It’s disconcerting that this isn’t shelved as fiction. It’s absolutely exceptional historical fiction with a pretty heavy tongue-in-cheek narrator. It is absolutely scathing and not at all like a nonfiction book. Though, it does chronicle a few pivotal years in the fascist uprising in Italy, as you might expect, and in probably as edifying as a textbook. It’s just obviously a narrative with a dog in the race. A dog that calls others dogs racist, sexist, idiot pigs when they behave like that.

Truth be told, I am not much of a reader of history because my brain is just not good with dates, and because I consumed the (excellent) audiobook, with impeccable narration, mostly what I got from it was the excellent major “plot” beats that one assumes are factual, and a high enjoyment factor from the prose styling. This is wildly good in every form of the craft I can spot and has that weird crossover thing, kind of like When We Cease To Understand The World, not quite narrative nonfiction, but leans heavily on fact and real people. Sooo, really high end literary historical fiction, I guess? Whatever it is, I’m down for more.