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ITALIAN Fiction Alessandro Piperno. Con le peggiori intenzioni. Milan. Mondadori. 2005. 304 pages. euro17. ISBN 88-04-53802-3
ALESSANDRO PIPERNO'S first novel recounts with humor, panache, and a wide-ranging, flamboyant vocabulary the lives of a Roman Jewish family. And it takes all the adjectives the narrator, Daniel Sonnino, can garner to tell the story of his idiosyncratic family, beginning with his grandfather, Bepy Sonnino, who Daniel always thought of, with his gargantuan appetites, as "a force of nature."
Daniel is frank and open about every kind of so-called sexual aberration or perversion-such as his own foot fetish, how it came about, and what fears...