Books & Reviews Archive

Under the title *La Rinascita*, in June 1944 the first issue of the Communist Party’s monthly journal was published. Italy is not yet free; the partisan struggle is underway, and yet from its very first issue the journal devotes several pages to literature. There are poetic works (by Umberto Saba and Salvatore Quasimodo), texts by foreign authors, and contributions from Italian writers as well, from Alberto Moravia to Cesare Pavese. This book collects some of these short stories, published between 1945 and 1956, during a period of fierce political struggle and in the full bloom of Neorealism. The stories are steeped in social themes; many deal with the Resistance, featuring contributions from Renata Viganò, Italo Calvino, Marcello Venturi (an important and forgotten chronicler of the partisan struggle), and Mario Puccini—the latter with a moving tale about a father’s anxieties for a son engaged in operations against the Germans. I have chosen three to review, not only because they are the finest, in my judgment, but also because they are representative of our country—of peasant Italy and of an urban middle class that would carry forward from Fascism the indelible marks of superficiality. Francesco Jovine is the author of a novel, *Le Terre del Sacramento*, which chronicles a South forever condemned to exploitation and forever betrayed by its ruling class: a writer of resignation and defeat. In the short story *La morte del patriarca*, published in 1949, a grandson speaks of his grandfather, a justice of the peace in a southern village and trusted confidant of the primary landowner, the quintessential southern *latifondista*. The grandfather is a patriarch to his family and the entire community: he does not exploit the owner’s absenteeism to enrich himself, but rather stands as a defender of the peasants. He is a bulwark and a mythical figure. > On summer nights he would wander the moonlit streets together with his fellow peasants, enchanting them by softly playing his flute. (...) Often, when he was away, the young men would be seized by sudden rages and reach for their hatchets. But when the grandfather was there, nothing occurred that was not placid and gentle; one could hear those notes taking flight, like turtledoves in love, accompanied by the hornet-like drone of a *chitarra battente*; the old peasants would awaken from their sleep and imagine summer fields laden with heavy ears of wheat, and succulent fruits bathed in the morning dew. What will become of the village after the patriarch’s death? > Suddenly an old woman from the back began to weep aloud and sing her sorrowful lament for the impending loss. Slowly, in a rhythmic voice, she spoke: you are departing, our honour and our defense; you are departing, brilliant sword. Without you, a youthful voice took up on the final laisse of the song, we have neither light nor judgment left. In *Il mondo salvato a spalle*, published in 1951, Felice Chilanti recounts the dramatic flooding of the Polesine, offering a realistic and evocative sketch of peasant solidarity. "Run, people, the water is overflowing along the entire embankment!" Giovanni and his fellow peasants rush to rally the men and rescue the women and children. And the village shopkeeper shouts, "And you, Giovanni, and you, Gabana, and you, Tabanin, weren't you already thrown in jail a year ago for this kind of work? Do you really want to save Cané's land and cattle?" > Canè is the great landowner of the area, whose brother, the cripple, screams like a madman at the peasants laboring to save the Cané family and their household goods. "You want to start a revolution, you wretches! Come and get me, you'll taste the lead of my pistol... (...) Giovanni and his companions carried the world on their shoulders to safety: the entire world just as it was, friends and enemies, the society in which they lived and fought; they carried to safety the landlord and his property, the priest and his prayers, the maresciallo of the carabinieri and his handcuffs." The title of Libero Bigiaretti’s short story (*Un altro destino* > 1951) echoes Jack London’s *Martin Eden*. Two young men strike up a friendship because they work together on a construction site: Renato comes from a working-class background, intelligent, combative, capable of asserting his views with clarity and energy > , Giulio comes from a bourgeois family, restless, he dropped out of school and would like to publish his poems in *La Fiera Letteraria*. Unlike Giulio, thoroughly steeped in fashionable names and trendy books," Renato "read whenever he had the chance, with a stubborn desire to understand things to the very core > . Giulio meets Elena, Renato's sister, with whom he begins a relationship. We parted, I full of dismay and confusion, she calm; she told me to wipe my lips, for they must be smeared with lipstick. (...) I can't help laughing, looking back on it. When I think how, throughout the evening and the night, that most ordinary of adventures got tangled up in my head. "What if I had to marry her?" "Did you know that Giulio goes walking around the Mercati Generali with a greengrocer girl?" (...) Then I met Loredana with whom, between kisses, one could discuss literature. And Loredana also knew how to kiss me much better than Elena." The stories are certainly no masterpieces; behind a veneer of Neorealism there emerges a melodramatic and bombastic streak, originating from Fascist literature and from even deeper roots within a provincial Italy, alien to European culture. It is remarkable how one can already detect a sense of weariness, of resigned acceptance of what Italy would become: inward-looking, mellifluous, and hypocritical. A touch of nostalgia arises when reading these stories. Back then, a party journal made room for literature, for Italy's foremost writers; today we are reduced to reading disjointed remarks on Facebook and Twitter, while writers speak of other matters, far removed from politics. Is it perhaps from here that the by now tiresome crisis of the Left originates? Why read it? It is worthwhile for reminding us what the culture of the Left once was.

In 1795, Immanuel Kant drafted a "project for perpetual peace" designed to eradicate war forever. For the German philosopher, as for all of us, only peace guarantees well-being and happiness. And what if this were not so? What if war were the ideal condition for humanity? In the year 3012 AD, men have lived in peace for centuries; yet feelings of solidarity, loyalty, and friendship have dissolved, replaced by a pervasive and immense hatred that requires a ruthless repressive apparatus to be kept in check. The author imagines that, after twenty centuries, a researcher discovers a manuscript by an anonymous writer recounting the advent of the Prophet, the one who preached "perpetual war." According to the anonymous chronicler (doubt is necessary, as legend and historical fact intertwine), the Prophet was a young *vitellone* named Antalo, who lived in Fellinia working as a porn star. He fell in love with a splendid woman who convinced him to follow her to the "Capital of the World," a megalopolis of fifty million inhabitants. It was a trap: his body was meant to rejuvenate wealthy old men, desperate to regain their former vigor. Antalo managed to escape and would become the protagonist of numerous adventures—some amusing, others chilling, all of them astonishing, and often serving as a metaphor for today's world, Italy in particular. At a writers' competition (Antalo was the author of incomprehensible poems, the subject of constant and conflicting interpretations), the future Prophet met a young woman who had entered with war novels and introduced him to a fourteenth-century poem describing chivalric clashes, massacres, and quartered bodies, extolling war, martial courage, concord among fighters, and magnanimity toward the vanquished. It was a revelation. > He put down the book. He held his head in his hands and a Voice spoke within him, saying: go and announce to the world that the accursed age of peace has ended. (...) The darkness will be torn asunder, the virtues believed lost will shine once more, and the brightest among those virtues will be generosity, the love of justice, and mercy toward the weak . But what will be the rules of this new era of war? Chivalric customs and respect for nature. And indeed, in the "memorable sayings" through which the Prophet outlined his vision, it is written: > the war that God wills is just and holy, as long as it is waged against true enemies. But if an enemy, to escape me, climbs a tree, I cannot cut down the tree to bring him down, for the tree is not my enemy . The editor informs us that a new era dawned, but of the "beautiful, just, holy, and necessary" war, little remained. Men > began slitting one another's throats with such enthusiasm that no natural or supernatural force could have stopped them anymore. The human race, then, lived through an unrepeatable season of violence and bloodshed, but was no unhappier than it had been in the past. On the contrary, it was almost happy . And so the anonymous chronicler was right to conclude, > and thus all that is born of man on this Earth is destined to pass away. (...) Amen . It should be made clear that the book is not an essay, but a fully fledged novel, set in a fantastical yet not improbable future. It is a sequence of events over the course of which poor Antalo, a naive young man, finds himself, in spite of himself, the victim of mysterious and incomprehensible forces, all of them violent and cruel. Even when he kills, he does so because he is forced to, refusing to become a manhunter (one of the pastimes in the era of peace), despite knowing that this choice would save his life. Likewise, he rejects rampant corruption and longs to love, not merely to have sexual encounters. He is, in short, "a fish out of water" in the > Great Capital of the World; and it is precisely this innocence that makes him a visionary, capable of giving humanity and the world a sense of perspective. Through an ostensibly ironic and cynical novel, Vassalli wants to tell us that utopia is necessary, but it demands free and naive spirits. The prose is very far removed from that of *The Chimera*, but this is as it must be, for it is an account aimed at capturing the bare essence of the Prophet's story. The flaw of the narrative lies in its excessive references to contemporary Italy—amusing at first, but ultimately tedious and predictable: it almost seems as if the author wanted to settle so many scores". Why read it? It is astonishing.

In four years, from 2013 to the present day, the author has published 6 novels, all featuring the figure of Rocco Schiavone as their protagonist. Perhaps haste has precluded the necessary care: the narrative is muddled, intertwining the noir genre with personal stories and depictions of social contexts without ever arriving at an effective synthesis. We are in Aosta; a woman has been murdered in the protagonist's apartment. In the lengthy interrogation that ensues, Deputy Police Chief Rocco clarifies the backstory, albeit not entirely. Back in Rome, he had led an investigation into the brutal murder of two youths. Drugs are involved, but we will not delve into the details, leaving it to the reader to discover how Rocco manages to untangle the affair. Alongside the main plot, numerous narrative windows open up, chief among them the tormented love affair with his wife and the close friendship with three childhood companions. Marina > was beautiful. With focused eyes, teeth barely biting her upper lip, hair gathered in a bun held by a pencil, or was it a chopstick? Beautiful, in her immaculate white coat reflecting the lamp's light and creating a halo all around her. Her hair looked blonder and the few specks of dust dancing around her face seemed like stars and comets . Marina left home when she learned that Rocco was corrupt: he had exploited his position as deputy police chief to enrich himself. Responsible for these petty dealings are his childhood friends: a sort of Three Musketeers, congenial, hearty eaters and drinkers, always ready to help their pal, but genuine scoundrels—terrible company for a police officer. It will be Marina who returns home, because she loves Rocco and accepts him as he is. The reconciliation between the two is one of the novel's many disappointments. Consider this dialogue: > Marina stroked his chest. Did you really have to close your eyes to come back home? (Rocco) A little. Now they are wide open and I see beside me the man I love and whom in all likelihood I will always love (Marina). I have an erection (Rocco). Could you for once think of something else? (Marina) Like what? (Rocco) . In short, for Rocco it was all just a matter of sex! Why draw us into a love story if everything boils down to a trite and resigned acceptance on the woman’s part? Rocco manages to find the culprits; behind the murders lies a powerful criminal syndicate which attempts to assassinate Rocco, killing Marina instead. That July of 2007 > had been strange days. Days of heat and sudden downpours, of anxiety and, above all, of stench. The stench of basements, the stench of violent deaths, of vile people, crouching in the sewers, ready to strike... A noir novel demands an intense narrative pace; the reader must be gripped by the plot, participate in the investigation, or be swept along by events and their tension. All of this is missing from the book: sluggish, often predictable, cluttered with unnecessary characters and subplots, the story is trite and dull. The “three musketeers” serve in vain as foils to the protagonist: Rocco, let us be frank, is a failed Marlowe, a character incapable of sustaining the assigned role of the corrupt yet decent cop, an avenger on his own terms. The writing also contributes to the novel's failure; the excessive use of full stops and the frequent recourse to dialogue fragment the narrative, rendering it more akin to a screenplay than to the prose flow of a narrative, which requires room for description and psychological depth. How is it possible that this novel has topped the Italian bestseller lists for weeks? Why not read it? It is tedious and banal.

The novel is set in 1960s Japan, when the upper and middle bourgeoisie is becoming Americanized, flirting with Western customs, eager to forge international ties. Ayako is the daughter of a minor yet rising pharmaceutical entrepreneur: she has “amiable” features. > Over those features, even with fashionable makeup, hovered harmony and freshness, and her face, by no means plump, gave the impression that something inner was rising to the surface Ha un carattere pacato, composto e razionale, > but Ayako was by no means obtuse; it was merely that she lacked an inclination toward momentary enthusiasms and toward exaggerating passions . The young woman frequents a fashionable riding club, where she meets Lady Takigawa, the widow of a high-ranking Japanese bureaucrat. Through a stratagem, the woman introduces her to her son, Toshio, whom she herself describes as > egocentric, selfish, stubborn, caustic—in short, a young lion . And yet Toshio has an entirely different self-image: a kind of robot, rigid and somehow other-directed by his mother. An arranged marriage is brokered, readily accepted by the two young people, partly because they are fond of each other and partly out of obedience to their parents’ wishes. The honeymoon strengthens their bond, which evolves from mere mutual liking into passion, genuine love. It would thus seem a lovely fairy tale, upon which Lady Takigawa intrudes, insinuating an alleged betrayal by Toshio—an insinuation that devastates Ayako. Yet who is Lady Takigawa? She is what used to be called a “merry” widow: wealthy and powerful, she has an immense love for high society, receptions, and social networking. Behind a tender, affectionate face hides an “innocent malice, (...) an unpleasant woman,” a split personality. One evening, the young couple is invited to a reception by Lady Takigawa. Yet right at the threshold, Toshio discovers the unbelievable lie and decides to rebel, refusing to go to his mother’s; Ayako tries to object, but then obeys her husband and follows him to eat at a modest diner. It is a scandal; offended, humiliated, and filled with rage, Lady Takigawa demands that they divorce, accusing her daughter-in-law of showing her a lack of respect. How is the matter resolved? Certainly not by telling the scheming mother-in-law where to go, nor by shrugging one’s shoulders and going about one’s business. We are in a world of conventions as well as interests; Lady Takigawa is wealthy and powerful. Toshio visits a princess of the Imperial Court, asking whether she might be accompanied by his mother on a trip abroad. > In that sort of conversation, Toshio was on his home turf, playing a game the youth of today could never imitate The princess knows full well the reasons for the visit, but > her countenance remained imperturbable, tinged with a tender understanding, enchanting as a dawn sky, then in a clear and decisive tone , she accedes to the young man’s request, on one condition alone: the two youths must show toward Lady Takigawa > a sincere tenderness, (...) asking forgiveness with grace, even should his mother deem it unacceptable . In short, conventions must always be respected, even if deception has been used to circumvent them. The narrative lends itself to multiple interpretations. What is clear is that the two young people undergo a transformation: though both belonging to a social class dominated by form, before marriage they were frank, sincere youths; to survive, they too become mere “semblances,” altered by anxiety and fear. > Perhaps marriage was a school where one is taught the lie of life , for one must > foresee the reactions of the outside world from every angle, as if the doors on all sides of a room, previously hermetically sealed, had been thrown wide open . On the other hand, there is no alternative for poor Ayako, > she could have become a little bird flying away, entrusting its shadow to that plain, but there was an emptiness there and it frightened her, not even a tree branch on which to rest her wings . The story is elegant and subtle, yet superficial: many windows open onto the protagonists that one would like to see explored in greater depth, but they remain mere glimpses; the author hurries off at once toward something else. Absorbed by his critique of Japanese society and its frantic Americanization, the author neglects those parts of the novel that most captivate the reader: how social conventions erode authenticity and the carefree joy of living. Why read it? It is read with great pleasure, for its narrative style and because one grows immediately fond of Ayako.

Maria is a *fillus de anima*, > that is what they call children born twice, of the poverty of one woman (who gives them away) and the barrenness of another (who welcomes and raises them). In our case, Maria has been “adopted” by Tzia Bonaria, an elderly widow. The novel’s first part, the most accomplished, recounts Maria’s childhood and adolescence, and in particular her gradual acquaintance with her adoptive mother—a woman always dressed in black, austere, reserved, who ostensibly earns her living as a seamstress. Tzia Bonaria provides the child with relative comfort, ensures her education, and above all constructs a fragile normality around Maria, behaving “as though the child had been born of her own womb.” For Maria, this filial bond and the acceptance of belonging to two families is a gradual conquest, one that accustoms her to being the focus of public attention, to accepting anomalous situations, and to shaping her own life independently. Her ability to confront the unspeakability of the world and of human nature collides, however, with a jarring and unsettling discovery. Tzia Bonaria is an *accadabora*—that is, a woman who grants a sweet death (euthanasia) to those who ask for it. In a dramatic confrontation, Maria, “with the tearless sob of a strangled beast,” demands that the elderly widow explain “this necessary thing,” the dispensing of a sweet death. And Tzia Bonaria’s justification is startling, lying far beyond Maria’s comprehension. > I learned on my own, says Tzia Bonaria, that children need both the slap and the caress, the breast, and the feast-day wine, and whatever they need, whenever they need it. I had my part to play, too, and I played it.... I was the last mother some ever saw.... When the time comes, Maria, you will discover things about yourself that you do not yet know . The young woman cannot bear the thought of living with a woman who dispenses death and flees far from Sardinia, finding employment with a family in Turin. This marks the second part of the novel, an interlude that also serves as a turning point—albeit a rather obscure one—in the narrative arc. One of the boys entrusted to her care as a governess is a taciturn, hostile, domineering adolescent; yet Maria’s habit of reckoning with the indescribable allows her to unlock the young man’s inner life and uncover a dreadful secret: the boy suffered sexual abuse in his childhood. Sharing so horrific a truth leads to love, for the bond between individuals is never stronger than when it rests upon the profoundest mysteries of the human soul. In the third part of the novel, Maria returns to Sardinia to attend to Tzia Bonaria in her slow agony. The narrative moves gradually, yet also sluggishly, toward the epilogue, without, however, delivering the resolution one ought to expect. Why does Tzia Bonaria die a moment before Maria is about to perform the euthanasia? Is a sweet death a threshold we cannot cross? Something we ultimately cannot accept? In addressing so complex a theme, there was a risk of drifting into redundant prose, fraught with parenthetical digressions and overwrought passages. The author, instead, has navigated the subject with a light, restrained, at times ironic style, relying on vivid character sketches and vignettes typical of rural Sardinian life. The novel’s first part is undoubtedly the finest, both in its prose and its dramatic structure. The storytelling builds in intensity as it approaches the final scene: the clarifying confrontation between Maria and Tzia Bonaria. In the subsequent parts, the narration becomes bloated, forfeiting that spareness and levity that had characterized the preceding pages. The narrative thread itself splinters and dissolves, depriving the reader of a clear sightline toward the conclusion, which disappoints all the more for this very reason. Why read it? The subject is compelling, the prose engaging.

Il libro è costituito da 10 racconti, che sono altrettanto bozzetti della vita della borghesia milanese degli anni ʼ30. Il tratto comune è una lieve ironia di una società soddisfatta di sè stessa, attenta ai soldi, ai buoni matrimoni, alle occasioni mondane, ma anche alla cultura tecnica, «allʼingegnere». Le scene della vita lombarda sono, poi, lʼoccasione per Gadda per una esplosione di parole, modi di dire, neologismi, sovrapposizioni di forme dialettali a italianismi, che confonde il lettore, il quale perde, spesso, il senso del racconto ma anche il filo del discorso. Sembra, quasi, che lo scrittore abbia lavorato in piena libertà con il linguaggio ed è, quindi, impossibile riferirsi ad una trama, a personaggi, ad episodi, ma la lettura si perde in una serie di impressioni, alcune felici, molte noiose e ripetitive. In uno dei racconti più briosi ( > *Quando il Girolamo ha smesso...*) Gadda racconta le vicende di una onorata ditta che fallisce in quanto ha dato i soldi ad un finanziere creativo: “per levar di tasca, a certi bamboloni con la bocca aperta, lʼanima di quei quattro ruspi o ovverosia sudati risparmi che gli son costati una vita; per spennarli a modino, sti cocchi di mamma, senza gli abbino a strillar troppo forte, e arrivare a farli finalmente contenti dʼun bellʼuscio chiuso, sigillato in piena regola dallʼautorità giudiziaria, per raggiungere questa suprema meta del credito e dellʼattività creditizia, si può bene ingegnarsi adoperare una Croce, la Patria, poi, neanche a parlarne”. In un bozzetto felicissimo sulle abitudini della borghesia milanese (*I ritagli di tempo*), lʼautore racconta il sonnellino durante la lettura del giornale: “bello è il vedere un ingegnere Caviggioni seduto, e quieto, una volta tanto, onninamente immemore del 263.890 e delle filettature normali (dei bulloni Withworth): seduto, dico, anzi nobilmente abbandonato sulla poltroncina del sabato, in attitudine pregustante, indi poco di poi assaporante”. In un altro racconto (*Un concerto di centoventi professori*), viene tratteggiata con benevole sarcasmo lʼabitudine a frequentare il teatro, dove > la società musogonica della città industre, aja di laboriosi pupilli, dopo le molte buone opere, sʼaduna a purgare le sue indigestioncelle farisaiche, i suoi peccatuzzi stitici, col porger orecchio a quegli altri peccati, un pò più cipperimerli per fortuna, di Luigi Dallapiccola e di Igor Strawinski . Perché non leggerlo? Singoli frammenti sono anche deliziosi, ma per gustarli bisogna soffrire per 284 pagine.

