014
Giordano's (The Solitude of Prime Numbers, 2010) unorthodox Afghanistan war novel is short on action but rich in psychological insight. In a post outside Afghanistan, a team of Italian soldiers copes with boredom, fear and barely human living conditions. This is no typical group of heroes: Medical officer Egitto is a former male prostitute who's just learned that one client is pregnant with his child; Cpl. Ietri is a naive 20-year-old who's still attached to his mother. One officer gets into an online relationship that turns abusive. Another is a bully who singles out one subordinate for mistreatment, Full Metal Jacket style. And two female officers drift into unhealthy relationships with their colleagues. For much of the book, the closest thing they see to action is an epidemic of food poisoning. Military engagement finally arrives in the form of an ill-advised plan to transport local truck drivers away from the reach of bloodthirsty insurgents. As some in the company predict, the mission is a disaster, with many of the major characters wiped out in an instant. There's no easy resolution, but all the survivors are transformed as they return to their former lives. Giordano tells the story with economical language and a few memorable images, most notably that of the convoy getting overrun with sheep just before the carnage erupts. As the title suggests, the book is less about military heroism than the devastating human impact of combat. Well-observed and compassionate, this is a memorable look at imperfect people in extreme circumstances.

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September 15, 2014
Giordano's fine novel tells of a group of Italian soldiers posted at the Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan. Life at FOB is nasty and brutish, a combination of bad food, boredom, and unpleasant chores. And often bad companythere's a bully, a victim, an egghead, a bright-eyed innocent, an incompetent superior, and others battling their own private wars with family, girlfriends, and just plain loneliness. When it becomes necessary to escort their Afghani truck drivers to a region 30 miles north, the company pulls together for the long and dangerous trek. Moving at a snail's pace as the bomb squad inspects every foot of road for IEDs, the soldiers' key directive is to keep the caravan together. But when one vehicle gets stuck on rock, the forward vehicles refuse to wait, and those behind it must stop to help dig out. A dozen little errors collude to bring the group under Taliban fire, leaving the survivors battling guilt for themselves and anger toward others. The Human Body is a memorable entry in the literature of the Afghan war, the characters crisply drawn and the writing full of telling details.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 1, 2014

Italian soldiers played a part in the recent ill-fated war in Afghanistan, and this novel tells the story of a small group of them at a remote outpost there. Among the main characters is Lieutenant Egitto, a doctor, who's smart, sensitive, and depressed, and who ruminates about his past family life and romantic failures. Roberto Ietri, one of the younger soldiers, also thinks about his kinsmen and becomes friendly with the older, hard-nosed Cederna, among the few looking forward to a real battle, if it ever comes. Meanwhile, Marshall Rene finds his shell of cynicism and duty cracking under the Afghan sun. Then a mission is conceived that involves accompanying some local truck drivers who have been supplying the base in their return trip across miles of hostile, Taliban-held territory. An ambush arises, lives are lost, and people are changed forever. VERDICT Despite the tragic events, this is a very entertaining novel, with the characters' innate and passionate sense of the absurdity of their situation, and of life itself, evident in every scene. The fast-paced, present-tense narrative seems to have been translated accurately to capture the nuances of emotion and drama conveyed by the highly intelligent and perceptive Giordano (The Solitude of Prime Numbers). [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/14; for another take on the Italian experience in Afghanistan, see also Melania G. Mazzucco's Limbo, p. 95.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2014

Giordano, who shot up like a firecracker with his internationally best-selling debut novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, returns with a book featuring a platoon of Italian soldiers--including one woman--posted to a Forward Operating Base in a particularly sun-scorched corner of Afghanistan.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.