BookPoints Book Reviews
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Starting May 1,2002 we will review a newly published series of E-novels, "The Oedipus Syndrome", by a new author, Maria Giusto, from a new publishing firm, 4 Points Press.
By permission of the author and the publisher, we can insert text from this E-series and conduct an on-line forum from any book of that E-series. Two E-novels of this series are complete with three more to follow. The publisher has promised us a pre- publishing date of each so that we will have ample time for reading and discussion.
E-Book One, "Blind Intentions", is in three parts, "The Present", "An Awakening", "A Realization", and is already in publication online. They can be accessed at http://www.4pointspress.com/readerrm/
For a start we will review Chapters One to Six, of Book 1 - Part 1, "The Present", which is available now to download FREE from http://www.4pointspress.com/wfb.htm
This is National Library Week. (See our direct links in the "Free to Add Links" section)
It would be wonderful if every reader, who is reading this month's selection or any other book, would send an email to their library to let the staff know how much they enjoy and appreciate the library's Services. (And if you're not reading at a library book club, send your library an email anyway, and tell them about this book.) This is their week but let's celebrate it all of the rest of this month and into the middle of next month. Let's give them some feedback.
It's great reading and discussing books with friends. We will see you here on May 1st. So send us your comments for onsite publishing.
Sincerely,
Gina Carr
Site Moderator
May 5, 2002
Thanks to all of you who have downloaded "The Oedipus Syndrome - Book One, Part 1 - The Present" here and from the READER ROOM of WWW.4POINTSPRESS. COM. Besides the mail I got on this site, the publisher forwarded a lot of incoming e-mail to me from their site. From the looks of it, all of them were positive. So, here we go with some asnwers for you. One question cropped up repeadedly. "Why was there not more of a storyline presented in the Publisher's Review section in the Reader's Room on the www.4pointspress.com site?"
I asked the publisher that and, along with an apology, here is what I got back from their Marketing V.P., Delvin Shrout -- a more complete story outline. It satisfies me and I hope it satisfies you.
Press Release of "The Oedipus Syndrome" May 2, 2002
Raf Frataleon finds that he now has begun to chafe against his present corporate life style. His CEO position and image of the high powered executive on wall street of the only family owned, multi-million dollar, after-market airplane parts company in the world is safe and unchallenging and his company's successful future is already mapped. While he has taken precautions against his company's demise and insured his position in Frataleon, Inc., he nonetheless stands vulnerable to the wishes of his mother Sara, born and raised in Honduras, the sole, legal owner of the family corporation and totally dependent on her son's charge of family affairs since the diagnosis of her husband Cece's terminal disease in 1975 and his subsequent death in1990.
The downward spiral of Frataleon, Inc. from its lofty world dominance in the aircraft aftermarket parts marketplace and Raf's sudden topple as its CEO takes us on an unsettling page turner of a journey through his lifelong dilemmas and discontents. His imposed dive from prominence comes from an unsuspecting source. On his way into attempted retirement, after a long career of positive accomplishments bringing Frataleon Inc. from obscurity in a small suburb of Los Angeles in California, Glendale, to the business Mecca of the world, Wall Street in New York City, Raf sits in his plush office feeling cranky and introspective, distracted by thinking of his long, entangled way to success, a success that came to him against all odds. Trying to untangle some of his emotionally scarring, deep rooted, long ago buried experiences preoccupy him the day his mother, near death, is rushed to Cedar-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. A phone call from his sister Nicole, a long time, out of control alcoholic, summons him to his mother's bedside where his death vigil over her mother sets him on a long road back over his life and how he came to his present state of affairs.
As we follow Raf from his childhood between Los Angeles, Houston, Texas, Casa Iru'n and Tegucigalpa in Honduras, into his adulthood achievements and his back and forth movements from these places to Zermatt and Sion, Switzerland, where he has the freedom to be who he is, to New York, his center of operations, to Benalma'dina, in Montauk Bay on Long Island, and other major parts of the world, ''The Oedipus Syndrome'' becomes a resonant meditation on the way a victimized family member can unknowingly be strangled into submission and so limiting the inner self. Still, in the end, none of these places are a place for a heart that craves amnesia and the pulse of anonymity. That only comes to him in a remote place where he had never dreamed of settling to spend the rest of his life.
Ms. Giusto has chosen her locations well giving her novel a worldwide appeal. Her scenes are alive with the sense of what it's like to be where Raf is at any given moment, whether he is young and awed or older and more savoir fare. And as someone who has been to most of those places he has, the author has tugged me back and reminded me how I felt and what I saw in those same locations.
In some of the finest writing in the book, we track Raf's slow seduction into the web of entanglement that surrounds the impending financial disaster that faces his father Cece' Frataleon, Raf's childhood hero, who is a creature of immense drive, a man with a gift for flourishes, a man wide open in his profound love first for his son Raf and second for his daughter Nicole and his wife Sara. A dichotomatic personality, he was also somewhat as cool as he was eloquent and evasive and, without consciously knowing it, he possessed an equal gift for cloaked deception. Struck down in 1975 with an incurable disease, Parkinson's, in the prime of his life, prevents him from carrying on as the CEO of the company he started at the end of World War II. At thirty-one Raf is forced to step in and take the company over in his father's place and his entanglement becomes complete.