Arkady Dolgoruky, the first-person narrator, is the natural son of Versilov, > a cold and proud man, haughty and negligent toward me, who..., having fathered me and abandoned me among strangers, not only did not know me at all, but never even repented of it . Arkady suffers deeply from his father’s indifference, not least because the latter has taken his mother with him and reduced the young man to a state of acute social distress, as his status as an illegitimate son is known to all. > I was like an outcast... and I had decided to renounce them all and withdraw once and for all into my own life . What draws the young man, who has now completed his secondary studies, out of his isolation is a letter from Versilov inviting him to Petersburg. The first part of the novel recounts Arkady’s encounter with the complex and elusive figure of his father: a fraught relationship, also because > that man was nothing but my dream, the dream of my childhood years. Thus I had invented him myself, whereas in reality he proved to be different, fallen so far below my fantasy . Yet Versilov is not the sole center of Arkady’s life. The young man finds himself caught within a veritable “enigma,” woven of characters, relationships, and events, amid which he feels ill at ease with his rigid, solitary, and proud disposition. Much to his regret, he must acknowledge that people have multiple faces, that interpersonal relationships are often ambiguous, and that there is a “sacrosanct axiom” in Pushkin’s famous verse: “dearer to me than base truth / is the deception that transfigures us.” In the second part of the novel, Arkady appears to have accepted this reality. He leads a dissipated life, devoted to gambling, drinking, and women, while neglecting his mother and sister, whom he has only just met. This might be an ordinary phase in an adolescent’s life, were it not for the fact that Arkady carries a terrible secret: sewn into his coat is a document in which Katerina Nikolaevna, Versilov’s former lover, formulated a plan to have her father declared legally incompetent—a wealthy, elderly prince to whom, moreover, Arkady is deeply attached. The discovery of this document would prompt the prince to disinherit his daughter and would favor the aspirations of Arkady’s half-sister, who wishes to marry the old aristocrat. To complicate matters, Arkady is in love with Katerina and cannot bear to betray her. Furthermore, he is fond of his half-sister, fascinated by her intellect and strong character. Everyone suspects that the young man possesses the document, and so they cajole him with words and gestures that the naive Arkady misinterprets as genuine acts of friendship and even love. It is difficult to navigate this web of intrigue, especially when one lacks a clear perception of good and evil and when people are neither clearly wicked nor purely virtuous. What reigns is “the soul of a spider”—namely, that man > can cherish in his soul the loftiest ideal alongside the greatest baseness, and all in perfectly good faith . Yet Arkady too is seized by “ignominious thoughts”—for instance, using the document in his possession to win Katerina’s love. > Where, then, had all of this come from, already so prepared? And this, because I had the soul of a spider! It means that everything had sprouted long ago and lay in my corrupt heart, lay in my desire . And it is precisely Arkady’s weakness, his yielding to the pull of evil, that precipitates the crisis in the third part of the novel. The young man is himself duped by criminals who secretly steal the document from him and attempt to blackmail Katerina. To his horror, the youth later discovers that they are in league with Versilov.. Versilov’s split personality confronts the young man as a “broken image,” all the more so after an intense, long-awaited conversation in which Versilov had professed to his son his love for Arkady’s mother, only to subsequently send Katerina a formal marriage proposal. Who, then, is his father really? Perhaps merely a man driven by whim, by unchecked vanity, Arkady thinks. The disillusionment with the father figure is complete. Arkady is no longer an adolescent. *The Adolescent* is the author’s most contemporary novel. Several elements contribute to this: the modernity of the father-son relationship, the Pirandellian theme of duplicity, the detective-story elements of the plot, which is full of twists and turns and frequently leaves the reader in suspense as to what will follow. The book’s greatest merit lies precisely in its tight pacing, which leaves little room for philosophical disquisitions, as is so often the case in the author’s other novels. Beyond Dostoevsky’s well-known skill in constructing dialogue, what is striking is the author’s ability to mirror duplicity in the very structure of the sentence: for example, chapters unfailingly close with the image of a contradiction, of an ‘other,’ delineated in just a few sparse strokes. Why read it? It is one of Dostoevsky’s finest novels, insufficiently appreciated perhaps because it does not foreground philosophical and religious themes.

The publisher presents the book as a novel with two voices, “that of a father and a daughter.” This summary is certainly accurate. Adua fled Somalia to escape an authoritarian father and to fulfill a dream: to work in cinema and become a famous actress. In reality, she managed to make only one film—a pornographic one. Twenty years later, she finds herself a mature woman, an “Old Lira,” as the new immigrants call “the women of the diaspora.” Partly out of compassion and partly for companionship, she marries an immigrant who > hung around drunk in many parts of Rome (...). But it was in Piazza dei Cinquecento (...) in that square that Italy had dedicated to soldiers who died in East Africa, that I concocted a papier-mâché love . Born to a strong and courageous woman, Asha the Daredevil, with a happy nomadic childhood among goats and camels, a sad adolescence in Magalo and Mogadishu, a desolate and mundane life in Rome—what has become of Adua’s dreams? > I wanted to be free to run in the wind. (...) I felt that the big city would devour all my purity, all my dreams . The author offers us glimpses of Adua’s life, but in truth she continually speaks of her disappointments, of her struggle to survive, nevertheless. Zoppe, the father, lives in another era, during Fascism and the ruthless colonialism of the Italians. He collaborates with the latter as a translator, makes himself a servant, witnesses the atrocities, the abuses, the racist and contemptuous conduct of our compatriots, in Italy as in Somalia. Here too, the narrative is made of slices of existence, important not so much for what they say as for what remains beneath the surface: self-contempt and, at the same time, the betrayed fascination with Italy and its language. Zoppe is nevertheless a traditionalist, who does not hesitate to subject his daughters to infibulation, because > afterwards there will only be the happiness of being pure, finally sealed as God commands . He is an authoritarian father; he disapproves of and disdains his daughter's aspirations, cynically and cruelly intent on severing the memory of Adua's mother, who died giving birth to her. > But enough, stop naming her. That woman is nothing, she is just a mistake . The two stories, Adua’s and Zoppe’s, run largely in parallel, like two straight lines that never meet—not because their lives unfold in different times and contexts, but because father and daughter do not speak to each other; they are too distant, both lacking the ability to express their love. > I like Rome in summer, especially its evening light at dusk; it is warm, and even the seagulls become gentler, making you want to hug them. They are the masters of the piazzas, but here you are, little elephant, and they dare not. Away, stay away from Piazza Santa Maria sopra Minerva! I feel safe near you. Here I am in Magalo, at home . Adua’s words “dissolve and are lost.” Look at the nigger, talking to herself”. And Zoppe walks through Fascist Rome and “the vision was still there to comfort him (...) The trees... the dome of Saint Peter’s... then the wisteria in bloom... the scent of the women... the walking sorbets... the martial tread of the soldiers... the rustle of rainbow skirts... their hopes painted blue > . This is what binds father and daughter: the love for Rome. Scego narrates a great deal about Somalia; the reader strongly perceives the desire to return ideally to the homeland, to reclaim the language, its sounds, and its imagery. Yet the novel speaks above all of a betrayal, of an Italy, a city—Rome—a language, and a history that, like beloved women too beautiful to be conquered, reject the courtships and overtures of the new Italians. I must say I was often tempted to abandon reading, and I carried on to the end solely out of sympathy and esteem for the author. It is difficult to write two parallel stories, but even more so if one relies on flashbacks,” dreamlike digressions, and trailing, opaque sentences. Without a plot to bring order to it all, a great confusion emerges, a crowding of thoughts and images that makes reading laborious. In this novel, Scego loses the gentle irony and subtle elegance that distinguish her writing. Perhaps she demanded too much of her abilities; a missed opportunity. Why not read it? It is confused and, in the end, tedious.

Tom Sawyer is a young boy who lives with his aunt in a small rural town on the banks of the Mississippi. Mark Twain introduces him in this way: > he got back home barely in season to help Jim, the small colored boy, saw next-day's wood and split the kindlings before supper—at least he was there in time to tell his adventures to Jim while Jim did three-fourths of the work. (...) If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. Tom is not clear on this distinction and takes a carefree, unencumbered life as serious business, swinging from melancholia—which prompts him to wish he could die temporarily, just to make himself missed—to a fantasy world in which he dreams of being a pirate or an outlaw. And so, with his faithful friends, especially the vagrant Huckleberry Finn, known as Huck, he embarks on a series of exploits, from the pirate life on an island in the middle of the river to wandering through the graveyard at night, witnessing a murder, all the way to setting off in search of treasures surely hidden by bands of robbers. This dizzying flurry of activity does not prevent Tom from courting Becky, a girl from a respectable family, who also finds herself drawn into Tom's reckless escapades. There is no point in recounting the plot, at times convoluted and commonplace yet never dull: it is far more interesting to dwell on two peculiarities of the novel. The first is the rural setting; with gentle and affectionate irony, Mark Twain depicts the school, dominated by the schoolmaster's authoritarianism; the church gatherings with the preacher's tedious and moralizing sermons; and the hilarious ritual of Examination Day, when the best pupils present an essay of their own before the entire community. One can smile, as Mark Twain does, at the ornate English, laden with words that most people likely do not understand, at the puritanical and sanctimonious values, at education imposed by sheer force; nevertheless, a strong communal spirit emerges, seeming to transcend even class divisions. It is a white society, placid in its values, with a single, clear boundary: discrimination against Black people, who remain in the background even as they sustain the small town's agricultural economy; one can sympathize with the vagrant Huck, but not with the servant Jim. The other compelling aspect lies in Tom's powers of fabulation. Unlike the protagonists of other coming-of-age novels, Gian Burrasca or Jim from *Treasure Island* (see the reviews of *Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca* and *Treasure Island* on this site), what surprises is Tom's dialectic: how he manages his aunt, capitalizing on her naive affection; how he cajoles his friends, talking them into adventures and overcoming their reluctance; how he persuades Becky to follow him into dangerous and intimate situations, paradoxical for such a prudish society. And when Mark Twain remarks that he can stop at writing the story of a Boy, because > the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a Man. (...) When one writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can , he perhaps means that Tom's innocent cunning would turn into a guilty capacity for deceit, as so often happens among adults. In Twain's imaginative world, it is better to keep playing with the petty subterfuges of adolescence. Beyond the character and the plot, the literary merit of *Tom Sawyer* resides in its writing—attentive to detail, magically realist, subtly ironic. Take as an example this passage, which describes Tom's awakening on the island of the imaginary pirates: > when Tom awoke at dawn, he wondered where he was. (...) Now, far off in the trees a bird called; another answered; now the distant strokes of a woodchopper were heard. (...) A little green worm came crawling over a soft leaf, lifting two-thirds of its body into the air from time to time and “sniffing around,” (...) then proceeding again, (...) and when the worm approached him, of its own accord, he sat still as a stone, (...) then (...) when it began a journey across him, his heart was all glad. (...) Now a procession of ants appeared from who knows where. (...) A brown-spotted ladybug climbed the dizzying height of a blade of grass (...) and Tom bent down close and said, > Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are alone. These are wonders of a world inhabited at night by spirits, and Nature still seems endowed with a soul. And what of the description of the school, punctuated by that repetitive “showing off” (in Italian, *ostentare* or *vantarsi*)? All the teachers “put on airs”

In early nineteenth-century Germany, Eduard and Charlotte are two wealthy landowners. Though they loved each other in their youth, they married late in life, after both had been widowed. They possess differing temperaments that seem to complement each other perfectly: Eduard is “in the prime of manhood,” impetuous, generous, but superficial and at times reckless; Charlotte is reflective, patient, and prudent in managing both household and estate. Life flows serenely, as they enjoy “undisturbed the happiness finally attained,” until two guests arrive. The Captain, a friend of Eduard’s, is a poised man of vast experience who places his skills as a planner, engineer, and organizer at their disposal. He cannot help but find himself in tune with Charlotte. Ottilie, Charlotte’s niece, is a graceful, sensitive, introverted, and seemingly quiet young woman. The boyish quality within Eduard cannot fail to resonate with Ottilie’s youth. And very soon > the secret attraction and the power of imagination asserted their rights over reality , with such overwhelming force that in the dark, during the couple’s most intimate moments, > it was none other than Ottilie whom Eduard held in his arms; the phantom of the Captain hovered near or far before Charlotte’s soul, and thus they entwined, the absent and the present, in an exquisite mingling of voluptuous excitement . Seizing the opportunity of the Captain’s departure, Charlotte wisely proposes sending Ottilie to a boarding school, but Eduard abruptly leaves the estate, seemingly relinquishing the happiness of loving the young woman. The two women remain together in an apparent calm, yet without returning to “a full and open harmony.” The marital crisis might be resolved, with a new bond, by the birth of a child, who nevertheless has Ottilie’s eyes and the Captain’s features. It is the physical proof of adultery, having indeed been conceived on that very night when, making love, the spouses were thinking of their respective beloveds. Affection and care for the child bring Charlotte and Ottilie back together: > everything seems to follow its usual course, as happens even in the most extraordinary circumstances, when everything is at stake, yet one still continues to live as if nothing were amiss . New characters enter the scene, such as a talented young architect who lavishes attention on Ottilie. Daily life is disrupted by Charlotte’s lively daughter—cheerful, tumultuous, even excessively so. The two women complete the projects already initiated by the Captain: the rearrangement of the vast park, the merging of several ponds into a lake, the construction of a new dwelling on a magnificent scenic viewpoint, and the restoration of the parish church. The pursuit of perfection pervades the characters’ actions, even driving them to recreate famous paintings through *tableaux vivants*, in which Ottilie commands admiration. Charlotte, out of affection for Ottilie or a secret desire to reunite with the Captain, would be willing to accept divorce and Eduard’s union with Ottilie. Yet it is the girl who refuses, making an entirely spiritual choice, though only seemingly resolute. In this part of the novel, the external narrator is joined by the young woman’s diary: brief entries alternating moral maxims and romantic reflections with the manifestation of the profound yearning of a youthful heart in love. And it is Eduard’s reckless impetuosity that precipitates such a fragile situation. He surprises Ottilie by the lakeside on an autumn evening; the two lovers embrace and > for the first time they kissed openly, freely, and parted with painful effort . The girl remains “troubled and agitated.” To return to the manor, she commits the imprudence of using the boat, despite having the child with her. Through a series of accidental circumstances, the child falls into the water and drowns. At this point, the narrative reaches its inexorable denouement. Ottilie, despite an outward serenity and expressions of diligent expiation, starves herself to death. Goethe, who was by no means religious, closes the novel with a sort of sanctification of the girl, likely indicating her spiritualization—Ottilie’s death as moral elevation. Thomas Mann defined the novel as > the clearest fusion of Eros and Logos, of sensuality and morality, of immediacy and reflection... a German work of the highest moral culture . Ottilie’s death by starvation would express > the obedience rendered to the law of the spirit, paying its tribute, with virile tragedy, to the ethical norm . *Elective Affinities* would thus be “a spiritual construction,” a philosophical text in the form of a novel, a sort of manifesto of Germany’s “moralizing mission,” its “imperious instinct.” Perhaps Merkel had read *Elective Affinities* all too closely when demanding that we Italians do our homework: she personifies Germany’s didactic intent toward the pleasure-seeking Mediterranean peoples. Without detracting in the least from the great writer, Mann’s interpretation freezes the book in the past, as a testament to the history of German thought, overshadowing what still makes it so modern: “the story of the magical attraction” between kindred souls that shatters friendship, mutual esteem, the most sacred institutions—such as marriage—and the orderly, elegant world we desperately strive to build. And Ottilie, taking everything too seriously, falls victim to the superficiality and selfishness of some, like Eduard, and the tedious wisdom of others, like Charlotte, who, often through excessive self-assurance, fail to grasp in time the tragedy of fragile, sensitive souls like Ottilie. Alongside the characters, another protagonist is the landscape. Within it, and in the continuous attempt to reshape it according to human design, the contradiction between present and past is expressed. The present seeks to confer upon everything a more harmonious and rational order; the past returns to us the spontaneity of nature, which also serves as a vessel for transmitting memories. By bestowing a new and more fitting arrangement upon the cemetery, Charlotte unwittingly offends the reverence felt for the departed, as relatives were accustomed to visiting them buried in different spots, however haphazardly scattered across the churchyard. It is as though the notion of time were lost, and with it memory, so inextricably bound to familiar places and their traditional disorder. The novel’s limitation lies in its frequent philosophical and moral dissertations. Particularly in the second half of the narrative, after Eduard has abandoned the house, these digressions weigh down and fragment the reading, breaking up the overall unity and marring both the narrative pace and the psychological depth of the characters. Even Goethe failed to construct the perfect work. Why read it? The story and the characters remain remarkably modern, if one allows oneself to be captivated by the plot.

The novel is set in New York at the end of the nineteenth century, when the old New York elite, with its oppressive social rituals, was overwhelmed by a new, upwardly mobile bourgeoisie—prejudiced and aggressive; it reacted by trying to ignore the changes, > until they crashed down upon them. What mattered was preserving the "traditional pleasantness" of social life. It is no coincidence that the tale opens with opening night at the Opera, meticulously described by the author: the arrangement of families in the boxes according to a rigid social hierarchy, the placement of individuals within them respecting family roles, the elegant gowns in the latest Parisian fashion, the hushed gossip that must cease when the solo is sung; an aristocratic atmosphere steeped in American Puritanism, and therefore superior to the frivolous European world. Amidst a crowd of minor characters, the three protagonists appear from the very beginning. Archer is a young lawyer with a passion for literature and a history of typical bourgeois transgressions (a mistress, perhaps a few young ladies), yet well aware that he must make a "good marriage." Reckless reading leads him to make nonconformist statements ( > women ought to be free—as free as we are ), but > he was a quiet young man endowed with strong self-control. Adherence to the discipline of a small society had become almost a second nature to him. Yet a restlessness stirred within him, leading him to feel as > though he were being buried alive under his future. Still at the Opera, in the family box in an unobtrusive position, as rigid etiquette dictates, sits the very young May, who > that very afternoon had allowed him to think there was on her part "an inclination" (the official New York phrase for a girl to declare an interest) ; a consummate representative of wholesome American society, who > would probably go through life facing each experience to the best of her ability, but never anticipating what was to happen by so much as a fleeting glance. Perhaps this heedlessness was what gave her eyes that innocence, and her face the semblance of a type rather than a person. Beside May is > a slim young woman, (...) with brown hair curling in thick locks around her temples, held by a narrow band of diamonds, (...) with a dark blue velvet skirt gathered beneath the bust by a belt with a broad, old-fashioned buckle. Her unusual carriage and attire catch Archer's attention: she is "poor Ellen Olenska," May's cousin, who has returned to America after separating from a Polish nobleman. Being taken in by the family is one thing, but displaying her in public, on opening night at the Opera, before all of New York's foremost families! From this opening scene, so voluptuously baroque, the story branches out: Archer is drawn to the mysterious and intoxicating Countess Olenska, who represents to him the promise of a different life, glimpsed through literature and now attainable through falling in love with the beautiful, melancholic Ellen. If we look beyond the haze of reverie, we discern that the figure of Ellen > had built up within him a kind of sanctuary where she reigned enthroned among his secret thoughts and desires. Little by little, this image became the scene of his real life, of his every rational activity. (...) Outside of this, on the stage of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and inadequacy, blundering against family prejudices and traditional viewpoints, much like a madman colliding with the furniture of his own room. And yet, he imprisons himself in a bourgeois existence: he advances his marriage to May, counsels Ellen against seeking a divorce from her husband, leads an ordinary life beside an affectionate and understanding young wife, frequenting New York's customary social venues and fulfilling his duties to May's family. Slowly and silently, a muted curtain of protection forms around him: officially, no one knows of Archer's infatuation with Ellen—a burgeoning love marked by petty lies, abrupt business trips, and fleeting, supposedly clandestine meetings, as happens with all lovers. Then, all at once, May comes out into the open, having previously been eclipsed by the vitality of the splendid Countess Olenska; in a conversation made of insinuations, of truths half-spoken and withheld, May preempts Archer's irreparable confession by declaring that she is expecting a child and that, bold and cynical, she has used this still-uncertain pregnancy to induce Ellen to leave America. Innocent May has revealed herself to be an astute wife—not because she possesses any singular intelligence, but because she adhered to the well-worn patterns of the society to which she belongs. At a farewell reception for Countess Olenska (for appearances must always be kept!), Archer realizes that everyone knew about the affair and acted in solidarity to avert the scandal of a separation: in old New York, everything must proceed > without bloodshed: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage. And on the other hand, Archer too shared these values, even if > he seemed to be witnessing the scene in a state of strange weightlessness, as if floating somewhere between the chandelier and the ceiling, nothing astonishing him so much as his own share (as a spectator) in what was happening. Written after the First World War, *The Age of Innocence* recounts the end of an era, narrating the loss of innocence of the American bourgeoisie. If in Alcott's books (see the reviews of *Little Women* and *Good Wives* on this site) the family is woman's natural destination, thus giving concrete form to her social role, in Wharton's novel marriage is a cage, a place of renunciation and duty. From this perspective, Countess Olenska is the longed-for figure, capable of living outside convention, like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. This interpretation, emphasized by Martin Scorsese's 1993 film, does not encompass the tale's truest meaning. We must look from Archer's vantage point and from Wharton's conservative vision. In her introduction, Sarah Blackwood notes that two alternative endings to the book have been discovered. In both, the marriage is dissolved and Archer is able to go and live in Paris with the beautiful Countess Olenska. Why did the author decide that Archer should instead retreat into a flat bourgeois life, into the social and marital duties of old New York? The novel's primary theme is the weight of social rules, whose strength lies in their internalization within the conscience; they are a prison that charts our destiny, beyond our "secret thoughts and desires." And as occurred with Archer, nothing is left to us but to live in fantasy, to anchor ourselves to dreams and imagination, creating a parallel reality in our minds. Ever-renewed Don Quixotes of Cervantes or Quichottes of Rushdie (see the reviews on this site), we move about, lost and imprisoned in a world we would wish to be different, until, like Archer, we adapt, settled into a quiet life. How long can we keep doing so? Wealthy, influential, and surrounded by artists during her life in Paris, Wharton was also passionately devoted to being an "interior designer"; this accounts for the detailed descriptions of interiors and attire—veritable theatrical stagings, already cinematic, so rich in imagery, resonance, and symbols. It is a meticulous, seemingly realistic prose that radiates a dreamy, suspended, and evanescent charm. Whether Wharton ever knew Joyce or Proust I cannot say; yet behind the superficial nineteenth-century patina, we are clearly in the presence of an innovative narrative, an anti-novel. The lexicon is rich, with a distinctly American stamp, coupled with an articulate and refined syntactic structure; without question, fine English! Why read it? Archer is an interesting and modern figure, splendidly baroque.

