Leonardo San Pietro's Party with Cassowary follows a group of college students at a gathering through a series of strange and sinister events, in a weird, mind-bending novel about how humans relate to one another.
Chapters alternate characters of focus, always in close third person. The novel begins with Vincenzo, en route to a party thrown by a classmate he does not know well. He is nervous. Before Vincenzo's ride to the function arrives to pick him up, he experiences a random encounter: a mussed stranger with "hospital-patient breath" rushes him, demanding money, threatening--and then hugs him, staggers back, claims it was all a joke, and vanishes into the night. This unsettling interaction, part peril and part prank, sets the tone for the rest of the novel.
The celebration takes place at a lavish estate in northern Italy, the home of Isa M., a literature student who enjoys wealth and privilege but is not happy. Isa M. and her close circle of friends offer some of the novel's perspectives, but not all. There are also the outsider Vincenzo, an otherwise unnamed Gatecrasher Y, a drug dealer, and a social pariah. Events rotate around an absent character, the popular, charismatic Ezio, who never shows up at the party. Instead, an ominous note declares, "Unless someone touches the cassowary before one a.m., Ezio dies," referring to Isa M.'s neighbor's flightless bird from Australia, arguably a more dangerous cousin to the ostrich. And so begins an increasingly bizarre rite of passage or evil gag, prompting questions: Who wrote the note? Do they really have Ezio? Is this a joke, or are lives really at stake? How unsafe is the cassowary really?
In this translation from the Italian by Todd Portnowitz, San Pietro's narration is disjointed, in the spirit of college students imbibing and reveling and struggling to parse what is real. They love Ezio; they are jealous of him and of one another; they want to appear courageous; they just want this night to be over with. They indulge in philosophy and grand statements. But is this party, and the challenge of the cassowary, just another wacky episode in the unsober college experience? Or is it where true selves are forged? One partygoer "crossed the fence to get a glimpse, at least a glimpse, behind the curtain of life, where real life rests." San Pietro challenges readers with a surreal narrative that is either far weirder than--or a truer distillation of--real life. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: A small group of college students grapples with an extraordinary and dangerous demand with potentially life-or-death consequences in this phantasmagorical novel about the instability of youth.