This book has so much to recommend it. The really outstanding thing is the child narrator's voice - it's always exactly appropriate to the child's purported age. Nothing precocious - only what the child could really know and say.

A divine parable. A German married couple on the verge of breaking up smell a stinking corpse on a drive through Italy. When their rental car breaks down in a seedy, decrepit Sicilian town, they are forced to participate in a banal tourist spectacle at a nearby water tower--and find themselves witnesses to an act of barbarity. Hofmann conjures a gothic atmosphere out of petty and mundane incidents. The novel works both as an all-too-believable tale of a horrid holiday, and on a deeper level, as a damning parable of third-world exploitation by slumming first-world tourists