The novel is set in South Africa in the mid-1980s, during the era of apartheid. An elderly classics teacher learns that she has incurable cancer. She resolves to recount the final days of her life to her daughter, who left the country many years ago: > I tell you the story not so that you may take pity on me, but so that you may learn how things are. It would be easier, I know, if the story came from someone else, if it were a stranger’s voice resounding in your ears. But the fact is, there is no one else. I am alone, the only one writing. Do not pass it over, do not forgive easily. Read everything with a distant eye . This declaration by the protagonist encapsulates the novel’s multifaceted meanings: the events, and above all the companions, of the old woman’s final days, the loneliness and nostalgia for the past, the exile from her daughter. An alcoholic vagrant and a stray dog find shelter at the protagonist’s home; initially wary, but growing increasingly trusting, she takes them in, finding solace and friendship. Meanwhile, the plight of two Black youths draws the elderly teacher into the grueling living conditions of the Black population and, above all, into the brutal repression of the Afrikaner police. Upended by events that shatter a hitherto tranquil existence, the letter to her daughter changes in meaning: intended as a way to reinforce their bond, the woman instead finds herself swept into turmoil and uncertainty. Her love for her daughter grows more abstract and distant, while her feelings deepen toward those closest to her in suffering and in the face of death: the vagrant, the dog, and the two Black youths. And a plea for love rises from the old teacher: > and this long letter, I say it now, is a plea toward the sunset, toward the west (the daughter lives in the United States) for you to return to me. Come and hide your head in my lap as a child does, as you used to do. I cannot live without a child, I cannot die without a child. What I endure, in your absence, is grief. I produce pain. You are my pain. This is an accusation. Yes, I accuse you. I accuse you of having abandoned me . It is a powerful, ancestral novel, dominated by classical themes typical of Greek tragedy—those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The relationship between mother and child is explored not in psychological terms, but by tracing it to an ineluctable destiny: the detachment of offspring from their parents. The daughter’s flight from South Africa begets the mother’s exile, her solitude, and with it the awareness that she will not be remembered after death > let me go from myself, let me go from you, letting go of a house still alive with memories: it is a difficult task, but I am learning . > Do not be afraid, says the protagonist, I will not seek you out. It is not my soul that will remain with you, but the spirit of my soul, the breath, the movement of the air around these words, the faintest turbulence traced in the air by the otherworldly passage of my pen across the page your fingers now hold . Why read it? It is not an easy read, not least because the author frequently opens philosophical digressions, but the novel’s cosmic depth and the evocative power of many of its pages are well worth the effort.

The novel chronicles the Resistance in the Valli di Comacchio, between the mainland and the wetlands. Unlike the great works on the war of liberation (1943–1945), typically set in the mountains, *LʼAgnese va a morire* tells of the lowland partisan war, where > the Germans did not know that among those men and women, wandering through the snow, many, almost all of them, were partisans. Couriers dispatched with orders hidden in their shoes, leaders heading to meetings in peasant barns, commanders preparing actions where no one expected them. (...) A fire without flame or smoke: a markless fire. The Germans and the fascists walked right over it, noticing only when they were burned. The lowlands, and in particular the marshland environment, form the backdrop to Agnese’s story: a fat, old woman, who until then had been an industrious washerwoman and a rough peasant. > One September evening, Agnese, returning home from the washhouse with a heap of wet laundry on her wheelbarrow, met a soldier on the cart path. (...) His shoes were torn, and his toes could be seen, dirty, the color of mud . Without hesitation, Agnese gives him shelter and later shows him the escape route when the Germans arrive. With this seemingly obvious act, Agnese embarks on a human and political journey that takes her from > a mature, composed yet ruthless hatred towards the Germans, (...) towards the subservient fascists , to becoming > truly responsible for incomprehensible actions and unforeseen decisions . At first, she is asked to carry a parcel and she replies: “if I’m capable”; then she becomes the coordinator of the couriers while securing a safe hideout for the brigade command; finally, she is forced to make solitary, swift, and perilous choices involving the lives of many partisans. All this would remain an abstract tale were it not admirably embedded in the marshland setting and in the conditions of struggle and survival that defined it. Across the seasons, from spring to winter, living conditions grow increasingly harsh, mirrored by an escalating clash between partisans and Germans. > They moved by boat through the green canal, slimy as a slug. On either side the reeds stood tall, yet cast no shade: the sun pierced through the straight, bare stalks as if through an iron grating, burning on the water, on the floating weeds that resembled dead grass snakes. (...) It is a magnificent place, the Commander said, the reeds provide neither greenery nor shade, but they conceal. (...) Agnese knew that sound of the marsh at night: a dull hum, an isolated cry . The partisan detachment has taken refuge in an isolated hut in the wetlands, and here > toward evening they would sing, their voices low so that no one might hear them, and their song would seem little more than the rustling of the reeds... (...) The couriers brought bread, wine, orders, and circulars to the camp... . With winter and the mounting pressure from the Germans, > away, away from the house, away from the prison, prisoners still of that dark, roiled water, choked with weeds and mud, yet already bound for land, where one could breathe one's own air, clean air, not just the breath of the comrade beside you, and where one walked not across a few feet of flooring, but forward, along a road, an embankment, a field, forward toward the world of free men . Hemmed in between the Germans and the Allies, fleeing a hostile and intolerable environment, the partisans go to die, > if only to reach the shore, to be out of the water, to set foot upon ground that did not shake . Agnese dreams of her husband, who died during deportation to Germany: > It’s hard, isn’t it? I know you can’t take any more. But it isn’t time to let go yet, Agnese. (...) Agnese saw him open the door to the cold of the staircase, truly felt that wave of cold against her face. Then she realized it wasn’t Palita (her husband), and behind him was another, and another, and another. The last one quietly closed the door. After so many men as protagonists of the Resistance, here at last is a woman, and certainly not an intellectual! If only for doing justice to women’s contribution to the partisan struggle, the novel deserves a prominent place in the literature of the war of liberation. Yet one must not be confined by this single interpretive lens: the novel contains numerous characters, countless episodes of civilian and combatant life, and an intense narrative pace punctuated by dramatic twists, not least the final one. Criticism has regarded it as a neorealist novel; yet if one allows oneself to be captivated by the writing, particularly the descriptions of the marshland environment, it becomes evident that the narrative possesses a lyrical, even oneiric undertone. One might think of it as a dreamed epic, a modern *Iliad*, dense with myth and heroic figures: precisely what we need. The style is lean, marked by an adroit use of punctuation: the short, concise sentences do not fragment the narrative, but rather lend it communicative power, bolstered as they are by a richness of adjectives and the use of brief, succinct dialogue. Why read it? A masterpiece of substance and style!

The protagonist is a young Ethiopian; the adolescent longing to leave his remote village behind drives him to choose a purpose and a city: to become a great writer in Kampala, which, despite being the capital of Uganda, like him «belonged to no one and no one could claim it». It is therefore a non-place, where the young man hides, forgets, or simply abandons the twenty-five names by which he was called in his village. In Kampala, he meets his friend. > Isaac and I became friends the way two stray dogs find each other following the same trail every day in search of food and companionship . Both are unversed in urban life, but Isaac projects confidence and takes the protagonist under his protective wing—naive, fragile, and too much of a dreamer to survive on his own in a violent and chaotic metropolis. Having no names left, Isaac gives the boy several nicknames (no fewer than thirteen), all tied to his air of an intellectual and a man of letters. At first, the two young men frequent the university campus, a kind of "oasis > in a country increasingly torn apart by clashes between opposing factions, which soon culminate in dictatorship and repression. If students were initially allowed to voice dissent, demonstrations are subsequently banned and smothered in blood. For the protagonist, the situation is particularly dire because he is a foreigner; Isaac must step in repeatedly to save him and hide him in safe places. The political struggle has degenerated into gang warfare. Isaac, growing ever more mysterious due to the life he leads and the company he keeps, enters the service of a clan leader. The protagonist watches in horror as violence, executions by firing squad, and outright massacres unfold. Yet above all, he is appalled by his friend’s transformation: from a slightly provocative, somewhat playful young man, Isaac reveals himself to be a cynical killer, a skilled manipulator of men, an unscrupulous opportunist, perhaps even a double-dealer. But who is Isaac, really? What do we know of him, of his past? The situation deteriorates rapidly, and Isaac provides the protagonist with a passport and a plane ticket to flee to the United States. In doing so, he also gives him a name: his own. The young man, now Isaac, holds a temporary visa as a political refugee and is monitored by social services, in particular by a young caseworker, Helen. A love affair begins, but can one truly love someone whose past remains unknown? During their troubled relationship, Isaac asks what he can do for her: yes, I told her, promise me you won’t disappear one day > . Yet so it will be, because this is the fate of migrants, placeless and nameless: all they can say, promising to return one day, is that no one will ever have loved each other more than we did. For the sake of clarity, the plot has been presented according to a possible logical sequence: first the events in Uganda, then the love affair in America. In truth, the author does not construct the novel this way; the narrative unfolds through two parallel storylines: in the first, the narrator is the protagonist and the subject is his friendship with Isaac; in the second, the narrator is Helen, recounting her relationship with the protagonist. Only in the final lines do the two narratives intersect, when we discover that the phrase the false Isaac utters to Helen at the moment of parting was written by the real Isaac on a slip of paper for the protagonist. One is left to wonder whether the love for Helen is cut from the same cloth as the friendship between the real Isaac and the false one: extraordinary bonds in an age when relationships between human beings are like those of two men who meet unexpectedly in the middle of a desert after traveling so long they have begun to believe the world is uninhabited > .. Yet what does this strange novel mean? It conveys a sense of rootlessness, that special loneliness that comes from having nothing that is truly yours«, which drives Helen to search Isaac’s room to »seek proof of his existence > . This rootlessness possesses a dark allure of its own because it offers us a world weightless«, allowing one to confront a reality that »breaks you into pieces slowly« and to overcome the fear of »what comes next. It is an interesting book. It is, however, marred by an excess of intellectualism, discernible in many passages of the novel and in its overarching design: the reliance on two parallel narratives fragments the story, weighing it down needlessly and causing it to lose both narrative momentum and emotional tension. The almost Pirandellian interplay of the two Isaacs is pushed to an exaggerated degree, yet fails to surprise the reader upon discovering that Helen’s Isaac is not the real Isaac. The author sought to pack too much substance into a storyline and its characters, when it would have been enough to narrate them in their spontaneity, in their real lives as migrants of the world". Why not read it? It is boring.

Two boys, sixteen-year-old Grady and seventeen-year-old Rawlins, rest on their saddle blankets after dismounting their horses. > The night was cold and clear and the sparks rising from the fire spread warmth and reddish glows among the stars. They could hear the trucks out on the highway and they could see the lights of the town reflected far in the desert fifteen miles to the north. What do you think you’ll do? Rawlins asked. I don’t know. Nothing , Grady replied. After three hundred pages—some of them arduous reading—to the same question (“where is your country?”), Grady answers: “I don’t know. I don’t know where it is. (...) He touched the horse with his spurs and moved on. He rode while the sun turned his face copper-colored and the reddish wind blew from the west across the evening plain and the small desert birds sang among the dry ferns; horse and rider advanced and their long shadows moved together as the shadow of a single being. They passed and paled into the evening plain, toward the world to come > There is nowhere to stop; nothing remains but to keep moving, with only two certainties: the horses and the great untamed plain. The novel recounts the adventure of an adolescent. profoundly alone and in search of himself across the vast expanses of a West now overtaken by modern American society. We are like the Comanches were two hundred years ago. We don’t know what will show itself come daylight. We don’t even know what color it will be > . So his father told him, almost as if urging Grady to leave, perhaps to flee. And the boy embarks on a long journey on horseback, together with Rawlins. They strike out into the great expanses toward Mexico, into a swarm of stars, so that they rode not under but among them (...), like thieves newly loosed in that electric black, like young thieves in a luminous garden, ill-equipped against the cold and ten thousand worlds to choose from > . Along the way they encounter Blevins, a thirteen-year-old boy on horseback, solitary, perhaps on the run. They realize he may be a source of trouble: he is impulsive, stubborn, devoid of judgment, still a child. They take him in, and after feeding him, Blevins began to take off his clothes and walk naked across the grass, and, passing by the horses, plunged into the water. (...) The horses watched him > . The kid gets drunk and lets his horse get stolen by a group of Mexicans; he then drags the two friends into an attempt to recover the animal, and the whole thing ends in a shootout and a pursuit, from which Grady and Rawlins barely escape, nonetheless losing all trace of Blevins. The two young men seem to find a safe haven and employment at a large hacienda > ; Grady earns esteem for his exceptional skills as a breaker of wild horses; he also meets the master’s daughter, with whom he has a love affair. It is a situation fraught with peril: a poor cowboy in love with a wealthy heiress. And indeed, Grady and Rawlins are arrested by the Mexican police and accused of being accomplices to Blevins, whom they meet again in prison and who has allegedly killed a man. During the transfer from the police station to the prison, Blevins is killed; in the horrific Mexican penitentiary, the two young men are attacked and stabbed, and only the intervention of the aunt of the girl Grady has fallen in love with saves them from the hell they have landed in. It would seem that we have reached the end of the adventure, but Grady insists on getting the horses back, and consequently the novel concludes with a gunfight in which the young man reclaims the animals. Then again, what is more beautiful and more true than a horse? That night he dreamed of horses in a high plain where the spring rains had made the grass and the wildflowers grow and the flowers spread all blue and yellow as far as he could see in the dream he was among the running horses and in the dream he himself could run with the horses (...) and they ran he and the horses together out on the high ground where the earth resonated under the galloping hooves (...) in a resonance that was like a music..." It is a circular story, one in which the plot lacks any genuine development, continually folding back on itself—namely, onto the figure of Grady, his loneliness and despair. The characters are sketched superficially; in some instances, they are incomprehensible. If one wishes to appreciate the novel, one must focus on the contrast between the austerity of the dialogues between Grady and Rawlins—spare, minimalist, and precisely for that reason expressive of their existential condition—and the descriptions of the horses and the magical landscapes of the great wild plain. Yet a level of minute detail consistently predominates, encumbering the narrative and wearying the reader. As for the disquisitions on Mexican history, let us draw a charitable veil over them. Why not read it? It is prolix, overlong, and rambling.

