Zapinette Video

Rating:
Summary: Verbal Acrobats
Review: One of the greatest delights of childhood is words-discovering them, voicing demands with them, engrossing oneself in them through stories and books, and amusing ourselves with them. A clever child's wordplay can be language at its best: spontaneous, funny, a pure and uncluttered stream of creativity. Happily, not every adult loses this gift. In his novel Zapinette VidÈo, Albert Russo offers an abundant portion of verbal acrobats in the voice of his precocious young heroine, Esmeralda McInnerny, affectionately nicknamed Zapinette by her uncle for the girl's love of video games, computers, and other high-tech media. Zapinette reveals a slice of life from a perspective that is both rare and familiar. She is unique in her worldly travels, having been born in the United States, currently living in Paris, and visiting faraway lands with her beloved Uncle Berky. She is all too common in her pain as the child of a broken home, her anger and hostility over her mother's new beau ("Fermin the Vermin"), her confusion over the baffling realities of the adult world, and her inner longing to find her real father. Armed with a facile mind and an exposure to several languages, Zapinette relies heavily on her own vocabulary to describe the people and events that spin around her. More than in her thoughts themselves, it is in the words she uses to express them that we uncover the conflicts, breathless conclusions, and surprising subjects to which the young Zapinette has been exposed.

Impatient, impertinent, raucous, and often passionate in her opinions (a trait she obviously inherits from her hot-blooded uncle), Zapinette regales us with words we've never heard before. Like her mother, she's a staunch "felinist;" she worries about the "heather-setchuals" who are "VIP positive;" is freaked out by the "Clue Cocks Clan" and the "androidous" Michael Jackson; has read about the English playwright "Shake'em pears;" wishes more people would go see a "sigh-kayak-tryst;" and can't stand an uppity blue-blood classmate she calls "Charlotte de Jerq." There is wisdom in this young voice, too. After sensing her mother and stepfather's attitude about AIDS, she feels a new anxiety creeping into her and realizes that "fear is sometimes more contagious than sickness itself." Contemplating the Ten Commandments, she refuses to take the Bible at face value: "To 'Thou shalt honor your father and your mother,' I have added, 'not if your dad ran away, leaving you and your mom on the dole, without a single farting (that's how they used to call pennies in the times of Charlie Dickens),' coz that would be too easy."

The laugh-out-loud wordplay Albert Russo creates, especially with names, provides an unavoidable comparison to Nabokov. "Charlotte de Jerq" is a child's twist on the Nabokov humor found in Lolita and other novels, as evidenced in this passage from Transparent Things: "Madame Charles Chamar, nÈe Anastasia Petrovna Potapov (a perfectly respectable name that her late husband garbled as "Patapouf") . . .

Albert Russo's freshness with language is further enhanced by his ability to maintain such a unique voice throughout Zapinette VidÈo. He creates a very challenging problem by choosing a character whose atypical language is central to her character, and never lets up on this child-like intensity. Anyone who has attempted a novel-length work will appreciate Russo's stamina and seemingly endless imaginative resources. In Zapinette's own words: "To all of you ninnies who think that writing a book is a picnic, you have no idea how mindbubbling the whole affair is." From beginning to end, each page crackles with Zapinette's original use of words-delivered at the quick pace of a child's nonstop inquisitive mind. Keeping up is an amusing and exhilarating experience.

Rating:
Summary: A loving fictional look at language and childhood
Review: Russo's novel flows like rich Parisian wine; though the relevance of his digressions is sometimes suspect, they are always hilarious. And that, of course, is the point. Reading ZAPINETTE VIDEO is like taking a stroll through the Latin Quarter, baguette in hand. The heroine of this novel, Zapinette, is wise, witty, and ultimately human. Her observations on the French, television, family, and the hypocrisy of modern life are as biting as they are true; anybody who's ever stood in line at a French post office ("la poste") can relate to this novel's send-up of that particular raspberry. Ultimately, though, Russo's novel is about language, and the relative levels of success with which we communicate across linguistic barriers. That Russo and his Zaperetta are both bilingual is no coincidence; the novelist puts his impressive aptitude for languages to work and creates a charming, relevant work that captures both French and English syntax in one consistent narrative style. A must for lovers of Paris, of satire, and of fictional truth. C'est bon!

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, and zany
Review: The gifted author, Albert Russo, almost convinced me that the novel, Zapinette Video, is being written by Zaperetta, a precociously jaded, yet somehow still innocent, child. I was hooked from the start. Seeing a familiar Paris, Italy and Switzerland through the humorous, creative eyes of Albert Russo's, Zaperetta, and her vividly rich characters left me smiling, yet strangely haunted by the author's undercurrent of seemingly aching rage.