“The two whispered with the familiarity of experienced soldiers, which they were, not like twenty-two-year-olds, which they were.”
Seventeen short stories, many characters different from each other, which describe the normal extraordinary nature of their lives. The American dream, seen from within, described in the routine of everyday life and in the pleasure of small conquests. A continuous series of perfect family paintings (even when they don’t want to be), in which the heart of America comes out, or at least a portion of it.
An ideal book for the US market, and for all lovers of the stars and stripes culture, to find the right consistency of smells and know that they can only be tasted overseas. Something that only an American can be able to tell; a look in the mirror without the cultural and social superstructures imposed by society. We think this is the necessary preamble to keep in mind for anyone who wants to read the book.
What didn’t meet our taste was the thick line of do-goodness that holds the stories together. A redundancy of good intentions and feelings to leave tooth decay. We wondered if this was not the author’s intention, that is, to tell of an ideal and not very real America, lost in time but which makes the reader’s heart feel good. Could this be the game of implication that the title “Uncommon Types” refers to?
We liked the rhythmic rhythm of the reading very much, and made us appreciate the author from another point of view, far from the big screen, and it is not something to be taken for granted. We have read many other books of actors lent to the “pen” with much more modest results, and of which we have finished reading with great difficulty.
We also appreciated the abundance of descriptions, being projected into the environments with the different protagonists, so much so as to give us the idea of being reading the script of a film, but perhaps in this evaluation we were misled by the fame of the actor-author of the book.
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Tom Hanks, Uncommon type, Bompiani, Milano, 2017
Original edition: Uncommon type, Random House, New York, 2017
