Sea of Memory

By Erri De Luca

A sixteen-year-old boy is spending his summer on an Italian island. It's the 1950s and Naples, his home town, is still full of American soldiers. So even though World War II is over, its effects are everywhere. The boy, whose name is never given, has questions about the war but the adults around him just want to put it in the past.
The boy spends his days out on a fishing boy, learning the trade of the fisherman. The man who operates the boat sometimes imparts a little information about how he spent the war and the boy soaks it all up.
The boy meets a girl, Caia, and becomes smitten. She is a little older than him and seems like she has a secret burden. He finds out that she is Jewish, a fact she prefers the group she hangs out with not to know. The boy becomes her confidant, and she sometimes imagines her dead father talks to her through him from some trick of gesturing that the boy has that reminds her of her father.
As the summer goes on, and the boy comes to feel more deeply the role the Italians played as allies of Germany. He especially sympathizes with Caia, who lost her whole family during the war. His rage and guilt become focused on the many German tourists who are vacationing on the island and he carries out a kind of stupid and pointless revenge against a few of them.

It is strange reading about a teenage obsession, knowing that a crush will most likely pass and that the boy's revenge is the product of an immature mind. All that youthful passion, thrown away in an act that really has no purpose other than to relieve some of the boy's stress, guilt and rage. The reader follows along as a young man's feelings take to him places that may ruin and will probably change the rest of his life. You never find out the consequences of his actions, but even if he is never caught, surely such a drastic step must affect and skew his outlook permanently. He will always be the person who did that terrible thing just as the Germans will always be the people who did that terrible thing, the Holocaust.
But is it a good read? I found it slow going and rather dull. Took me several days to read a very short novel, only 118 pages. Normally I could do that in one sitting. I'm not saying it's a bad read, but it just didn't grab me. Also the abrupt ending was a let down. The boy does his dirty deed but we are not told its effect or the consequences. I can only rate this one fair.