Questo romanzo riporta la mente ad un altro libro, apparentemente così lontano nel tempo e nei contenuti: *Le Confessioni d'un italiano* di Ippolito Nievo (vedi la recensione in questo sito). Come per Alma, il grande racconto di Nievo è una storia d'amore, che prende le mosse dall'infanzia in quella terra marginale che è il Nord Est dell'Italia. Carlino, il protagonista narrato da Nievo, è innamorato della bella cugina Pisana, che solo nel punto di morte riconoscerà di averlo sempre amato, così Alma rincorre Vili, quel > bambino magro, gli occhi neri e una frangia scura da teppisti , che ha fatto irruzione inspiegabilmente in una famiglia in strano e incerto equilibrio, portandosi via l'attenzione del padre. E come per i protagonisti delle *Confessioni*, la vita di Alma > è sempre stata immersa fino al collo nelle questioni che il passato o la memoria e perfino le ossa sotto terra proiettavano nel presente, e lei non aveva fatto altro che camminare sul filo di una ragnatela sforzandosi di evitare le trappole della Storia, quando invece ci stava camminando sopra. Se, però, la storia d'amore di Nievo si sviluppa dentro la grande e gloriosa cavalcata del Risorgimento, quella di Alma è segnata e travolta dalle tragiche vicende del «di là», quel mondo sconosciuto oltre Vienna e Trieste, quelle terre sempre rimosse dall'immaginario collettivo, il dissolvimento della Jugoslavia tra il 1991 e il 1995, e oggi la guerra in Ucraina. Alma vive ormai da molti anni a Roma, apprezzata giornalista, ricercata dagli uomini per quel fascino che hanno quelli «di là», ma non può confessare, perché non sarebbe capita, che > solo un esule da quei mondi è in grado di suscitare in lei qualcosa di simile a un innamoramento. L'occasione per tornare «di là» è la morte di suo padre che le ha lasciato «una scatola», in cui dovrebbero esserci i segreti della sua famiglia, insieme con quelli della grande Storia. L'attende confuse combinazioni di sensazioni in cui presente e passato si mescolano insieme, ma non c'è mai il futuro: la nostalgia per i nonni materni, per la bella e solida casa mitteleuropea; la villetta sul Carso dove sono andati a abitare i genitori, per stare lontani dai nonni e dalla buona borghesia; gli arrivi e le partenze improvvise del padre, sempre coinvolto nelle grandi vicende; la madre anch'essa distante perché sempre occupata nella «Città dei Matti»; i bagni e i giochi sulla riviera di Barcola; e poi i morti, gli stupri, le stragi delle guerre balcaniche, immortalate dalle foto di Vili: > una fossa piccola, una fossa enorme, una fossa con dei corpi, il viso di una ragazza tenuta per i capelli. Scoprirà che nella scatola non c'è niente d'importante, come nel grande romanzo di Kenzaburo Oe (*La foresta d'acqua*, vedi la recensione in questo sito). Ciò che troverà sarà lo svelamento del mistero di Vili: fotografo delle stragi perpetrate dai serbi per dare testimonianza dei crimini commessi durante le guerre balcaniche. Se questa rivelazione potrà dare sollievo all'animo di Alma, non sarò possibile ritrovare l'amore per chi ha sempre amato. > I loro destini si sono incrociati, pensa Alma. e questo è tanto, i tentativi di fuga non contano. (...) Si guardano. E' così sexy, pensano. La solitudine e le incomprensioni, tutto l'amore e tutti quei morti, (...) quei loro teneri anni, e anche tutti quei pensieri sul caos delle loro vite lontane. Ci sono romanzi che vogliono dire troppo, che mescolano grandi affreschi della storia con le vite familiari, senza però riuscire a approfondire a sufficienza le diverse dimensioni dell'esistenza; e tutto resta in superficie. La relazione privilegiata del padre con Vili (quelle passeggiate insieme che escludevano Alma) non è analizzata nei suoi risvolti psicologici ed emotivi: è come il contenuto della scatola che non dice nulla di intimo. Lo stesso legame tra Alma e Vili, che attraversa tanti anni della loro vita, è trattato con spicchi d'esistenza, certamente meglio nella seconda parte del romanzo, nella Belgrado sotto la guerra, ma mai portato fino in fondo. Chi era Vili, una comparsa della Storia, obbligata, come dice lui stesso, > a essere uno che mente, un falsario, un vigliacco, ad alzare il calice a brindisi disgustandosi illudendomi che così avrei salvato qualcuno? E perché Alma perde sempre l'occasione per rompere il guscio entro cui si appaga Vili? Perché non li dice semplicemente che l'ama e lo porta con sé a Roma, lontano da «di là»? O c'è un mistero indicibile (la rigidezza degli affetti familiari, le stragi e le morti, il mondo dei Matti) che impedisce di dispiegare il senso di umanità reciproca? Troppe domande rimaste senza risposta! Sotto il profilo stilistico il romanzo si avvia faticosamente per salire di livello nella seconda parte, quella della guerra, senza dubbio la migliore. Il continuo avanti e indietro nel tempo e nello spazio confonde il lettore che deve di continuo riprendere le fila della narrazione. E' vero che il flusso dei ricordi e delle sensazioni non ha tempo, e tutto ritorna senza mai andare avanti, ma è pur vero che non seguire una sequenza disorienta il lettore, lo confonde inutilmente. La scrittura è di alta qualità, nei dialoghi così come nelle descrizioni: manca tuttavia di mordente, non lascia il segno, anche per l'uso di un italiano standard, scolastico sotto il profilo lessicale. Perché leggerlo? Interessante la sovrapposizione della Storia con le vicende familiari.This novel brings to mind another book, seemingly so distant in time and content: Ippolito Nievo’s *Le Confessioni d'un italiano* (see the review on this site). As with Alma, Nievo’s great narrative is a love story that has its roots in childhood, in that marginal territory that is northeastern Italy. Carlino, the protagonist recounted by Nievo, is in love with his beautiful cousin Pisana, who will only on her deathbed acknowledge having always loved him; just so, Alma pursues Vili, that > skinny boy, with black eyes and a dark, hoodlum fringe , who inexplicably burst into a family balanced on a strange and precarious equilibrium, capturing her father’s attention. And as with the protagonists of the *Confessioni*, Alma’s life > had always been immersed up to her neck in the issues that the past or memory and even the bones beneath the earth projected into the present, and she had done nothing but walk a spiderweb's thread, striving to avoid the traps of History, when in fact she was walking right over them. Yet, if Nievo’s love story unfolds within the grand and glorious sweep of the Risorgimento, Alma’s is marked and overwhelmed by the tragic events of "over there"—that unknown world beyond Vienna and Trieste, those lands perpetually banished from the collective imagination, the dissolution of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995, and today the war in Ukraine. Alma has now lived for many years in Rome, an esteemed journalist, sought after by men for that fascination possessed by those from "over there," but she cannot confess, because she would not be understood, that > only an exile from those worlds can awaken in her something akin to falling in love. The occasion to return "over there" is the death of her father, who has left her "a box" that is supposed to contain the secrets of her family, together with those of grand History. A tangled combination of sensations awaits her, where present and past blur together, but the future never appears: nostalgia for her maternal grandparents, for the handsome, solid Central European house; the small villa on the Karst where her parents went to live to get away from the grandparents and the respectable bourgeoisie; the sudden arrivals and departures of her father, always embroiled in grand events; her mother, likewise distant, forever busy in the "City of the Mad"; swimming and games on the Barcola seafront; and then the dead, the rapes, the massacres of the Balkan wars, immortalized by Vili's photographs: > a small pit, an enormous pit, a pit with bodies, the face of a girl held by her hair. She will discover that there is nothing of importance in the box, as in Kenzaburo Oe's great novel (*La foresta d'acqua*, see the review on this site). What she finds instead is the unveiling of Vili's mystery: a photographer of the massacres perpetrated by the Serbs, to bear witness to the crimes committed during the Balkan wars. If this revelation may bring relief to Alma's spirit, it will not be possible to rekindle love for the one she has always loved. > Their destinies crossed, Alma thinks. and that is a great deal, the attempts to escape do not count. (...) They look at each other. It's so sexy, they think. The loneliness and the misunderstandings, all the love and all those dead, (...) those tender years of theirs, and all those thoughts, too, about the chaos of their distant lives. There are novels that strive to say too much, blending grand historical canvases with family lives, without, however, managing to delve sufficiently into the diverse dimensions of existence; and everything remains on the surface. The father’s privileged relationship with Vili (those walks together that excluded Alma) is not analyzed in its psychological and emotional ramifications: it is like the contents of the box, which reveals nothing intimate. The bond between Alma and Vili itself, spanning so many years of their lives, is treated through fragments of existence—certainly better in the novel's second part, in Belgrade under the war, but never pursued to its ultimate depth. Who was Vili—an extra in History, forced, as he himself says, > to be someone who lies, a forger, a coward, raising a glass in toasts with disgust, deluding myself that I was saving someone this way? And why does Alma constantly miss the opportunity to break through the shell in which Vili is content? Why doesn't she simply tell him that she loves him and take him with her to Rome, far away from "over there"? Or is there an unspeakable mystery (the stiffness of family affections, the massacres and deaths, the world of the Mad) that prevents the unfolding of their mutual sense of humanity? Too many questions left unanswered! Stylistically, the novel gets off to a labored start, only to elevate its register in the second part—that of the war—which is undoubtedly the finest. The constant shifting back and forth in time and space confuses the reader, who must continually pick up the narrative thread. While it is true that the flow of memories and sensations is timeless, and everything recurs without ever moving forward, it is equally true that failing to follow a sequence disorients the reader, causing unnecessary confusion. The prose is of high quality, in the dialogue as well as in the descriptions; yet it lacks bite, leaves no lasting impression, owing also to the use of a standard Italian that is lexically textbook. Why read it? The intertwining of History and family fortunes is compelling.

> I will never be able to tell if it is Naples or if it is me. (...) Or if it is truly the sight of that ugly tenement on the other side of the gate, the swelling yellow wave, the domes beneath the clouds, architraves too heavy for a woman alone to bear. If reality is made of unreachable terraces, unreachable powers as they describe them... . With this opening, the reader is led to believe they are getting a foretaste of the surreal world of Anna Maria Ortese (see *Il mare non bagna Napoli* and *Il Cardillo Addolorato* > ); instead, one is confronted with a love story suspended in midair, swept away by a stream of consciousness that is unchecked precisely because it is entirely interior. A fifty-year-old mathematics teacher, Elisabetta Maiorano teaches in the juvenile prison of Nisida. Whoever crosses the threshold of a prison knows (and if they do not know it, they feel it) that they are crossing over to another side, irreconcilable with the promise made to us as children: that life would not be frightening, and we would never be left alone. Prison, instead, is fear and loneliness > . But is being incarcerated, living within a daily routine at once repetitive and protective, what creates a sense of isolation, or is it rather the recollections of a lifetime, the hopes and disillusions, the mistaken choices, and the misunderstood loves? Following the relentless outpouring of the protagonist-narrator, one begins to think that prison is merely a lockpick to unleash her interior world—and to indulge in self-pity: the unloved husband, the child desperately sought through artificial insemination and then through adoption requests, the tedium of teaching, advancing old age. We take these dossiers and store them in the furthest archive of memory, and then we hide the key. Our hope, I believe, is that on that day, now far off, when they have served their full sentence, this key will return to their hands, and from the flung-open archives blank sheets of paper with no more ink on them will take flight, immaculate, like laundry hung out on the terraces > . But if for the inmate—of whom the protagonist ostensibly speaks—there is the light of normal life, how can a person imprisoned within herself escape her own prosaic and mournful existence? Only if Love breaks in. I became attached to Almarina like that, while we were looking at the sea, and I told her that my husband was a magnificent swimmer. (...) I don't know how to swim, she told me, then.«Reading Valeria Parrella brings to mind Alda Merini, when she writes»and perhaps I will tear from the roots/the repressed hope of love,/I will remember that the fruit of every/human limit is absence of memory,/I will plunge entirely into becoming...". In both authors, one is in the presence of a restless and insatiable quest for a Love that allows memory to be removed, or at least suspended. Prison, much like the asylum for Merini, is a metaphor for the prison of the human soul, a moment of stillness, a place of unexpected encounters. Every page of Parrella's is a cameo, akin to a brief and intense poetic composition. But whereas in Merini the lyricism, speaking of oneself, the hinted-at sentiments, the lexical preciousness are in their proper place because they are typical of a sonnet, especially according to traditional Italian poetry, in Parrella these stylistic and narrative traits compromise the overall narrative, strip momentum from the story, desiccate the characters—particularly that of Almarina, who is, in fact, incomprehensible. The self-mirroring 'I' is ill-suited to the novel, which nonetheless requires a plot. Why not read it? An elegant outpouring, yet detached from a narrative structure.

The novel is set in Madrid during World War II: it is a period of deep economic crisis, marked by widespread squalor and a sense of "hopeless waiting"—the expectation of generic change paired with resigned pessimism. Dona Visi is happy because her daughter has found a fiancé, > someone studying for a position as a notary , her husband > tosses and turns between the sheets, > Fine, hold off on ringing the church bells. (...) Let's wait and see how it turns out , and her husband knows full well, having run into his daughter prostituting herself. Madrid is a city where everyone > walks aimlessly, with hands in empty pockets -- pockets that, at times, are not even warm -- with empty heads, empty eyes, and in their hearts, without anyone being able to explain it, a deep, implacable void. (...) Night falls (...) over the city's strange heart. Thousands of men sleep wrapped around their women, without thinking of the harsh, cruel day that perhaps lies in wait for them, like a wildcat, in just a few hours. Hundreds upon hundreds of students lapse into solitary vice. And a few dozen girls wait -- what are they waiting for, my God? Why do you deceive them so? -- their minds full of golden dreams.... If *The Family of Pascual Duarte* > (see the review on this site) revolves around a character dominated by a bloodthirsty disposition, by an irresistible fate, here we have a series of episodes, anecdotes, and figures in a disordered succession that makes it difficult to trace a unifying thread. On the other hand, what is the point of delving into the story of Elvira, already a weary prostitute, or that of Celestino, who talks to himself, or of understanding better who > the neighborhood poet really is, (who) has red cheekbones and sometimes, when the mood strikes, faints in the Café and has to be carried to the restroom. They are numerous figures, physical and thus contextualized, yet also allegorical of a human condition; and it is futile to dwell on them, so similar is their fate. If two reference points are really to be found, they can be identified in Dona Rosa and Martín. The former > comes and goes between the tables of the Café, bumping into customers with her enormous backside , at the center of a kaleidoscope of the defeated and the resigned, > with their elbows on the old, crusty marble of the tables, (...) once funerary slabs (a magnificent image of a world where everything has crumbled). And she, the formidable tavern-keeper, > pats her belly (...) Move along, move along.... Everyone in their place. (...) The hairs of her mustache twitched defiantly, solemnly, like the antennae of a cricket in love and full of pride. Martín is a young intellectual who survives on a few newspaper articles, on meals provided by his sister—who sets something aside for him without her husband's knowledge—and on the generosity of a brothel madam, who allows him to sleep in a warm bed beside a young prostitute. > He feels the young woman's hair on his face, feels her naked body beneath the sheets, feels her breath which, at times, is slightly raspy, almost imperceptibly so , and he recites a melancholy poem to her, dreams of being hired by the Social Security Institute, of visiting his mother's grave, and does not even realize that the Francoist police are searching for him. > Martín, out of a vague premonition, does not want to hurry..... It is true that we are in 1940s Spain, but isn't this hopeless waiting" perhaps the very sentiment pervading us right now, in the face of announcements of dramatic turning points (peace in Ukraine, the end of the genocide in Gaza), only to find ourselves repeatedly trapped in the most brutal paralysis? Are we not like the characters of this hive, a metaphor for our own condition? We would not feel so close to Cela's narrative had the author not relied on a dry, essential, and intense style, so distant from the convolutions of contemporary Spanish writers such as Cercas, Marías, and Aramburu (see the numerous reviews of their novels on this site). Cela's prose, steeped in raw magical realism, recalls Grazia Deledda's *Canne al Vento* (see the review on this site). The novel's limitation lies precisely in the dispersal of its many anecdotes, in the disorientation of the narrative—elements that make it difficult to navigate the reading and assign it an overarching meaning. One must simply surrender to it, without searching for a cohesive plot. Why read it? Splendid prose, a metaphor for our current condition

Can a love story bridge the ineluctable chasm between two peoples? The novel answers this perhaps overly naive question in the negative. And it does so by retracing a bewildering affair: the relationship between Golda Meir, an authoritative Israeli prime minister in the early 1970s, and Albert Pharaon, scion of a wealthy Palestinian family. The book traces the history of the nascent State of Israel from 1917 (the year of the Balfour Declaration, in which the British Empire declared itself in favor of the establishment “in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”) through the 1948 war, as a result of which the State of Israel was founded and the exile of over seven hundred thousand Palestinians began. The novel’s opening is remarkably evocative. On one side is Golda, still a young woman, in the kibbutz. The Zionist ideal of a demanding, communal life is admirably epitomized in the vigor and courage of the young Golda: > so luminous, so self-assured and confident, an olive tree flourishing in a barren land . On the other side is Albert, an “exquisitely cultured man of the world” for whom “nothing in social life is enticing enough to tear him away from his sweet idleness.” If Golda personifies the unstoppable force of an idea, fueled by despair and the memory of persecutions, Albert effectively represents a landowning caste who watch the Jewish immigration with stunned disbelief, confounded by their mad determination to forge a state, and are above all alarmed by socialist ideology, which might nurture “strange aspirations” among the perpetually exploited Palestinian peasants. Disparate as they are, Golda and Albert meet, feel drawn to one another, and carry on a clandestine, intensely carnal affair for several years. At the root of their relationship, however, lies a misunderstanding. For Albert, their bond is logical and possible. The fact that one is Palestinian and the other Jewish presents no obstacle to someone who has always lived in a land where numerous communities coexisted without friction. For Golda, the barrier of nationality is insurmountable. In a conversation decisive for the future of their relationship, when Albert urges her to acknowledge that Jews will have to live alongside Palestinians, Golda shouts in fury: > we came here so we would no longer depend on anyone, do you understand? There is no other us but us . The sacred tenets of Zionism (“becoming masters of our own destiny”) prove stronger than any love. And so the two lovers > throw themselves upon each other, collide, clutch desperately, surrendered to an irresistible urge to tear one another apart, so that nothing remains of them or of their impossible relationship . The love story between Golda and Albert stands as a metaphor for the tragic fortunes of two peoples. The most evocative part of the novel is the section leading up to Golda and Albert’s encounter. Up to this point, the narrative remains open to unpredictable developments. The reader expects the author to delve into Golda’s personality: wife, mother, lover of many men, vigorous idealist, political figure, leader of her people. Was the affair with Albert merely the diversion of an intensely sensual woman, or did it answer, instead, an unconscious need to break free from the cultural and social molds of her Jewish identity? Were there contradictions within Golda’s world, or merely the whims of a woman of power? Through Albert, could Golda have been the “Prince Charming” who cast the Palestinian people “into modernity like shrimp into boiling water,” yet paving the way for eventual coexistence? The narrative abandons this potential trajectory, perhaps for lack of documentation or out of reluctance to strain historical reality too far. Instead, it focuses on the figure of Albert—languid, indolent, and inconsequential. And this is a pity, for the narrative loses its allure, turning into the chronicle of a man’s decline whose ending was already written in the preface, in his very character. Why not read it? It is a fragile narrative: it adds nothing to our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it lacks intrigue because it fails to probe the central figure, that of Golda.

The book is divided into three chapters, each possessing its own distinct identity. In the first, bearing the evocative title *Paradise Remembered*, the narrator is the writer himself. The idol of his youth is Seymour Levov, “the Swede”: handsome, blond, athletic, a formidable sportsman. The memory of his feats epitomizes a golden era where harmony triumphs. Now in his sixties, the writer is invited to lunch by Seymour under a pretext. The meeting turns out to be mundane and pointless; later, however, at a reunion of old classmates, the writer learns that Seymour was suffering from cancer and had been shattered by the actions of his daughter, who had bombed a general store, killing a bystander. > The gentle man with his delicate ways of dealing with conflict and contradiction, the confident former athlete, responsive and resourceful in any fair-minded struggle with fair-minded foes, is up against a foe who is not fair-minded, a devil rising out of the human feelings, and he is overwhelmed. He learns to live behind a mask . The writer decides to write a book about Seymour, even as he wonders—with a deeply autobiographical undertone—whether the man inside the man is ultimately knowable, whether he is a “jar you cannot open.” Yet does the story he writes conform to reality, or is it merely the author's invention? In the two subsequent chapters, the writer shifts to a third-person narrative. In the second chapter, titled *The Fall*, the dramatic story of Merry is recounted: Seymour’s stuttering daughter who, at sixteen, vanishes after committing a heinous crime, sinking ever deeper into hiding and self-destruction. At the root of the daughter’s conduct lies a hatred for her parents, their orderly home, their life built on bourgeois values—and, by extension, for American society itself. Yet how could > his daughter be so blind as to want to destroy the very system that had granted her family so many opportunities for success? To destroy her capitalist parents as though their wealth were anything other than the product of the steadfast labor of three generations? . Is Merry, then, an inexplicable anomaly? In truth, in the final chapter, *Paradise Lost*—which largely details a dinner party among the Levovs and their friends (a dinner that concludes tragically with the stabbing of Seymour’s father)—it becomes evident that the “moral disease” afflicts not merely the girl, but an entire society in which > what was supposed to exist did not exist. Deviance prevailed. You cannot stop it. Undeniably, what was not supposed to happen had happened, and what was supposed to happen had not. The old system that created order no longer works. All it has left behind is fear and dismay, now concealed by nothing . The themes of this undoubtedly formidable book are essentially two: generational relations and, above all, the agony of a parent who views himself as blameless, who wishes to protect his family and cannot fathom why a daughter so cherished grew up so estranged from his world; and the unraveling of a society built by immigrants who toiled tirelessly to integrate and be embraced as successful citizens, only to watch the foundational values of social cohesion disintegrate. Seymour’s ordeal is that of a father, but it is also the tragedy of the American pastoral. Roth’s narrative structure is exceptionally rich and intricate. It relies neither on a lavish surplus of adjectives, as with Updike, nor on the expansive periodization of Bellow (all chroniclers of the crisis of American society). It is precisely this syntactic framework that constitutes Roth’s strength, yet also proves to be his weakness: the sentences are often overly convoluted, making for an exhausting read and fostering a redundancy of phrasing and, above all, of syntactic constructions. A greater frugality would certainly have served the book’s otherwise compelling themes far better. Why pass on it? It is deeply demanding, particularly the third chapter. It should be taken in small doses.

Paul Krugman, the American Nobel laureate in economics, begins his recent book (*End This Depression Now!*) by recalling how unemployment is "an immense human disaster," not only because of the resulting financial hardships, but because the effects on one's dignity, self-respect, and sense of control over one's life can be devastating. One no longer feels like a protagonist, and a profound malaise sets in—born, as the author of *American Rust* puts it, "from the pain of watching the world change without you." With this novel, the author sets out to do precisely this: to narrate the deindustrialization of a steel town through the eyes of its victims—not so much the workers who found themselves unemployed, but rather their children, who have lost the social and psychological anchor their fathers once possessed. The novel's protagonists are two young men, Isaac and Poe. The former, intelligent and a dreamer, is the son of a retired technician who, after working for decades in steel mills, is now confined to a wheelchair following a severe industrial accident. Isaac has given up his aspirations (he would like to become an astrophysicist) to care for his father, while his sister, equally intellectually gifted, severed ties with the past, leaving town to become a successful lawyer. Poe, by contrast, was once a local hero, a football star, but has been reduced to scraping by at the expense of his mother—an impoverished woman who lives in a trailer and supports the household through precarious employment at a small tailor's shop. The setting is the decline of an industrial town, painted by the author in somber tones yet devoid of nostalgia, with descriptions that highlight the ruin of mills and buildings alongside nature's reclamation of a space no longer dominated by man. > The mill had been a small city... now it stood like an ancient ruin, its structures overwhelmed by wild vines.... tracks of deer and coyote crossed the grounds: there were only the human signs of occasional squatters . A theme dear to American literature—including contemporary writing—resurfaces: the myth of the wilderness, of a rural society where man finds for himself, in total freedom and autonomy, the means of survival. Isaac steals his father's savings and decides to run away to pursue his dreams, finally free from the past. Before departing, he meets with Poe, his best friend, who once saved his life by thwarting a suicide attempt. They decide to spend one last night together in an abandoned mill. There, however, they run into a gang of thugs, whom Poe provokes with his customary recklessness. To save his friend, who is in danger of being murdered or severely beaten, Isaac kills one of the assailants. The two young men take flight. Poe is accused of the murder, while Isaac flees on foot toward California. The paths of the two young men diverge, each unaware of the other's fate, yet both endure the violence of a disintegrating society. Poe experiences the ruthless law of prison, which does not tolerate anyone failing to belong to a gang, and for this he is assaulted and left on the brink of death. Isaac, naive and fragile, suffers the violence of the road: he is deceived, robbed, and forced in turn to steal to survive. All Poe would have to do is tell the truth—that it was Isaac who killed the man—yet he refuses, feeling guilty for what occurred and, above all, knowing that his friend would never survive prison life. Isaac, in turn, realizes that flight is not the answer: he must return and confess to the crime, and, above all, he must live where his roots lie. Friendship is the central theme of the book: it is, indeed, the profound bond that unites the two young men, as well as the novel's secondary characters, shielding them from the unraveling of society. Why does Poe not choose to turn his friend in rather than endure the brutality of prison? Why does Isaac return to surrender himself when he could escape to California? From the standpoint of dominant economic rationality (grounded in the pursuit of self-interest), their behavior is irrational, inexplicable; yet it is, instead, the primal force that holds society together. Delving deep into the impact of economic decline on human relationships, the author probes the inner workings of the human mind during a phase of social disintegration, finding a solid foundation in the bonds between individuals. Yet does this offer us hope for the future? The narrative is driven forward through a literary device. Each of the protagonists tells their own story across dedicated chapters, whose sequence apparently follows no order but seems random. Consequently, only the reader possesses knowledge of the overarching plot and must construct an overall picture for themselves. This approach, undoubtedly refined from a literary standpoint, asks too much of the reader. Left without a guide, one gets lost in the characters' analyses, which are often a bit too intellectualized and introspective. Everything remains as if suspended, merely sketched, failing to grip the reader, failing to captivate. Moreover, the novel is deficient in action, meaning that only the psychological introspection of the characters and the examination of their relationships could offer points of interest. Yet this is precisely what remains unresolved, as the exploration of the mind's inner workings appears endless, lacking any definitive development. If the author does not wish to be all-pervasive and intrusive like the great Dostoevsky, he fails—or refuses—to untangle the narrative threads and bring them to a resolution, as the Russian master does so brilliantly. Consequently, the sluggishness and thinness of the plot render the novel tedious and ponderous. Why not read it? It is boring.

