Guarding Hanna

Rating:
Summary: Guarding your own emotions
Review: (This was written by a 40 year old reader)
Rarely have I come across a recommended book that having read it I think about incessently afterwards. The main character of Guarding Hanna, a kind of anti/hero, certainly has few redeeming qualities. He was brought up in a home for delinquents, facially deformed and a constant curiosity to insensitive eyes. Rescued from the orphanage by a petty gang leader called Maestro he subsequently enters his service. When he is latter given the task of guarding a witness to a crime for a week it seems to present our hero with such an awesome challenge. Being a loner, whose previous experience with women had only been with prostitutes, he now must learn to accomodate the simple needs of another person until it becomes no longer clear who is actually guarding or helping who. Through their relationship the reader comes to realise that even though life has dealt our hero such a bad hand there is a real sense of humanity that is struggling to break through the prejudices of his peers, and perhaps that is something that every reader might empathise with and which is why the climax of the novel left such a profound effect on me. It was so unexpected. Perhaps my out pouring of emotions was just from a sense of release from the accumulated tensions. The novel is written in such a way that it holds your attention with every page. Ever entry, told from our heros point of view like a diary, is given a time. One is therefore very much aware that our heros assignment is drawing to a conclussion and that something unexpected must surely happen. When it finally comes there is nothing predictable about it, which makes it all the more shocking, and as I turned the last page I really felt that for a second the world had stopped turning and that nothing would be the same again. Read this book, suspend your prejudices and leave your emotions unguarded, it will be all the more rewarding.

Rating:
Summary: I want a turn Guarding Hanna
Review: Guarding Hanna is an allegory of the relationship between the sexes. Men are dogs and women are fawns. Men crave hamburgers and women get a warm glow from a cup of herbal tea. Put the two extremes together, and the tension can cause both sides to bloom. It's funny and painful and extremely smart. I want a turn Guarding Hanna. It might be the only relief from the tyranny of the industrial world of single men and women living out their lives alone, in tiny apartments, in cities like Berlin.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent stuff
Review: It's a very interesting story. What happens when a deformed loner is assigned to guard a woman for a week before she's due to testify in court? He moves into her apartment to protect her, and the ensuing eight days bring a lot of surprises and drama. Mazzini has some dead-on insights about modern urban life and how it distorts our capacity to understand each other. Better yet, he tells his story well, with humor, an intriguing plot, two strange and curious main characters, and an exciting conclusion. The book's a mix of detective story, psychological drama, and crime novel.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent stuff
Review: Just your average story about a hideously deformed mob errand boy guarding a potential witness that could put a rival crime boss away. The narrator grew up in an orphanage and has never made any attempts at maintaining relationships or entering society, now has to live with Hanna for a week to protect her from possible harm. His various trials and tribulations in trying to fit in are detailed in a very humorous fashion by the author.