Olivo Oliva

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Olivo Oliva’s beginnings are deliciously presented: an olive falls
from a centuries-old tree and lodges inside the passionate body of young
Pina Di Vita, the daughter of the wealthy and unscrupulous orchard
owner. The olive is then pushed further inside by the ardor of the
girl’s lover. “We know how the Olive was thrust into the young
woman,” says the author. “Did the Olive participate in the
procreation of the Sicilian child? It certainly did! And if the narrator
had not suggested this combination, who would have believed such an
allegory possible?”

Italian-born Quebecer Poloni has crafted an exquisite fable, in the
best Borgian tradition, of Olivo Oliva, half man, half olive, whose
quest for identity takes him from his illegitimate beginnings, to
employment with the New York Mafiosi, and, finally, back to the lonely
grove in Sicily where he finds the venerable tree under—and
through—which he was conceived. Skewered in the novel are New York,
Sicily, the Mafia, Catholicism, most literature, art, and masculine
friendship.

From such fabulist origins Sicilians may be born—heroes, in this
case, whose very blood and secretions are redolent of the oil of the
fruit of their ancestors. Poloni (who makes a lengthy personal
appearance in the final chapter) has found an admirable translator in
David Homel. In conception, realization, and conclusion, this is a
wonderful little book that should find a wide and appreciative audience.
Highly recommended.