The book is a moralistic fable. A nineteenth-century industrialist finds himself hurled into King Arthur’s court. He attempts to introduce an industrial, capitalist culture, which the author regards as vastly superior—because more rational and efficient—to that prevailing in the Middle Ages. The attempt fails miserably due to the opposition of the Church and an enchantment by the wizard Merlin that casts the protagonist into a deep sleep. The story aspires to be entertaining, yet proves tedious and pedantic.

For much of the novel, the brilliant friend seems to be Lila; she is intelligent, capable of mastering any subject (even Latin) without attending school; she is brave, creative, enterprising; with adolescence, she also blossoms into a stunning young woman. Elena, the first-person narrator and co-protagonist alongside Lila, has been enthralled by her since elementary school, yearning to resemble her, both in body and mind. > I became fixated on Lila, who had very thin, agile legs, and was always moving them, kicking even when she sat next to the teacher (...) I decided that I had to model myself on that girl, never lose sight of her, even if she got annoyed and pushed me away. (...) I trained myself to accept Lila's superiority in everything with good grace, and even her bullying . Through Elena's words, we follow—with a touch of envy—the childhood and adolescence of the two friends and their many peers in a working-class neighborhood of Naples: violent, cruel, yet vital and authentic. Is the novel, then, the narrative of a friendship between Lila and Elena, and with it, of a social milieu? Toward the end of the book, we realize the theme is something else entirely: the author speaks of detachment from one's origins as a consequence of education, of opening up to new cultural and linguistic horizons. When Lila, still an adolescent, marries the neighborhood's wealthy grocer, securing a position in the eyes of the local community, the two friends share a clarifying conversation—for themselves, and for the reader as well. Elena is excelling in high school and declares, with “a nervous little laugh,” that she will abandon her studies once she earns her diploma. Lila replies, curt and resolute: > you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of them all, boys and girls (...) you must study always . In that moment, Elena realizes how they had ended up “in two different worlds,” despite living in the same neighborhood, despite having shared the same childhood. Elena had drawn from Lila the drive to study, but schooling had become her own personal wealth. > I had grown up with those boys and girls (our peers in the neighborhood), I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was my own. With them, I couldn't use anything I learned every day; I had to restrain myself, somehow demean myself. (...) Yet that very celebration (her friend's wedding) confirmed that Lila—the only person I still felt was indispensable despite our diverging lives—no longer belonged to us, and with her gone, any mediation between me and those young people (...) had run dry. The story of Lila and Elena’s friendship provides the occasion for a rare reflection. In common sentiment, schooling is always seen as performing a positive role, of emancipation and spiritual uplift. It undoubtedly is, one hopes, yet too often we overlook how education alienates us from our world of origin, causing us to lose our anthropological roots and squandering values and outlooks that are not always entirely negative. What will remain of Naples in a society that demands complete homogenization? Moreover, change is difficult and tormented for the person undergoing it. Elena, in fact, does not feel superior to her friend or to her peers; quite the opposite, she experiences this detachment with surprise and anguish, struggling to attain an awareness that she has long denied to herself. Her romantic entanglements reflect this very inner conflict: she is in love with Nino, another brilliant high school student, yet she gets engaged to Antonio, a decent young man, but alas, so ignorant. Why, above all, hadn't I stopped to say to Nino stay, come to the reception (...) let's talk among ourselves, let's dig ourselves a den to keep us out of this way Pasquale drives, out of his vulgarity, out of the violent tones of Carmela and Enzo, and even—yes, even—of Antonio? " The theme of detachment is not tackled through a faux-narrative approach that is in truth sociological and prescriptive. The author develops a multifaceted cast of characters, each delineated with effectiveness and psychological depth. Likewise, the neighborhood is described with vibrancy and emotional investment, while never concealing its insular, stagnant, and violent nature. Judgments are not handed down from the heights of an assumed social and cultural superiority, nor does the prose adopt justifying or populist tones. The literary merits—the characters, Lila in particular, the setting, and the plain, elegant prose—make one forgiving of the narrative’s weaknesses: a slow, at times repetitive pace, and a plot left hanging, perhaps to herald future volumes. Yet serialized novels ought to conclude with an atmosphere of suspense, rather than merely an ellipsis. Why read it? Lila’s figure is fascinating, the writing refined and elegant.

In an earlier novel, *The Golden Cangue*, the protagonist fails to escape the mechanisms of her family and descends into madness, bringing ruin upon herself and those around her. In the first of the two stories in this book, *Love in a Fallen City*, Liusu is likewise despised by her relatives, but seizes the opportunity of a chance encounter to escape a house that > had something of a dwelling of fairies and spirits: here, the slow passing of a day was like the lapse of a thousand years in the world. Yet spending a thousand years here was roughly like a single day, because all the days were equally monotonous and senseless . And it is boredom, not passion, that drives her—watchful and almost reluctant—to enter into a liaison with a Westernized Chinese man, a figure of dubious repute: wealthy, cultured, and refined, yet hostile to marriage. From the outset, Liusu knows full well that binding herself to this man means becoming his concubine. While yielding to her lover’s flatteries, she thinks to herself: > if I were a thoroughly respectable woman, you would not have noticed me at all. Yet she smiled, tilted her head toward him, and said, You want me to be a respectable woman in front of others, but not with you . With consummate skill, the author guides us through the unraveling of a relationship in which > both [were] too busy talking about love; where could they find the time to truly love each other? . The conclusion is a foregone one: the wealthy lover accommodates Liusu in a grand, empty house, where she will await his visits like a quintessential concubine. What overturns this destiny is the war. The Japanese bomb Hong Kong, and amid the battered city, the man resolves to marry Liusu. > Hong Kong’s fall had sealed her victory. Yet in this unreasonable world, who could ever tell cause from effect? Who could know? And had an entire city fallen merely so that she might triumph? In the second story, *Red Rose, White Rose* > , the author ponders whether transgression and respectability can coexist within the same personality. Zhenbao is a rational and meticulous sort, through and through the perfect modern Chinese man. Having started out on the right foot from the very beginning, (...) he now held an excellent position in a renowned foreign textile firm > Everything seems beyond reproach: the university-educated wife from a good family, the little daughter for whom funds have already been set aside for college tuition, the devoted care shown toward his mother and siblings, his dedication to work, and his benevolence toward friends. Yet is that truly the case? From the story, we learn that Zhenbao had an intense, fulfilling affair with a married woman. When his lover, genuinely enamored, confesses the adultery to her husband, Zhenbao abandons her because he realizes the scandal would ruin him. Merely crossing paths with the woman many years later is enough to unhinge him and shatter his drab bourgeois existence: he frequents prostitutes, succumbs to drink and gambling, neglects his work, beats his wife. And you. Are you well?, she asked. As he searched for the right words to summarize the perfect happiness of his life in a few simple sentences, Zhenbao raised his head and saw his own face in the mirror to the driver’s right. (...) Suddenly, however, he began to tremble in earnest and saw in the mirror that tears were streaming down his cheeks. He himself did not understand why. In that sort of encounter, it is always she who weeps, not he. (...) Far from consoling him, she fell silent for a long time, then said: Isn’t this your stop? > The author probes the ambiguity of the human soul through a markedly Western lens. While the opening of the first story still evokes the traditional Chinese family, the remainder of the tale could easily be set in any European city. The thematic core and the very prose of the second story echo much of Western literature, from which the author drew extensively. There is little originality. What continues to captivate the reader is Zhang’s mastery in navigating chiaroscuro and plumbing the depths of the human psyche, particularly the female heart. Jiaorui and Zhenbao are in bed: the woman realizes that the man intends to leave her. Lifting her swollen, flushed face, Jiaorui stared at him, then sprang to her feet, almost astonished herself to have been reduced to such a state. (...) She dried her eyes with her handkerchief, blew her nose, and walked out. (...) In his sleep, it seemed to him that someone had lain down on top of him, weeping. (...) He realized Jiaorui had returned. (...) The warmth of that womanly body enveloped him like a down quilt lined with silk, imparting a pleasant, intensely sensual warmth. When Zhenbao was fully awake, Jiaorui slipped away without a word, nor did he utter a sound". Why read it? They are short tales, the prose is fluid and graceful, and certain pages are remarkably evocative.

Imagine something akin to Anna Premoli’s novel (*Ti prego lasciati odiare*): a love story, delicate, mildly ironic, woven from brisk dialogue and youthful musings. It could be a tender fairy tale, were it not set in Jordan—which, for most women, is > an oppressive prison, its atmosphere rendered all the more fraught by the risk of dying at the hands of one’s own relatives. Jordan is my home. I love its rugged beauty, its sweeping history. Yet, perhaps, I may never return there again . There can be no happy ending to an impossible love story in a society where > a woman who breaks any of the rules she is expected to respect is not afforded the luxury of forgiveness . As readers, we foresee the novel’s tragic conclusion from the very beginning. This breeds a mounting anxiety, which prevents us from fully losing ourselves in and savoring the beautiful friendship between Norma and Delia. Though belonging to different faiths, they grew up together sharing the same dreams of freedom and emancipation from an age-old female condition. > Our parents insinuated into daily life the idea that men were superior to women. We were not enslaved with whip and chains, but rather persuaded by centuries-old words and teachings to place ourselves in that condition of our own free will . While their mothers believed in "the Arab way of life," Norma and Dalia conform to the oppressive customs of tradition out of fear. Yet > fear can be overcome.... and so, sooner or later, things will have to change . To carve out their own space of freedom, the two young women devise a business venture: hairdressing, a typically feminine occupation that poses no threat to tradition, a sort of holding pattern awaiting the arranged marriage to which they are inexorably destined. Once left in the shop by whichever brother is "on duty," tasked with chaperoning them, Norma and Delia feel free to talk, to share confidences, to read women’s magazines, to dream. This haven in an "insidious sea of religious rules" is upended by the arrival of a young man, who forces them "to behave as we should not have." On the other hand, > were we to rely on subterfuge and deceit to get what we wanted, and let a suburban beauty salon, a hotbed of gossip, define the boundaries of our lives—boundaries that could have been so much broader? Could we risk our necks for a love story? . The two girls have no doubts, even knowing that Delia, a Muslim, can never marry the young man, because he is Catholic. The rules of Jordanian society prohibit marriages between people of different faiths. They know the risks they run. By seeing a young man without her father’s permission, the girl dishonors her family, and her relatives are permitted to punish her with death. Yet we are not faced with just another tale of star-crossed lovers forbidden to love. Norma and Delia reject their inexorable destiny. > Although it had all amounted to little more than some pastries and a coffee, the taste of that ordinary freedom was too delicious to surrender. We had traveled only a few kilometers, yet we had entered another world . As the narrative draws closer to its tragic denouement—Delia’s murder at her father’s hands—the writing style shifts, imperceptibly at first. The increasingly reckless encounters between Delia and the young man are still recounted with apparent lightness, which nevertheless fails to mask the girls' fear and anguish. Then, all at once, the narrative becomes dense and dramatic. With the death of her friend, Norma grows up in an instant. She realizes that her ties to Jordan and its traditions have died with Delia. Yet, as she flees her homeland, she grasps, as never before, her mother’s profound sorrow, the barrier > she had erected to protect her soul from the harshness of life... the surviving remnants of that unique, independent person . Refusing to be trapped by pity for her mother, even while feeling closer to her than ever, makes Norma free as a person, even before being free as a woman. The novel can be read from many perspectives: a sociological and anthropological portrait of Jordan, a country that conceals a cruel, pervasive tribal tradition beneath a veneer of modernity; an impassioned indictment of the widespread acceptance of honor killings and, more broadly, of the condition of women in Arab countries; the chronicle of a sweet friendship, of a shattered bond; a *Bildungsroman*, a painful path toward adulthood. When Norma heeds her mother’s prudent advice—to apologize to Delia’s father, the very man who killed her friend—the girl cynically embraces the lie, recognizing that only through subterfuge and deception can a woman survive. Does she risk deluding herself, as her mother did, "glimpsing ghosts of lost opportunities in her heart," or does she open herself to a new life, truly free and autonomous? Is fleeing Jordan enough to be recognized as a person? Why read it? A novel that is ironic and light at first, then, in its final pages, intense and dramatic. A book that prompts deep reflection on the female condition.

The Nenets are a people of just over 40,000 individuals, settled in the northeastern part of the Ural region: their economy is fundamentally based on reindeer herding. Like many young Nenets, Aniko left to study far from her homeland: first at a boarding school in the nearest town, then further away still, to study geology at the university. She assimilated Russian language and culture to the point of forgetting her origins. She must return to her aging father because news has reached her of the death of her mother and little sister, killed by a wolf dubbed Lame Devil. The return is marked first by revulsion ( > when her father was now close to her: she involuntarily took a step back: he gave off a stench of alcohol, smoke, and filth ), then she slowly reclaims the language and customs, and finally the remembrance of her lost childhood returns: «Evening had fallen; together with her mother, she had lit a fire near the» chum > . She played with her rag dolls that had bird beaks instead of faces. Mother was busy sewing a new jaguska for one of the dolls. For an instant Aniko thought she truly saw her mother's concentrated face again. But once that instant had passed, however hard she tried, she could no longer redraw her features in her memories. They had vanished, perhaps forever . She is confused; until then, «she had done nothing but try to live». Must she accept the reproach-laden invitation of Aleska, her childhood friend, to stay in order to improve the conditions of the Nenets? Or should she let herself be submerged by the spell of the tundra and of an ancestral, motionless, and seemingly harmonious society? It is this that attracts Pavel, a young non-Nenets geologist, prompting him to want to stay, to abandon «the usual ordinary thoughts» and «suddenly discover oneself to be more mature, sincere, and good!» We do not know what Aniko will do; she leaves the tundra, but will she return one day? What will become of her? Aniko is a slight character, and her story is too tenuous to convey the contradictory feelings of a young woman poised between affection for her father—alone now, yet sheltered by the village—and the desire to be part of a society rich in cultural and professional stimuli. Abstracted from the specific setting, and were we to substitute Russian with English, Aniko’s state of waiting and nostalgia is the condition of many young people today. Yet this was not the writer’s purpose: deeply bound to her land, the author leads us into a world of serene concord where men, dogs, reindeer, and even wolves live «in a stillness of inexhaustible joy», as Ungaretti put it when speaking of his birthplace, Alexandria, Egypt. Think of the reindeer Temujko, who was suckled by Aniko’s mother and continually returns to her mistress’s grave; of the dog Buro, the old father’s faithful friend; and of how the father accepts with sorrowful resignation his daughter's abandonment, perhaps definitive. And what of Lame Devil? The description of the wolf, of his loneliness and bitterness, opens the entire tale and leaves its mark on some of the novel's finest pages. Nenets society seems perfect in its centuries-old harmony, but it is not so. As Pavel says to Aniko, > the nenets are confused. Outwardly they appear calm. imperturbable as ever, but I know they are uneasy. They wonder what their future will be like, where their children will end up. (...) And if we don't help them now... And what if the entire story were a fable—and, like any fable, fit for all latitudes—as well as a metaphor for our wretched Italy, a summons to free ourselves from passivity? The writing is melodious and fluid, like the story itself: sweet and graceful, evocative and naturalistic at once when describing the tundra and its inhabitants; concise and effective in dialogue, in the timeless conversation among the Nenets, yet contracted whenever Aniko speaks, as if mirroring the agony of the life choices she must confront, despite herself. The plot is weak in its narrative pacing (it seems as though nothing happens), but the prose is splendid, with assonances resonating from other languages. Why read it? Sweet and graceful.

> Blessed is the writer who, leaving aside characters that are tedious, repulsive, striking in their sorrowful reality, approaches characters that reveal the highest qualities of man..... > Sublime, universal poet they proclaim him.... > far different is the fate of the writer who dares evoke into the light all that is forever before our eyes, yet which indifferent eyes do not perceive: the entire tremendous, galling sediment of petty things that entangle our lives, all the depth of the cold, fragmentary, everyday characters with which our earthly journey teems, at times bitter and tedious .Gogol develops a caustic yet buoyant analysis of the society of his time, with an inspiration that makes him unique among the great nineteenth-century realist writers, such as Zola, Flaubert, and Verga. Gogol’s stroke of genius lies in bringing to light the squalor and vacuity of his contemporaries by confronting them with an implausible premise. The protagonist of the novel, the prosaic Chichikov ( > neither too young nor too old, neither too stout nor too slender, neither too elevated nor too humble ) travels through the vast Russian provinces proposing to purchase dead serfs (hence the title of the novel), on whom the landowners continue to pay a tax. And what is paradoxical is that not only do the landowners accept the transaction, but institutions and polite society itself fail to perceive the absurdity and immorality of this commerce. Far different are the obstacles the protagonist must encounter along his way! His visits to the landowners force him to endure the idiosyncrasies, at times eccentric but often irksome, of diverse dispositions and lifestyles: the vain, vacuous landlord; the sanctimonious yet covetous old spinster; the wheeling-and-dealing proprietor; the drunkard prone even to violence. It is a panoramic procession of characters and settings that enables the author to sketch, with a few deft strokes, the petty yet profligate life of the Russian petty and middle landowning class. While the characters are delineated with irony and verve, the depiction of the villages is sociological, even if Gogol is entirely devoid of any indignation regarding the condition of the peasantry. When scandal subsequently erupts in the small provincial town where Chichikov is staying, our protagonist is overwhelmed by gossip, conjectures, and false accusations that have nothing to do with the swindle he is perpetrating, yet which compel him to flee. Yet like all Russians, Chichikov too loves the speed of the carriage bearing him swiftly along the road, surrendering to a sense of exhilaration and abandon. > It is as though an unknown power swept you up on its wing, and you fly, and everything flies... Is it not thus that you too, Russia, like a spirited, uncatchable troika, fly away? With Chichikov’s departure concludes the first part of the book, the only one completed and approved by the author. The overall design of the work envisioned two further parts, of which the second has reached us incomplete, while the third was destroyed by Gogol himself. Reading the second part reveals clearly how the fundamental theme of the entire work was meant to be the journey: a kind of aimless reportage, devoid of moral designs, with no other interest than that of capturing, in its immediacy, the very flow of life. And Gogol remarks, with a Pirandellian inflection, > the reader must not be exasperated with the author if the characters who have appeared so far have not met with his favor: the fault lies with Chichikov; here he is the absolute master, and wherever it pleases him, we too must drag ourselves . Gogol’s ability to portray the characters and bourgeois milieux of Russian society constitutes the primary virtue of the novel. From a reading of it, however, there emerges a sense of superficiality and incompleteness, as though the writing still demanded refinement and further depth. Why read it? It is a timely novel (especially for Italy), in that it recounts the ease with which a vacuous and superficial society accepts any circumstance, however implausible and improbable.

