few novels and novellas, this is his first work to be translated into English. He is
part of the ‘cannibals’, a group of up-and-coming young Italian writers. He was
the youngest author ever to be awarded the prestigious Viareggio-Repaci prize.
‘I’m not scared’ tells the story of Michele, a kid in a hamlet in southern Italy. He
likes to bike around and play with his friends in the blazingly yellow grain-fields
around his village. This is the summer of 1976, the hottest of the decade. His
father and mother are your normal set of parents, or so Michele thought. He will
be soon confronted with a situation that he cannot comprehend because it
takes place in the adult world. He will be on his own, because he is not
supposed to know and cannot tell anyone. He will have to make his own
decisions about right and wrong. He will grow up in a fortnight.
There are so many bildung-novels out there, and the premise in itself is neither
original nor particularly sophisticated. Because we see the story through
Michele’s eyes, the structure of the story is linear and the language simple.
Michele, however, is a fully rational kid, an adult-in-the-making if you wish, and
either wittingly or unwittingly imparts the reader with knowledge about his
emotional development. The perspective never strays far from Michele, and
this is the novel’s greatest power. Ammaniti has taken a great risk by telling the
story from this child’s perspective; it could have easily become a story for as
well as about children, but he walks the fine line between overtly simple and
great literature stripped to its bare necessities and succeeds in constructing a
story that reads as a twelve-year old boy’s account of things, but has literary
undercurrents that run much deeper.