After nearly his whole lifetime of involvement in his mother and father's dysfunctional relationship, one that has cast its long shadow over his life almost paralyzing him and making him emotionally bankrupt, Raf is able to sit by his mother's deathbed and tread back over his years with them from one country to another, from one city to another, from one home to another until he decides which one he would call "home". In his ruminations we discover, as he does, that before, into now and into his future his saving grace is his deceased grandfather, General Ramon Austino DeDiegas, for whom he was named replacing Austino for Antonio and with whom he develops an imaginary relationship that had started through a journal when he was eleven and a half years old. But his true to life rescuers are his grandmother Dominica DeDiegas, who showers him with deep love and loyalty, Enzio Buchatti, his best friend and adopted brother who gives him a life-long binding affiliation, and his wife and son who love him with innocent, blind devotion.
Although Raf and his wife have dissimilar backgrounds, each is a refugee from extreme physical and emotional trauma. At this point in their lives together, even though his and his wife's love for each other has reached a deeper, more residual feeling, less passionate, but not by much, than when they had started out, nonetheless their commitment to each other, brought about by mutual, deep physical and emotional dependency, cannot be severed by any tragedy that comes their way. After the death of his mother and the unexpected takeover of Frataleon, Inc. by his incompetent sister, his wife's love and devotion is tested. Along with the help of Enzio, she comes out of her role as the passive partner in their relationship, never veering or trying to rationalize her new position in their lives, never questioning the sacrifices she has to make, and becomes the driving force that pull's him back from disaster.
What unfolds is an epic novel of the dysfunctional family Raf came from; of misplaced loyalties, betrayal and survival; of abandonment and estrangement; of the many attempted reconciliations that failed finally leading to the story's only conclusion: the structural demise of Frataleon Inc and the family who gave it life.
With plot elements like these, the series of novels, 'The Oedipus Syndrome", could easily have congealed into a daytime television mess of syrupy sentiment. That it never threatens to is a mark of Maria Giusto's ample talents. While primarily a stylist in brilliant character development giving her protagonist psychological depth, she knows just how to make Raf's world come alive and make his story build: the novels reveal a sure sense of pace and pitch. Using an introspective technique the author creates very persuasive male characters that come alive as soon as they are on the scene. We see Raf's complex nature morph from seeming outward passivity into an unstoppable drive and lust for living. His metamorphosis is complete when, through a chance meeting, he meets an innocent young girl on a train. While trying to avoid her he wraps himself into a cocoon of invulnerability and works himself into almost into exhaustion for most of that next year. Cece', his father, while not so complex as his son is, is nonetheless a study on how some men, once vibrant and dynamic, deal with debilitating, terminal disease. Then there's Enzio, Raf's buddy brother who, after Raf sustains him through overcoming a crippling birth defect, parallels his life with Raf's but instead of business steers his passion into sports.
Ms. Giusto is also the author of a collection of short fiction that includes, ''The Emigrant" and a very short story, "A New Beginning…" written under the pen name Bonnie Franklin. " The Oedipus Syndrome is her first attempt at a novel, or rather I should say an on going series of novels that has taken the last three years to get off the ground and into E-Book publishing.
Step by step, adversity changes many aspects of one's life. In the case of this story, every adversity presented to Raf since the first betrayal by his parents at a very young age to the ultimate betrayal by his sister Nicole leaves him with unexpected richness. ''The Oedipus Syndrome" intuits this: It's as much a story of misguided familial obligations and their devastating results as it is a story about deep, lasting love as well as embattled love and friendships that are sustained throughout life.
In a recent interview, Ms. Giusto said that the seed of this novel germinated in her own childhood. Growing up in a deep rooted, ten generation, pure Sicilian Culture, many of the story's circumstantial anomalies and character abnormalities, bifurcated with their benevolences, were pure fact. In this case that long a gestation period is clearly beneficial to the story clarifying it rather than dispersing it. I dare say that all these things considered, Raf's journey keeps us off balance and enthralled. He takes us beneath an act of surface heartlessness and immerses us in quandaries we all recognize.
How are we to act when our allotted choices are these: Is it betrayal or self-betrayal? What is the relationship between love and loyalty? How much of each can we expect? The author has deftly brought us face to face to these intractable questions. The energy of a humane story that at its center possesses all of these emotions is a novel that searches for all these answers.
Delvin Shrout,
Publisher,
4 Points Press Publishing Company
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Next month we will be reviewing, "SELF MATTERS", by Dr. Phil McGraw (I just love listening to that guy!) You can read a short excerpt from his first chapter on AMAZON.COM. In the meantime check out our link to his website on our "Free For All Links" at the bottom of this site.
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