The story opens with Ercole and his little brother Luca on the roof of a shopping mall, with the police yelling at them to come down. From the narrative, we learn that Ercole is fifteen years old, living with his older sister Asia and an absent father who takes whatever work comes his way and frequently gets into trouble. Ercole knows full well that Asia «was strong, yes, brave, but not indestructible. Tied to me, but not with me». When his sister informs him that she is moving in with her boyfriend, Ercole realizes that «mothers contain. Everything. Brothers and sisters accompany». On an old bicycle, he sets off to find his mother in a small mountain village. He gets a flat tire, has to hitch a ride, must ask for money for a train ticket, and when he arrives at the village where his mother lives, finds it difficult to locate her home because she lives in an isolated house. Stubborn and brave, Ercole faces every obstacle and overcomes his fears, yet cannot vanquish the monsters within. He cannot bring himself to ask his mother the questions he longs to ask. > Why did you leave, exactly? (...) Why don’t you ask me if I missed you? (...) That’s just how things are, Ercole. And there’s nothing you can do about it Asia used to say. Then comes a turning point. > Hanging from a spike on the outer wall was an American football helmet, yellow, with the number ten in red . It belongs to Luca, his six-year-old brother. > Life is a billiard ball; every collision makes it change direction; and if you are strong and lucky enough, you can go anywhere . Now Ercole has someone to care for, to protect, even from the world of adults. And when, at Luca's birthday, the boy's father's friends try to get the little child drunk without the mother defending him, it is Ercole who steps in and whisks his little brother to safety. Boldly conquering his fear, he gets behind the wheel of a car. The police surprise him. > Would they have believed me if I had explained what had happened, that I was doing it for Luca? Would they have believed me or the adults? (...) And if they had believed me, where would they have sent Luca? Into whose custody would they have placed him? (...) I heard Obi-Wan's voice whispering to me: use the Force, Luke. Follow your instincts. I heard the cracks crumble and the monsters emerge from the walls. I shifted into first gear. I slammed the gas pedal to the floor. And I fled. If in nineteenth-century novels the adolescent becomes an adult by braving increasingly perilous trials, thereby winning their autonomy from grownups, today the youth always remains somehow tethered to the help of adults. Consider the contrast between Stevenson's *Treasure Island*, where Jim faces perils alone—from the tempest to the pirate Silver—and the story of Harry Potter, who overcomes evil thanks to the salvific role of the arch-wizard Dumbledore (see the reviews on this site: *Treasure Island* and *Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone*). In *Anime scalze*, magic happily does not come into play; yet fifteen-year-old Ercole manages not to slide «from confusion to despair» because he finds solid footholds in his older sister Asia and his girlfriend Viola, his peer and yet so steadfast and determined. Woven into the primary narrative thread—that of the *Bildungsroman*—are other ingredients: the fragility and emotional distance of adults, bottling up feelings and refusing to seek help, abandonment, love as a lifeline; too many overlapping themes that are never explored in depth, as though the author wished to touch upon every conceivable facet of adolescent malaise. Coupled with frequent nuggets of wisdom, this narrative dispersion often renders the tale verbose and predictable. A weakness of the narrative lies in its literary style. Unlike the novels co-authored with Marco Magnone (see the reviews on this site of *Berlin* and *Il lato oscuro della Luna*), it lacks narrative pace, the final pages aside; the prose is also frequently prosaic, stripped of context because Turin remains distant in its post-industrial desolation, while the frequent resort to clipped, terse dialogue feels like a lifeline thrown to a narrative struggling to move forward, rather than an effective device to express incommunicability. Why read it? It is a smooth read and examines youth malaise.

The novel relates two parallel storylines originating in Kitty’s refusal to marry Levin, favoring the handsome and dashing officer Vronsky. From this act of vanity and levity, immediately undone by Vronsky falling in love with Anna Karenina, Levin’s trajectory begins: his love for the countryside, his rapprochement with Kitty culminating in marriage and the discovery of faith; while Anna’s sorrowful tale unfolds—her affair with Vronsky, the abandonment of her husband, their life together abroad, in the country, and in Moscow, down to her tragic suicide. We are faced with an «official» plot, which would perhaps seek to express Tolstoy’s own thought and message: only an adherence to religious values and Russia’s traditional customs can save man and the nation, whereas vanity and hypocrisy, typical traits of the aristocracy, can lead to nothing other than personal destruction and the moral and social unraveling of a people. The generous, profound Levin finds in the responsibilities of marriage, family, and estate management the answer to his social and existential inquiries. It is not new production techniques, economic theories, or philosophers that provide him this answer; rather, life itself has granted him revelation through the consciousness of good and evil. > I have not acquired knowledge, but it was given to me... because I, by my own strength alone, could not have attained it . The elegant and cultivated Anna, by contrast, having failed to honor ties with the traditional religious and social sentiments of Russia, is driven, in spite of herself, to despair: > how many things, (when I was a child) that seemed beautiful and unattainable to me in those days now seem wretched! And what I possessed then is now lost forever . Yet the contradiction between reason, which leads to death, and faith, which leads to life, persists up to the final moments of Anna’s life: > Yes, everything disturbs me, torments me. Reason is given to us to free ourselves from what torments us. Therefore, I must rid myself of it. Why not put out the light, if one no longer wishes to see anything, if looking at things arouses nothing but aversion?....suddenly the darkness that now enveloped everything for her was pierced and life appeared to her for an instant with all its bright past joys... Lord, forgive me everything! she uttered once more, feeling the impossibility of struggling. The muzhik, muttering something, worked on the foundations . As the novel unfolds, the character of Anna Karenina assumes an autonomous life, one that transcends the author's own aims and endows her with qualities starkly distinct from those demanded by the official plot. It is almost as though Tolstoy falls in love with his own creation, unable to confine her within the role originally conceived. At first, it is clear that Anna is a hollow and vain figure, fully conforming to the false standards of the Russian aristocracy; gradually, however, the complexity of this character deepens as she pursues absolute love and an authentic life, far beyond the hypocrisies of society. Anna is tormented by a profound sense of guilt over abandoning her husband and, above all, her son; yet she senses she is not guilty, for she wishes only to «live her life» in a sincere and genuine manner. From this perspective, she cannot simply be defined as a romantic figure, since the love affair is significant but ultimately serves as the catalyst for a deeper spiritual yearning: the resolve to live out her freedom without hypocrisy and false conventions. Anna Karenina is a tragic character who destroys herself and those around her, as though driven by a demon (the dream of the old muzhik) and by a destiny that surpasses her own will. Over the course of the novel, a kind of «reversal» takes place—a profound shift in perspective that leads to the elevation of Anna’s character, outwardly fragile and culpable, over the duller and flatter Levin and Karenin.

In *Patria*, the author confronts with forceful tones the psychological and existential consequences of the civil war that bloodied the Basque Country from 1968 to 2011 (see the review on this site). With *Slow Years*, Aramburu tackles the same themes, yet with placid, almost dreamlike accents. Then again, > when I pause to review my memories of those years (those of Franco's Spain), an old feeling of slowness returns to me. (...) I am tempted, at least in certain stretches of the novel, to make an effort to convey through a deliberately slow style that sensation of historical stagnation. To give this impression of a history > that dragged on sluggishly , the author imagines that an “informant” provides him with the raw materials to construct a novel, even > if it becomes necessary to stray from the informant's testimony, so be it. Literature first, then, if any room remains, the truth. And so a person, now grown up, recounts to Aramburu his childhood living with relatives in San Sebastián. He, > a little Navarrese shit , as his cousin Julen greets him, finds himself living in a Basque family: an authoritarian, abrupt aunt; a melancholic, absent uncle; an ugly, fat female cousin who sleeps around with all the boys; and Julen, who upon seeing him cry consoles him by mocking him: > if you were Basque you wouldn't cry. Have you ever seen iron weep? But, since you are a soft-boiled Navarrese, what happens happens. Strong, swaggering, self-confident, spoiled by his mother, Julen recalls Joxe Mari from *Patria* and, indeed, his story shares many similar traits: he joins ETA, is forced to flee to France, but, unlike Joxe, Julen cannot endure the loneliness and hardships of underground life; he betrays the organization and returns to San Sebastián, bringing shame upon his family. All of this is depicted through the eyes of a child, who does not fully grasp the dangers surrounding these events and their impact on his aunt and uncle's family. It is true, a shiver of fear ran through him whenever he saw the Guardia Civil pass by, but > those mustaches, do you remember them? Those hard stares, the batons and helmets, the weapons that my adolescent imagination struggled to conceive of outside cowboy-and-Indian movies. In the child’s imagination everything blurs together, creating something like a commedia dell'arte where comical or frightening figures bustle about within the same surreal, comedic atmosphere. Consider the fat cousin who, having fallen pregnant, is forced to marry the village idiot, himself obese and misshapen. Or the grotesquely solemn figure of the parish priest, assertive in inciting young men to join ETA, yet trembling when at risk of arrest. And yet, the subtle, amusing account of the child informant fails to bring peace, to permit reconciliation, even forty years later. The novel concludes with a bitter recollection by the author. On a bus, he runs into Julen’s father, but turns away. > They infected me with hatred. (...) I would like to ask his forgiveness, but he is dead. There are many ways to speak of a country's tragedies, the lacerations of a community, and the grief of people who were scarred by those events. In this novel, Aramburu does so with a reckless approach, perpetually teetering on the thin line between the comic and the dramatic; what emerges is a sense of narrative inadequacy that deepens as one delves further into the tale, where one would expect it to evolve toward a greater depth of exposition and judgment. Perhaps Aramburu chose the wrong informant—what could a child do? He could do nothing but defend his childhood behind a fantastical vision, as if everything were that game of plastic cyclists, the child informant's only toy, which > move forward in turns, by as many spaces as indicated by the die. Aramburu consistently displays remarkable narrative inventiveness. If in *Patria* it was the shifting of the narrator mid-stride (from “I” to “she” within the same sentence), here it is instead the pairing of the child's account with a sort of working outline by the writer on how to develop the novel: the plot, the setting, the deeper explorations, the words. These are “notes” that gradually overshadow the narrative, losing their character as a reflection on himself and the writer's craft to become increasingly another tale altogether, silencing the child's own. At first, this literary device is intriguing because of its novelty, but it eventually proves repetitive, disrupting the linear development of the story. Why read it? Enjoyable, yet in the end the story fades away.

Ricardo Reis is one of the many names under which Fernando Pessoa, the greatest Portuguese writer of the twentieth century, signed his works. The author imagines that a Ricardo Reis, after sixteen years spent in Brazil, returns to Lisbon in the very year of Pessoa’s death, 1935. It is pointless to seek a plot in the novel; as in Joyce’s *Ulysses*, the real subject of the narrative is the wanderings through 1930s Lisbon and the succession of thoughts on reality and on oneself: thoughts that never find an adequate expression in words. > Over the stark nudity of truth the diaphanous cloak of fantasy, the maxim seems clear, clear, neat and definitive, even a child will be capable of understanding it and repeating it in an exam without making a mistake, but this same child would understand and repeat with equal conviction a new sentence, Over the stark nudity of fantasy the diaphanous cloak of truth, and this sentence, yes, gives far more food for thought, and to imagine with relish, fantasy solid and nude, truth barely diaphanous, if overturned maxims became laws, what a world we would make of them, it is a miracle that men do not go mad every time they open their mouths to speak . In this deft literary inversion through which the certainty of reality turns into vagueness and imagination gains the upper hand, the novel’s fundamental theme is revealed: it is no longer possible to “read” the world, the interior one any more than the external context. Ricardo Reis walks through Lisbon as though in a labyrinth, unable to find an exit. He is partly “a spectator of the spectacle of the world” and partly overwhelmed by his own thoughts: it is not he > who is thinking these thoughts, nor one of those innumerable selves living inside him, perhaps it is thought itself that is thinking, or simply thinking, while he watches, surprised at the unravelling of a thread leading him through unknown streets and corridors... But is it Ricardo Reis who is confused, or is it reality itself that becomes representation rather than truth? The book’s most compelling pages concern the protagonist’s journey to Fátima and the description of a sort of war simulation staged by Salazar’s dictatorial regime: an urge to partake in the great slaughter of the 1930s (the Spanish Civil War and subsequently the world conflict). Faced with the shameless exploitation of hopes for a cure, with the petty and grand commerce surrounding the shrine, religion turns into superstition, an occasion for revelry, a contempt for spirituality. In the same way, the military parades, the celebrations of victories that never occurred, the false reports, the propaganda are the unsettling parody of a moral and physical disaster looming over Europe. The protagonist seeks, without much conviction, solid anchors for his life, both inner and political, but it is all in vain: > time drags on like a slow, viscous wave, a paste of liquid glass on whose surface lie myriads of sparkles that catch the eye and deflect meaning, while deep down the tawny and unsettling core shows through, an engine in motion (...) Ricardo Reis lacks a guide dog, a walking stick, a light ahead, for this world and this Lisbon are a dark fog where north and south, east and west are lost, where the only open path leads downward, and if a man lets himself go he plunges straight down, a dummy with neither legs nor head . It is hardly surprising, then, that when Pessoa’s ghost visits the protagonist, Ricardo Reis decides to follow him into the world of the dead, where reading is the first faculty to be lost. “Here (in Lisbon), where the sea has ended and the earth awaits.” Many interpretations can be offered for the novel: the narration of a progression toward death; the desire to evoke a Lisbon now vanished; the contrast between a yearned-for and idealized love (the figure of Marcenda, a notary’s daughter) and a sensual and concrete love (the liaison with the chambermaid Lídia); the subtle irony aimed at Portuguese society; and yet further meanings. The unifying thread of so many explanations is the shattering of the European conscience, aware and terrified yet inert and cowardly before the disaster toward which it moves, as though dragged along by an indecipherable and unstoppable fate. > We have all had a father and a mother, but we are children of chance and necessity, whatever this phrase may mean, Ricardo Reis thought it, let him clarify it . In reading the novel, one encounters sentences that are exceptional from a literary standpoint. One cannot help but feel envious, and captivated, by the following passage. > Only a vague inconsequential sorrow lingers a while at the door of my soul and after gazing at me for a moment passes on, smiling at nothing, he murmured (Ricardo Reis). Yet on the whole, the narrative style is cumbersome and tedious. The phrasing is complex, with frequent shifts of subject; the sentences are long, dominated by commas; the punctuation does not aid the reader; reflections, often philosophical in nature, prevail over plot, characters, and descriptions. There is a total absence of dialogue, which might otherwise lend breath and vitality to the narration. It is a *Ulysses* in which there is no Mr Bloom. Why not read it? It is tedious and prolix.

While in ancient Egypt embalming was practiced to preserve the deceased for eternity, the Shinto worldview and a certain measure of fetishism lead, in Japan, to the preservation and safekeeping of objects and living beings that are important in one's life. The novel speaks of a "specimen," and the technique employed is perhaps akin to that used for the wet preservation of fluid specimens using formaldehyde. In any case, the method is not explained in the book, perhaps to maintain a magical and mysterious atmosphere. This long preamble was necessary to frame the story. The protagonist is a young woman who left her job at a soft-drink bottling plant following a workplace accident: the gear of a machine severed the tip of her ring finger, > an image haunted me; that seashell-shaped piece of flesh, pink as a cherry petal, tender as the pulp of a ripe fruit, falling in slow motion into the iced soda, only to settle at the bottom, floating among the bubbles, (...) I had lost a part of my body. She goes to work in the city, in a semi-abandoned building. Here, Mr. Deshimaru prepares and keeps specimens of all kinds. > Everything about him was impeccable. The color of his skin, his hair, the shape of his ears, the length of his arms and legs, the line of his shoulders, his voice were all perfectly harmonious. (...) The sun's rays enveloped his white coat, sketching an aura of light around it. One day, Mr. Deshimaru puts new shoes on her and orders her to always wear them; then he undresses her, leaving the shoes on, and they make love. > He neatly unbuttoned my blouse from the top down and unzipped my flared skirt. (...) In the end, I found myself naked. I was wearing only the black leather shoes. (...) He held me tight in his large arms—not in a tender embrace to savor the sensation of our bodies—as if he wanted to press all of me flush against him. (...) I had the feeling of having been transformed into a specimen incorporated into him. From here, the story is a slow slide toward the inevitable question: > couldn't I entrust myself to you and become one of your specimens too? (...) The preserving fluid must have been warm and still. It was not cold and fizzy like the soda. It would have completely enveloped the ring finger, from the tip to the edge down to the faintest lines of the fingertip, while the cork stopper would have shielded it from dust and external noises. The story is disturbing if viewed as a realistic narrative; it becomes sustainable if considered as a metaphor for the deprivation of a part of the body. Having watched a small ring finger detach and vanish created a profound wound in the young woman's psyche. It is as if we were inside a dream, in which a kind of shaman, shadowy and luminous at once, draws the girl to himself, offering her a world that is protective and claustrophobic. Becoming a "specimen" is a way of escaping reality. The writing is limpid and simple, reflecting well the young woman's disorientation; pleasant and fluid, the style contributes to an overarching sense of implausibility that not even the eccentricity of Japanese culture can overcome. Everything remains on the surface; there is no psychological depth in a tale in which only physical contours and objects are delineated in detail, thereby acquiring a semblance of reality. The story flows far too linearly. Why not read it? It is simply too implausible.

The protagonist is a German woman in her forties who lives in Turkey and runs a bookshop specializing in crime fiction. She describes herself this way: > I have a double chin, orange hair, a mobile phone (an older model, though), and a circle of friends on antidepressants. I am always nervous, but I don't know why . Saddened and disheartened following an argument with her boyfriend, she sets out to find an apartment to buy. Among those brought to her attention, she attempts to view one that happens to be illegally occupied. In trying to see it, the protagonist—impulsive and quick-tempered—clashes with the tenant, who refuses to let her inspect the premises. As chance would have it, the tenant is murdered: thus begins a detective story in which the protagonist, partly because she is a suspect and above all because she enjoys playing detective, sets out to find the killer. It must be said that, as a noir, it is hardly compelling, particularly because it lacks twists and turns and everything feels rather predictable. Far more interesting is the sketch of a woman poised between two such disparate societies: the German one (where “people are always in a foul mood, unhappy, and dissatisfied”) and the Turkish one, where > the interiors of the houses and the windowpanes are polished to a shine, but the balconies and streets are so filthy as to disgust anyone who sets foot there . What the protagonist wants is clear—after all, where else could a woman live, if not in a Mediterranean city, when she prefers “a new apartment rather than another man” entering her life? The book possesses one undeniable virtue: offering the prospective tourist a list of Istanbul's most interesting neighborhoods. The protagonist is sketched with hurried, superficial strokes, almost deliberately avoiding any psychological or sociological depth. Life moves quickly, and there is no time to understand why one lives in Istanbul rather than Berlin, why one prefers living alone—with the pleasure of playing detective—over having a husband and the friendships typical of a middle-aged progressive German woman, such as having > peroxide-blonde friends who lived in residential complexes with swimming pools, complained about snoring husbands, wore silver ballet flats, and voted for the Social Democrats . Why read it? It is an enjoyable read, but the narrative is evanescent and flimsy. A translator's labor must cost very little indeed to justify publishing such a predictable book in Italian.

