Giuseppe

With a colorful cast of unexpectedly gentle German guards, helpful Red Army soldiers and generous American GIs, as well as avaricious looters and savage rapists, the book describes the odyssey of an Italian soldier trying to make his way home through a ravaged country. It is also a marvelous treatise on the folly of war and the consequences of becoming an outcast in a strange land. The protagonist tells us of his travails as an Italian military internee in various camps in war-time Germany. He witnesses needless cruelty while at the same time battling boredom and frustration.

He is a plain-spoken man but, in his simplicity, brings forth unpolished gems of wisdom that only a pure soul and a flamboyant mind can conjure. Having been a skilled dancer, he stumbles around in the dark after the apocalyptic fire-bombing of Dresden as this atrocity opens his eyes to the absolute horror of a war that knows no bounds.