Short Story Review: Massinello Pietro by Ray Bradbury

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Massinello Pietro by Ray Bradbury is a short story in his anthology We'll Always Have Paris. It is the first story in the anthology and an odd one. It is all about the importance of a seemingly insane old man who keeps a menagerie of pets in what we can assume is a small apartment of sorts in a very nosy neighborhood.

Massinello Pietro loves animals, music and dancing. His love for these things is unswayed by complaints from his disgruntled neighbors and even threats from the police. He keeps far too many pets that make a lot of noise. He plays his music at all times of the night, much to the chagrin of the neighborhood. He refuses to stop, no matter how many complaints he gets. His reasoning is that it makes him happy. As the story wears on, the reader comes to realize that he is not so much being inconsiderate of others as he is being considerate of himself. He is tired of the unhappiness that life can bring, so he resolves to suck himself out of the mire of the human condition and make his own conditions.

Ray Bradbury keeps this story short and simple. He gives the reader an eccentric, likable and pitiable character. He gives us page after page of validation for the complaints of the man's neighbors, but then he gives us validation for the man himself. He also shows us that, in the end, the polite, happy-go-lucky man was actually of value to those who were annoyed by him. In the end, his presence had been normalcy to them. Without him, things are wrong.