The novel is set in Friuli in 1944 and deals with an event that actually occurred. In that year, the Germans relocated an army of Cossacks to Friuli, who had sided with Hitler under the illusion that they could defeat the Bolsheviks, their historic enemies. They were a people who had wandered across Europe with women and children in search of a land, spurred by the promise of a victorious return to their places of origin, amid the great rivers of European Russia. The narrative revolves around the figure of a woman, Marta. She arrived in the village with her fiancé and his sister, Anita. Yet she is soon left alone, as her fiancé is dispatched to the Russian border and never returns. Marta lives with a wealthy Jewish widow of Slavic descent, who had fled Russia following anti-Semitic persecutions and sought refuge in a remote village in Friuli. Life unfolds in an apparent serenity, which is shattered by a German raid that sweeps away the Jewish woman and, along with her, a group of Gypsies who were camping with their caravan near the village. Marta is left alone with Anita, who is expecting a child, and an old Gypsy who by chance had escaped. Marta is a strong woman who always looks to the future, confronting adversity with great courage. A young man arrives from the Russian front, Ivos, with whom she has a brief relationship, soon cut short by his decision to join the partisans. Alone in a large villa, Marta, Anita, and the old Gypsy live in a state of suspension, of waiting, striving to lead a normal life amidst an increasingly precarious and dramatic situation. At this point, the Cossacks arrive, overturning village life both materially (first looting, then installing themselves in the houses) and socially, introducing their own customs and forging ties with the locals. In truth, the Friulians seem to accept the arrival of the invaders, not least because they feel united with them by the longing for land and for a definitive resolution to centuries-old suffering. A family comes to live in Marta’s house (a woman, a youth, and a twelve-year-old boy), alongside the two commanders of the Cossack detachment: Gavrila and Urvan. With the latter, Marta embarks on a romantic relationship which, in her mind, might culminate in an escape to America to build a life together. In this section of the novel, the tone is light yet melancholy: the Cossacks are capable of both enjoying themselves and entertaining others, but they carry a profound longing for their native land, their customs, and their traditions. > In Urvan’s soul, deep, deep within, the ghosts of those archaic customs still wandered, like a faded, bleached memory whose roots lay in times worn away and undone for centuries. He had the sensation of having landed who knows where, and of being awaited behind the wall by dark, unpredictable events . Both the Cossacks and the local people delude themselves into believing they can continue living > inside the house, a place set apart from the world, like an unmoored ship gliding across a sea devoid of change and storms . At a certain point, the situation unravels. The embattled peace between Cossacks and partisans turns into open warfare. A sequence of bloody, gratuitously cruel episodes begins. In truth, there is no reason to fight, yet it is as if the fragile bond of coexistence between the two peoples had shattered. The Cossacks, who until then had respected the women and local customs, begin committing acts of violence and murder without even knowing why; it is as though the hope of a safe haven, of a homeland, had vanished. > But above all, it was the mental homeland that had vanished, that order of thought through which a man always felt, within them, to be in a familiar and reassuring place . At a certain point, the Cossacks decide to march again and return to their homeland. It will be a tragic exodus, as many will perish from hardship and disease, others in clashes with the partisans, while the last among them will commit collective suicide to avoid being repatriated to Russia, where certain death awaits them. Marta is left alone once more, yet the novel moves toward a natural conclusion, for the world must go on. Anita’s child is born, and Marta is reunited with Ivos and resolves to live with him: true happiness may remain elusive, but with courage, the struggle to survive will begin anew. The novel develops along two themes: one social and collective, the other more intimate and familial. The social theme, which renders this novel so timely, concerns the encounter between two peoples, framed, however, within the notion that we are forever shipwrecked: > humanity had reached a point where, increasingly, there would be entire populations without a homeland, nomads driven from their lands, crucified by painful circumstances offering no way out, propelled forward by armies and wars . Faced with this resurgence of barbarism, the author finds no socio-political solution, seeking it instead in the strength of intimate and familial bonds, and above all in womanhood. Marta embodies the mother-earth, the figure capable of fostering coexistence. > She was a simple, even elementary woman, who around her, as always, could see nothing but men, only men, all resembling one another, speaking different languages, harboring different thoughts, yet all battered by war and misfortune, all lost in the disorder and darkness of the world . The narrative pace is slow, at times excessively so, yet it is the writing that sustains the reading. One is captivated and enthralled by a calm, expansive prose that manages to draw a sort of mist, a veil over the cruelty of destiny: after all, that is what the characters themselves desire. As the author stated, > I like to view things from afar, to describe events as though they were already history or legend . Why read it? The story is compelling, the book is exquisitely written, and above all, it is a timely novel that speaks of the encounter between two peoples and the inexorable power of our shared belonging to the human race.

The context is the French Revolution. > Revolution is like those decks of playing cards where kings, queens, and jacks are split down the middle, one right side up and the other upside down, head up and head down; you turn and spin the card, but not a damn thing changes, the king standing upright is forever tied to the inverted one, as if sneering mockingly at him, as if whispering from below: I am you headed for ruin! Enjoy it while you can, because the world turns upside down . In this whirl the people—call them the masses, class consciousness, or the «flea-ridden mob»—are the ones who believe in a new world, where they envision themselves as protagonists only to find themselves used by power, like a collective sleepwalker. The revolution, in short, is a «Grand Parody». To recount it, the authors trace four narrative threads, initially distinct and ultimately brought together into one. The first consists of the story of Marie, a woman of the > famished and shit-smeared people, yet standing tall, bloodthirsty, an enormous dragon of fremendous beauty . In this way, the authors are able to speak of the sans-culottes and, at the same time, of the role played by women in the French Revolution: a role often overlooked, yet vital to that great upheaval and to the history of female emancipation. It was the first time women’s rights were clearly articulated. To give voice to the people and their protagonists, the authors invent a language, displaying creativity and great literary mastery. The writing is a blend of Bolognese dialectal forms and syntactic and linguistic structures that evoke the style of Beppe Fenoglio. It is without doubt the most captivating and least predictable part of the novel. The second narrative strand follows the fortunes of an Italian *commedia dellʼarte* actor: Leo, who realizes that during the revolution, the real theater is reality itself. > How would it have been possible to return to reciting an old script within the confines of a hall, when theater had become history beneath the sky of France? . And indeed, Leo becomes «both actor and spectator at once», transforming into Scaramouche, an avenger and fighter for freedom. The third thread deals with animal magnetism, a scientific theory and practice widespread in the eighteenth century. It posits that there is a universal fluid coursing through all living beings. Harnessing it would allow one to cure illnesses and ailments, working for the good. Yet can magnetism be used to pursue evil? To subjugate other men, turning them into automatons, a sort of «army of sleepwalkers»? This is what the novel’s third protagonist, Dr. DʼAmblanc, discovers. Like all scientists, he «seeks not justice, but the confirmation of a hypothesis», and this leads him to sacrifice the life of a boy under his care, merely to verify whether magnetism could be employed for sinister ends. Finally, there is the section most deeply steeped in philosophical and psychoanalytic references: the asylum, the upside-down world par excellence. > The ward of the insane was a parody of a city district... everything that happens in here is a parody of the world out there... in short order, passing from mouth to mouth, news transmuted into wild rumors, as the alienated enriched them with their anxieties and bent them to the tortuousness of their indecipherable codes... studying the delirium of those who live openly in the Grand Parody can help us understand those who, seemingly saner, sink into it without being aware of it . In the development of its four narrative lines, the novel proceeds slowly and tortuously. It is demanding yet stimulating, rich in compelling scenes and food for thought. At a certain point, the narrative accelerates, turning into adventure, plot twists, and sudden shifts in direction. It becomes an easier read, but grows predictable, assimilating into the many modern novels that mix suspense with the paranormal. It falls to the reader to discover the unexpected conclusion. We can only say that power is overcome by humanity at its most fragile: a woman by now resigned to squalor and alcoholism. Yet the people advance; will they ultimately emerge victorious? It is a major historical novel, well documented, capable of recounting an epochal episode of our history in an engaging manner. The idea of telling the French Revolution from multiple perspectives is not merely an effective literary device. It makes it possible to address universal and contemporary themes, such as: the question of how far the people are a mob and how far a conscious force for transformation; the relations between men and women which, even in a time of great upheaval, are swiftly reined back into the former’s dominance over the latter; science as progress for the good of humanity and as an instrument of oppression; madness as the laying bare of the paradoxes of normalcy; political and social struggle transformed into performance, into theater. The novel’s limitation lies in its characters: the realm of feelings and interpersonal relationships is lacking, with the result that the protagonists turn out to be stereotypes, emblematic figures of a philosophy of history rather than living, autonomous characters. The creativity, which shines through above all in the prose, is placed at the service of an intellectualist approach. Why read it? A superb historical novel, a reflection on the contemporary world, captivating prose. It reads very well.

> My mother from the sea died on the top bunk, on one of those nights. Looking at her, she did not seem ill, perhaps just a little greyer than usual. (...) At the funeral, the other mother accompanied me. PoorAdalgisa poorAdalgisa, she repeated, wringing her hands. But then they threw her out; her nylon stockings were all laddered and she couldn't attend the service in that state. This dream haunts the nights of the Arminuta, the “girl returned”: a thirteen-year-old sent back to her family of origin, to the “mother by necessity,” after spending her childhood with an aunt, the “mother from the sea.” Raised as an only child in an orderly, quiet home, she finds herself catapulted into a large, impoverished family, with uncouth and seemingly indifferent parents, loud brothers always ready for crude jokes, a slightly backward little brother, and an invasive younger sister, already adept at housework, who still wets herself. > Toward evening the older boys came home; one greeted me with a whistle, another didn’t even notice me. They rushed into the kitchen, elbowing their way through (...). They filled their plates amid splatters of sauce; at my corner, only a spongy meatball over a bit of sauce arrived. (...) My first parents remembered after dinner that there wasn't a bed for me in the house. Tonight you'll sleep with your sister, you're both skinny anyway, the father said . What nostalgia for her former life, for the “mother from the sea,” and what shame for such an ignorant, neglectful, and destitute family! Yet what remains inexplicable to the Arminuta are the reasons why she was sent back to her parents “by necessity,” and so hastily. Could the mother from the sea be ill? What if she had died in the meantime? With a troubled soul steeped in melancholy, the Arminuta ventures into a world unknown to her: she finds support in her eldest brother (her first love?), learns to help around the house, and, through subtle signs, discovers a gruff maternal love, even if she cannot accept it. > I had felt my mother's hand move across my back and come to a firm rest on my shoulder blade. I had drawn my head between my shoulders, like a fearful dog pleased by the first caress after a long abandonment. Yet soon I pulled away with an abrupt movement and stepped back a little. I was ashamed of her, of her chapped fingers, the faded mourning clothes she wore, the ignorance that escaped her lips with every word. I never ceased to be ashamed of her language, of that dialect that turned ridiculous whenever she made an effort to speak properly . It is her sister Adriana (“she wore skimpy clothes, dirty shoes, greasy hair”) who shatters the Arminuta’s bourgeois solitude, leading her to understand the emotional wealth born of sisterhood, of a friendship that draws strength from shared habit, from being cast into the world together, from saving each other through complicity. And it could only be Adriana who bluntly tells her the truth: the Arminuta was abandoned by the mother from the sea because the latter was expecting a child and there was no longer room for her, having been wanted only because they had been unable to conceive a child of their own. At the end of the novel, the Arminuta meets the mother from the sea once more, and from that encounter comes to understand herself: > like an improbable flower, grown in a small clod of earth clinging to the rock . There is one word that encapsulates this short novel: authenticity. One is genuine if one does not view the world through forms, rules, and appearances, but seeks deep feelings; one is genuine if culture, education, books, and knowledge acquired at school do not serve as a shield, but as a means to immerse oneself more fully into real life, to seek a mutual sense of humanity beyond divisions of class, ethnicity, religion, and gender; one is genuine if one is not ashamed of one's own language, yet refuses to retreat into a parochial and folkloric dimension. This echoes the theme already explored in Elena Ferrante’s novel (*My Brilliant Friend*), though here the pursuit of an authentic life unfolds within the family, in the relationship between daughter and mother, and among sisters. The question one might ask is this: why, in recent years, is there such a pressing need to return to the primordial wellsprings of Italian society—family and friendship? Why do we feel that culture is insufficient to teach us “resistance”? The plot is slender, and the characters are merely sketched rather than fully explored, beginning with the Arminuta, an improbable narrator. Its fundamental merit lies in the writing: banality and the style of television dramas are finally abandoned in favor of forging a new language, built on short yet unsplintered sentences, a measured blend of standard Italian with dialectal and regional terms, carrying ancient resonances deftly woven into modern syntax. Why read it? An engaging story, even if only sketched; writing that is both intriguing and pleasurable.

In the final pages of the book, Modesta, the novel’s protagonist, is accused by her son of never having loved him, > because you lived for everyone, always on the go, damn you, talking and acting familiar with everyone . And Modesta answers him indirectly a few pages later, confessing that “in my eager thirst for life, I ran too far ahead in my mind.” The account of Modesta’s life resembles a long, passionate sprint, devoid of a single moment of quiet, drawing instead ever-renewed vigor from the obstacles it encounters, from new friendships and loves, and from an extended family without boundaries, hierarchies, or defined roles. In the end, the reader is left weary and disoriented, overwhelmed by such sheer energy. The novel is set in Sicily, in Catania. Modesta is born in 1900, and the narrative traverses twentieth-century Italian history, with a keen focus on the fortunes of the Left: the socialist and communist parties. Raised in a destitute peasant family, Modesta is raped at the age of sixteen by a man who may be her father. Out of charity, she is taken into a convent. While this allows her to develop a passion for reading and study, she must endure the bigoted, hypocritical environment of the nuns and submit to rules that mortify intelligence and a fresh, inquisitive sexuality. She becomes the mother superior’s protégée, and through a series of fortuitous circumstances—seized by Modesta with remarkable cunning—she goes to live with an aristocratic family, the Brandifortis. Modesta is no Jane Austen heroine. She has no qualms about sweeping aside every obstacle in the way of her resolve > not to be a petty little woman. Like the princess I wanted to become, now she was truly a strong, willful woman, like a man . She murders the mother superior and the much-admired princess, marries the heir prince, despite his Down syndrome, and carries on two love affairs: with Carmine, the strong and overbearing estate bailiff, and Beatrice, the delicate and sweet little princess. Modesta embraces bisexuality joyously and without guilt, just as she is determined to become the mistress of her own destiny. On the other hand, in the background there always lingers the “ancient fear” of misery—both material and moral—stemming from her peasant roots. > I must not forget... the past, but rather always remember all of it, so as to keep it under control and turn it into strength against the new encounters that were surely lying in wait for me . Still very young, Modesta is already at the pinnacle of Catanian society, censured for her transgressive lifestyle, yet respected for her abilities and erudition. She could stop there. > But even now, as I write, the sun is setting, someone is knocking at the door, a car is waiting at the gate . Her encounter with Carlo, a northern physician steeped in socialist ideals, sweeps Modesta into the world of ideologies, abstract aspirations, and grand illusions. For the earthy, carnal Modesta, there is too much moralizing in Carlo, even if the protagonist appreciates his consistency and rectitude. Far more fraught, by contrast, is her relationship with Joice, herself a restless figure, weighed down by feelings of guilt she attempts to overcome through psychoanalysis. The romantic bond between Modesta and Joice is punctuated by the latter’s suicide attempts, by biting and spiteful arguments in which Joice accuses her friend of superficiality, reproaching her for a joyous, overflowing sensuality that makes no distinction between men and women, between casual lovers and deeper relationships. > Ah, Joice, what good was so much intelligence, so much science, if you failed to chip away at even a millimeter of the vice of guilt? Fortunately, there are the sea, the sun, long swims, and “a crowd of exceptional children,” whom Modesta welcomes with affection, heedless of their birth or family ties. Imposing an abrupt rupture on a romance that had grown stale, overly steeped in intellectualisms and recriminations, prison irrupts. Modesta is arrested, accused of financing and aiding the communists, and locked away in prison. In her cell she meets Nina, and it is a return to a joyous love, made of kisses and caresses, at once affectionate and sensual. With Nina, Modesta can once again abandon herself > to life, always without fear.... I would like to follow her... and keep dreaming..., but murmurs of voices, clatter of trains, the dull roar of crowded mobs tear away from my future and invade the room, pinning me to the armchair . The fall of fascism and the post-war era overwhelm Modesta. The Communist Party seeks to capitalize on her charm and capabilities, yet her ideas do not align with > that engaging, democratic smile... meant to reassure public opinion... One cannot suddenly talk of free love, abortion, divorce; one must proceed by degrees, as Comrade Giorgio (Amendola) says . Modesta is too transgressive for the bourgeois respectability of the Communist Party. Politics proves to be a disappointment, though hardly a surprise. The true novelty, which unsettles the protagonist, is her apprehension toward the young. Modesta discovers that the children, once so beloved, have grown into adults who accuse her, demanding justifications for their lives and asking why they were raised in such an unconventional way. They feel embarrassed by Modesta’s lifestyle; they do not understand it. And > to my astonishment I, too, realize that I fear their judgment . Meeting a new love—Marco, formerly Nina’s partner—gives her the strength to recount her extraordinary life, explaining to herself and to her countless “children” the reasons behind such a joyful eagerness to live. The novel was written between 1967 and 1976, when Goliarda was in her forties. It is a > journey backward into the subterranean woods of memories seemingly forgotten, which, once brought back to light, reorganized, and cleared of mold and crusts, reveal mosaics of gleaming gems for the understanding of one's own life and that of others . It is a sort of Freudian psychoanalysis, in which autobiographical elements intermingle with an imagined world—partly a transposition of the deepest traits of Goliarda’s character, and partly a chronicle of nostalgias and expectations: the large family, the children, the land of Sicily. As Domenico Scarpa observed, > this novel is a continuous victory over fear and uncertainty . Storytelling did not seem to have brought serenity to Goliarda, given that the events of the following years led the writer to a desperate and self-destructive act: the theft of jewelry from a friend, imprisonment, disgrace, and poverty. Perhaps there is too much egocentrism in Goliarda, so much so that the character system resembles the solar system, with a central star (Modesta) and countless planets (the characters) that possess no life of their own other than that which radiates from the center. Goliarda’s world is complex and intricate, yet the figures populating it are mere creations, fragments of an existential and psychological terrain that belongs exclusively to the author. The narrative structure rests fundamentally on dialogues between Modesta and the other characters: dialogues in which the context, the narrative function, and at times even the participants themselves are not entirely clear. They resemble extended soliloquies more than anything else, giving the impression that there is only ever one interlocutor: the protagonist. Because it also lacks a well-defined plot, reading it becomes arduous, and reaching the conclusion requires considerable effort. The publisher Feltrinelli refused to publish the book at the time, asking the author—who declined—to cut it back and make it less rambling and prolix. Its resounding success outside Italy somewhat ridiculed the publishing house’s stern verdict. Yet today, as the novelty of Modesta’s transgressiveness fades, that earlier assessment undoubtedly appears correct. Why read it? If one arms oneself with courage and patience, Modesta’s restless hunger for life delivers a jolt of energy in a contemporary world that is so gray and monotonous.

There are artists who remain forever pinned to an idea we hold of them, one that prevents us from truly appreciating them. Consider Dino Campana, the mad poet, and how his poetry was reduced to his presumed madness, casting his stylistic qualities and sources of inspiration into the background (see the review on this site of *La notte della cometa* by Sebastiano Vassalli). The same happened to Artemisia Gentileschi, a painter who lived between 1593 and 1653. Although she produced some fifty paintings and achieved fame throughout Europe, the memory of this great artist remains inextricably linked to the rape and subsequent trial she underwent in 1612. > Yet none of this will be enough to make my worth shine in the eyes of the world. Like a curse I bear upon me, for everyone—collectors and biographers alike—I will always be the paintress of scandal, rape, and revenge. Thus the author of this novel imagines Artemisia reflecting on her life, when she is already an established woman, well integrated into the society of her time. In Artemisia, that refrain they sang to her outside the courtroom, acquitted of all guilt, constantly resurfaces, > amid winking smirks, lewd propositions, merciless jeers, (...) *Paintress, lady painter, take this brush and warm it in your cunt.* And how could it be otherwise when we admire her Judiths, struck by the ferocious realism of the images: the first painting (*Judith Slaying Holofernes* from 1612), in which the biblical episode is transformed into a depiction of the wronged woman’s revenge, and the second from the end of her life (*Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes* from 1650), in which the two women flee with the man’s head after decapitating him. How deep the wound in an abused woman, that it surfaces even after so many years! The luxury of denial is not granted to woman, as Teju Cole observes in *Open City* (see the review on this site). All the more so when the rape was abetted by her father Orazio, who used his beautiful young daughter to curry favor with the powerful and forge business ties; and even more so when, in lodging the complaint that permanently disgraced his daughter, the father did not seek to punish the rapist, but intended to recover a painting the rapist had stolen: a painting whose conception the father claimed as his own, but which was in fact by the twenty-year-old Artemisia. We speak of the first Judith, through which Artemisia took eternal revenge upon man and embodied female solidarity against male society. Thus triply betrayed by her father, Artemisia suffered trial and disgrace in a papal Rome that was corrupt, violent, and lustful. In the novel, Artemisia is no weeping victim; she is a strong, clear-eyed young woman who knows that a woman must fight alone. She defends, desperately and proudly, her future as a painter, acutely aware of her worth. When she returns home after undergoing torture, the insolence of men does not trouble her (she is used to it!); she is concerned instead with her hands, with whether she will still be able to paint. While the first part of the novel recounts the intrigue surrounding Artemisia's ordeal, in the second part, set in Naples in 1648, Artemisia is by now an established woman, and it is difficult to find in the narrative the dramatic tension that characterized the first half. In truth, no significant events occur; the narrative moves along placidly, though Artemisia's restlessness continually surfaces—her inclination toward violent, scandalous, and sordid scenes typical of Naples' plebeian quarters, contrasting with the overt opulence of the Spanish rulers, far from the fine portraits painted for illustrious men, ever sinking into the mire of suffering. We may wish to look beyond the Judiths, yet it is always they who dominate our vision of Artemisia. It is difficult to discern a clear narrative thread in a plot woven from too many episodes loosely bound by the story’s development. The temporal leap itself and the shift in setting—first Rome, then Naples—do not aid the unity of the tale. The novel’s virtue lies, rather, in certain environmental descriptions; scenes rendered in vivid colors, coarse language, and subtle irony, traits reminiscent of Boccaccio that turn the narrative almost into a social novel. One senses the influence of the great post-war Neapolitan writers, such as Domenico Rea (see the reviews of *Spaccanapoli* and *Ninfa plebea* on this site). To give a sense of Raffaele Messina’s style, one might take as an example one of the finest passages in the novel: “At the Tavern of the Fountain,” where the patrons insinuate that it was the father himself who deflowered his daughter. > Tossed out like that, onto that rough board soaked in animal fat, the hypothesis seized the attention of every patron in the room. The dice, thrown amid ceaseless blasphemies, died away inside the overturned mug; the cards, laid face up on the table or still face down, ceased passing from hand to hand. (...) > You Jew of an innkeeper, give us yer take! (...) With a steaming dish of farro soup and pork rinds held aloft in his right hand, he turned slowly toward his interlocutor and answered with a ruddy smile: Fucking is as sweet as drinking wine. Whose hole it may be, or from what vine, is no host's concern, but a lawyer's quibble! > . The prose flows smoothly, interspersed with deft citations from the transcripts of the rape trial or from Artemisia’s own letters; digressions that lend veracity and color to the narrative, though within a typically contemporary style that occasionally slips into journalistic mannerisms, such as the overuse of the period” and the resulting verbless sentence. Why read it? For its fine descriptions of the setting.

"A vulgar case of fraud, Your Honor, nothing more." Kermeur stands before the judge: he has confessed to killing a businessman, Antoine Lazenec. "We saw him sprout up like a mushroom at the foot of a tree," but in a quiet little town, lacking both ideas and jobs, > when someone like him arrives with such a determined expression on his face, (...) there is something about him that feels like an outstretched hand pulling our very soul out of us, with all those ideas of change, with all those grand schemes . People fall for it, starting with the mayor; the retiree Kermeur invests his severance pay, enthralled by the adventurer Lazenec's dreams of wealth. The beauty of it is that the swindler does not leave town after it has become blatantly obvious that the grand plans will never materialize, that he has pocketed the money, after the mayor has committed suicide; no, he stays right there, flaunting his lavish lifestyle, peddling optimism and falsehoods: > a man like that, Your Honor, a man like that, I realized later: if you don't make him disappear yourself, he will never disappear. He will come back . This is the motive for the murder: a poor man, ruined by a swindler, wound himself up like "an electric battery" and finally exploded, ridding himself and the entire town of a vainglorious scoundrel. What need is there for a lengthy interrogation? That is what we ask ourselves as well. In reality, the narrative is a slow soliloquy, in which Kermeur, the narrating "I," speaks with the "mirroring I," embodied by a laconic judge. It is like the mirror over the mantelpiece, before which the protagonist is accustomed to spending long hours. > And not because I want to see what is reflected in it, I told the judge, but I can't help myself, from staring at it I find myself tangled, as it were, in the thickness of the glass, my brain caught by the fog that could be mistaken for any hellish morning when the sun tries in vain to reflect within it, but made pale, as it were, or deceived by the opaque grain of the mirror . We thus learn the entirety of the retiree's life: his wife's abandonment, the raising of his son, from childhood to an adolescence prematurely marked by run-ins with the law, nostalgia for work and his few friends, a passion for fishing, and the setting of an Atlantic coastal town, where it seemed that > the pines and the ferns and the thick grass of the dunes (...) were in on a secret and whispered against me, beside me, proud to inhabit their peculiar world, a world without sentences and without malicious thoughts . It is, in short, the anatomy of a depression. There is nothing worse than expecting one thing and finding oneself confronted with another. Picking up the book, one hoped for a detective plot or an adroitly told provincial tale; instead, we ran headlong into a rambling spill of words—well-written, it must be said, at times offering intriguing insights, such as when the author observes that "a child is not programmed to feel compassion for you," a truth that we parents should keep firmly in mind! And yet, a sparkling, spirited style is not enough to save us; we are far removed from *Doctor Zhivago*, my dear Viel. The relentless succession of sentences, the lack of action, the excessive introspection, the overindulgent self-narration are all elements that render the novel utterly tedious and pedantic. Why not read it? It is unbearable.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to push an enormous boulder up to the summit, only to watch it roll back down into the valley and then be forced to haul it to the top once again. For Albert Camus, the myth of Sisyphus shows us how > the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. (...) At this subtle moment, when man turns back toward his life, a new Sisyphus returning to his rock, (...) he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which have become his destiny, created by him, brought together under the gaze of memory and soon sealed by death (*The Myth of Sisyphus* in *Opere*, Bompiani, pages 318–9). Viewed in this light, the myth of Sisyphus can serve as the interpretive key to a novel that would be simplistic to define merely as science fiction. Harold, a reclusive and solitary man, has been missing for many years when his brother learns that he has been hospitalized for evident mental disorders; he also discovers letters Harold wrote to his niece, recounting a mountain that mysteriously appeared in the sky, and its exploration by an expedition of scientists, including Harold. > I have wondered at times why I addressed these letters to you, Hattie, what this experience has to do with you. (...) At first, I told myself the letters were little more than a chronicle, a record of events that would allow me to process them at some deeper, subconscious level. (...) That is false. (...) I spent my life hiding from myself, denying my past, concealing my identity beneath new challenges and new mysteries. As Camus perceived, the thirst for knowledge and the flight from oneself are inextricably intertwined. The team of scientists comprises diverse competencies, some scientific, all within the natural sciences, an experienced mountaineer, and several military personnel. An exception is the presence of an anthropologist, whose necessity remains unclear. After being flown by helicopter to base camp, the ascent toward the mountain's summit begins. The climb entails the classic perils of high-altitude mountaineering: ferocious winds and subzero temperatures, ice and snow avalanches, ravines and crevasses. The explorers are also attacked by tentacled monsters and afflicted by paranormal phenomena, such as the collapse of temporal dimensions: a few hours can turn into months, the past and the future overlap with the future in the mind. The narrative is replete with adventure, plot twists, and Harold’s memories, as he painstakingly manages—or seems to manage—to free himself from guilt and achieve self-forgiveness. Only two men reach the summit: Harold, now physically broken, and Bettan, the mountain guide. In a sunlit environment above the clouds, surprisingly sheltered from the winds, the anthropologist appears. He is not a man; he is a Superior Being (God, perhaps?) and their expedition has been an experiment ( > I felt my entire existence shrink to the size of a rat cage ); an experiment to test the capabilities of human beings. It is by the will of the Superior Being that the ape became a hominid, then Homo sapiens, and was ultimately bestowed with the gift of Reason. The Superior Being has always intervened; now the time has come to make another leap—who will be the fortunate one? It can only be Bettan; our Harold is, deep down, a weakling. No sooner had the Superior Being placed the miraculous stone upon his chest than his body > began to glow, first with a deep blue, like that of the ocean, then yellow as the sun. (...) A surge of energy erupted from him like thunder. (...) It is done, said the Superior Being, (...) Welcome, “Other Man,” to the new era of humanity. And precisely at that moment of transformation, Bettan shoots himself in the head, killing himself, crying out: > I am the master of my fate, (...) I am the captain of my soul. The Superior Being retreats in dejection—forever, we hope. Adam preferred to leave the Garden of Eden to be free. Certain angels rebelled against God, choosing eternal damnation over being the applauding courtiers of divinity.   In the novel, it is imagined that Harold's letters sparked widespread debate among the public and critics: a confused and delirious work; confirmation of a global conspiracy; an account of a phenomenon plausible from the perspective of theoretical physics; genuine clues pointing to the presence of real people who vanished without a trace; the oneiric construct of an anguished man seeking to metabolize his own guilt. It is difficult to say which of these interpretations is correct: perhaps a little of each. And this is precisely the novel’s shortcoming: attempting to say too much instead of humbly being a good science-fiction novel. The prose is straightforward and readable; a subject of such complexity would have required a more evocative writing style, capable of stirring impressions and fantasy in the reader—a language akin to Paul Lynch's in *Prophet Song* (see the review on this site). The plot is muddled, the result of striving to blend the adventure genre with psychological introspection, alongside excessive intrusions by the author into Einsteinian physics and metaphysics more broadly. Why read it? It is interesting, but do not expect a science-fiction novel.

The third book of the Bandini saga represents a further transition, both in terms of narrative content and stylistic and expressive aspects. Arturo is in Los Angeles, where he scrapes by, trying to write and get his short stories published. At the outset, the novel retains the defining elements of its predecessor: a strong predominance of imagination, a narrative rhythm still grounded in subjective expression, and a style characterized by strong lyrical accents rich in evocative power. Arturo falls in love with Camilla, a Mexican girl who works in a bar, and embarks on a tormented love affair marked by verbal clashes, written notes from Arturo, and an outing to the seashore, during which the young man fails to translate his feelings into sexual consummation, despite the girl’s expectations. Arturo still lives in a sort of delirium, swinging between phases of exaltation and depressive states. However, an episode occurs (imagined or real?) that seems to mark the turning point in the novel’s narrative and stylistic structure: a woman seeks Arturo out to pursue a romantic affair with him. From this moment on, his relationship with Camilla is inverted: the girl turns to Arturo for help and confesses that she is in love with another man, who nevertheless does not want her. Arturo accepts the situation, not least because he has realized that Camilla is using drugs and he wishes to help her. A complex relationship unfolds, through which Arturo matures, coming of age as an adult. The young man wants to take her to a house by the sea, but Camilla flees and vanishes into the desert: > across the desert was an utter indifference, the rhythm of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of these hills, their mystery, secret and comforting, made death of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold…. I carried the book a hundred paces into the desert, toward the southeast. With all my strength I threw it far out there in the direction she had gone. Then I went to the car, started the engine, and drove back toward Los Angeles . Coming to grips with the reality of emotions, rather than merely the delirium of his own aspirations and fantasies, spurs Arturo’s transition from youth to adulthood. The style also evolves in this direction. It preserves its richness of language, with a sentence structure and a choice of words particularly attuned to phonetic qualities and the evocative power of rhythm. The style, however, becomes leaner, less lyrical and redundant; the narrative structure is distinguished by dialogues, previously virtually absent due to the lack of characters of significant weight.

The novel chronicles the investigation of a private detective following the murder of the Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party during a meeting of the Central Committee. The narrative unfolds slowly, blending markedly disparate styles and narrative content: a succession of continuous "parentheses" on life in Madrid and the tribulations of the leftist milieu, with a sentence structure reminiscent of *The Pianist* and thus tedious and prolix; a Raymond Chandler-esque approach, particularly in the more action-driven scenes, where the protagonist is pursued, captured, and beaten by secret service operatives; and an articulation closer to the British mystery when the protagonist ultimately unmasks the killer. The overlapping of styles and the predominance of themes tied to the existential and political dilemmas of the Left make the book bad, tedious, and ponderous. It is, therefore, a dated novel that offers little stimulation regarding contemporary issues (or so one hopes!).

Following his separation from his wife, a modest painter of commissioned portraits undertakes a journey across Japan. In a motel, he comes close to strangling a girl whose name he does not even know. > Just pretend, she had told me. But would I be able to get away with so little, was I sure?. (...) Because it obeyed an inner impulse of my own...(...) That was what truly frightened me, in the depths of my consciousness As in other novels by the author (see on this site the reviews of *Kafka on the Shore* and *Norwegian Wood*), an intricate journey into consciousness begins from a traumatic event on the brink of the abyss, during which the plot and characters dissolve into an oneiric and metaphysical world. This time, at the core of the reflection lies the function of art, conceived as an “implicit, secret, incomprehensible sign,” capable of allowing us to “slip through the narrow aperture that separates nothingness from reality.” Weary of wandering, the protagonist finds refuge in the mountain home belonging to the father of a friend—the great artist Amada Tomohiko. The residence is abandoned because the elderly painter has been admitted to a care facility for the aged. In the attic, the protagonist discovers a painting, *Killing Commendatore*, depicting a homicide inspired by a scene from Mozart’s *Don Giovanni*. Although Tomohiko had adopted the traditional Japanese style—seemingly ill-suited to expressing intense emotions—the painting depicts a bloody duel: a young man brutally slays an old man, the Commendatore, before the stunned gaze of a lady in an elegant white dress and a coarse, vulgar man, while the head of a mysterious witness emerges from a trapdoor. I have paused to describe this painting because it is from this very work that the novel’s various narrative threads branch out. It is as though we were faced with a succession of metaphors in which the signs of the painting, from the scene itself to the physical spaces, manifest within the plot and characters. As is typical of Haruki, many implausible, indecipherable, and heavily symbolic events occur: so many and of such nature that the reader, and alongside him the modest painter, finds himself trapped in a snare of metaphors. How can one return to reality and find oneself? The scene in the painting must come to life: before Tomohiko—demented yet alert—the protagonist slays the elderly Commendatore, escapes through the trapdoor, journeys through a narrow, pitch-black passage, is aided by the white lady from the painting (the Blue Fairy or Beatrice?), saves himself, and emerges from a mysterious hole near a small Buddhist temple. A Dantean journey? Perhaps, yet the conclusion is not Paradise; it is the prosaic life of a modest painter. Perhaps the protagonist has freed himself from his own guilt by bringing balance to his existence, even if life remains like “a tightrope walker's wire.” This extremely long and muddled novel seems like the testament of an author who was unable to restrain himself. One has to wonder whether Haruki had a clear sense from the beginning of where he wanted to go, or if instead the world of ideas took over, causing the characters to evolve without ever truly defining themselves—remaining suspended in limbo—while events piled up just as they occurred to the author's mind, without purpose or direction. Throughout the narrative, the style remains invariably precise and detailed, as though the author sought to chronicle something that has precious little reality to it: a nineteenth-century-style novel of an oneiric vision. This contradiction emerges clearly in the way the author describes the work of the protagonist painter: meticulous, attentive, almost photographic; yet all his works remain unfinished, and their very inconclusiveness constitutes their allure. The narrative is underscored by the sound of opera and classical music—a paradoxical choice, considering how orderly and rational such music is, and therefore hardly congenial to a confused mind like the author's. Why not read it? It is extremely long and boring.

> How to accept remaining blind in order to be happy, how to turn one's back on oneself without facing one's own negation?... non does not restore grace to a rose by transplanting it into a pot, one denatures it; one believes one is embellishing the living room, yet in truth one does nothing but disfigure one's own garden . Amin, an Arab Israeli, is a brilliant surgeon, happily integrated into Tel Aviv's polite society. After a devastating bombing of a restaurant, in which numerous civilians die, among them many children, Amin discovers that the suicide bomber is his wife, Sihem, the woman who > cradled my tenderest years, adorned my plans with glittering garlands, filled my soul with gentle presences. I no longer find anything of her in me, nor even in my memories . How is it possible that his wife is a homicidal fanatic? For a few pages, the novel seems to take an intimate turn: the secrets concealed within marital relationships. Then, the narrative reclaims a more existential and social direction. Amin wants to know who persuaded his wife, certain that Sihem was brainwashed by someone. He journeys to the Occupied Territories, into the midst of the war between Palestine and Israel, which he had desperately sought to escape. As a terrorist tells him, > the good doctor lives beside a war, he just doesn't want to hear about it. He thinks his wife shouldn't worry about it either.... Well, the good doctor is wrong . Amin's dreams shatter against the ruthless realization that his wife acted of her own accord, because > she must have harboured hatred within herself all along, even before knowing me..... she carried inside her a wound so foul and atrocious that she was ashamed to confide it to me; the only way to be rid of it was to destroy herself along with it . Yet perhaps, far more rationally, the truth lies in what Sihem writes in her farewell letter: > what use is happiness when it is not shared. No child is safe without a homeland . The journey into the Occupied Territories is also, for Amin, a return to childhood, to his people. The narrative does not tell us whether Amin too becomes aware of his people's tragedy; we only know that he dies—accidentally or deliberately?—in a slaughter perpetrated by an Israeli drone to eliminate a religious leader. With great narrative skill, the novel opens and closes with the slaughter in which the protagonist meets his death. According to some critics, Amin's death, inexplicable within the plot of the story, serves as a metaphor for an endless conflict and the destruction of a people: the Palestinians. It is an overly simplistic interpretation for a complex novel, one that refuses to take a side, neither against nor in favour of the two warring peoples. This assessment is confirmed by the positive portrayal of certain Israeli characters, such as Amin's tender female friend, and the alternation of colloquial language with poetic and, for long stretches, sermonizing prose. The narrative pace is tight, the dialogue dense and effective, the Israeli milieu and its characters convincingly depicted. What jars, instead, are the political soliloquies, such as those of the religious leader and the terrorist chief, which ring false and conventional. The Palestinian setting likewise feels artificial. It is evident that the author feels far more at ease in an urban, Western-style environment. Why read it? It is a gripping read.

The impetus to read Biamonti came to me from a poem by Montale: *Riviere*. In this masterpiece, the Ligurian landscape serves as the occasion for memories, for regret, and also for new dreams. And Pietrabruna, too—the village perched between mountains and sea to which the protagonist returns—evokes conflicting emotions: > the hills trembled in contact with the vault of the sky, shaken by a dense, luminous blue. Yet there were lands that turned their backs to the sun, despondent (as a boy they had made him dream). The rays descended from the peaks without touching them. Lands in perpetual yearning . Edoardo is a ship captain who returns to his home, awaiting a new berth. Welcoming him are > landslides clinging to the hillside and olive groves inside luminous chasms... sea light (that) welded itself to the summits, to the ridges, all the way to Pietrabruna : a village always the same, «yet where was life, outside the sabre-slashes of the sky, outside the wind?». Waiting for him, too, is Clara, who for years has been waiting for Edoardo to settle down. Theirs is an unusual love between a rootless man (like so many sailors) and a woman who is only seemingly placid and resigned: > in her sinuous, bony face, of an irregular sweetness, restlessness and reverie harmonized . Clara is the quintessential Ligurian woman, forced to be independent, and remains throughout the novel a mysterious, inscrutable, multifaceted character. Edoardo, on the other hand, is straightforward: behind financial troubles, he conceals the urge to flee. And indeed, he accepts a perilous assignment. He must deliver a cargo of weapons to Bosnia. He finds himself in command of an old tub. Soon enough, the voyage turns out to be a trap, as they lose contact with the shipowner, and upon reaching their destination, Edoardo is forced to seek out the buyers alone, amidst snipers and clashes between rival factions. The Bosnian village may resemble Pietrabruna, yet «the hills with their white ridge were shadow blue where the sun did not strike». And the woman, too, whom he meets and accompanies, could be Clara, but she had «light, distant eyes... the marks of a withered sweetness». Could the Bosnian village, left unnamed, be the inverted mirror of Pietrabruna, and Edoardo’s journey, therefore, have taken place not across geographical space, but within his own soul? It is one interpretation, as the novel remains suspended in a final, hermetic reflection by Edoardo: > in every land lies the seed of death, it is plain to see in broad daylight..... there are bursts of sunlight on hanging lands . Biamonti possesses a markedly lyrical style of writing, better suited to poetry than to prose. When describing the landscapes and figures of his native Liguria, his style often finds a felicitous balance between narrative movement and the quest for words and consonances. The first part of the novel holds a remarkable charm, especially for anyone enamored of Liguria; in the second part, the writer loses momentum and harmony: one senses that he is out of his element. Then again, current events and history are not the author’s true concerns; he is instead entirely devoted to delving into his own world, into the relationship between the luminosity of the landscape and the torments of the conscience. Why read it? It is a splendid read, though one should not expect a compelling narrative plot.

Mario Soldati was defined as “the first, great media-man of Italian culture” (Aldo Grasso in *Corriere della Sera*, 2016). Indeed, he was a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, film director, and television author. His numerous novels (reviews can be read on this site: *A cena con il Commendatore*, *Lo smeraldo*, and *El Paseo dei Gracia*) reflect his vast experience as a cinematic author, both in style and in narrative content. For Soldati, each of us wears a mask, even without realizing it, because the disguise is part of our deepest consciousness; consequently, our relationships with others are ambiguous, often full of futile deceptions; we like to live as if in a dream, as though we were in a soap opera. In short, we live in a bubble. Unlike his other tales, this novel stems from an episode in the writer’s life that could well be real. Soldati, the narrator, meets an old friend, a modest actor whom he has not seen for many years. Enzo is in dire financial straits because his wife continues to lose substantial sums at the casino: he asks Soldati for work. Our writer attempts to find him a role in a television series, though the moment is hardly favorable as new executives have replaced the old ones with whom Soldati enjoyed an excellent rapport. To inform his friend of what he is doing, he travels to Bordighera, where Enzo lives with his wife. In doing so, Soldati finds himself ensnared in an intricate and ambiguous family dynamic: Enzo’s wife, once a beautiful woman, now obese and infirm, is jealous of her husband, whom she suspects of cheating on her with their maid; Giovanna, the maid, dominates both Enzo and his wife through her mysterious, seductive allure; and finally Enzo, who convincingly claims to love his wife yet plays the role of the unfaithful husband, blatantly attempting to conquer the elusive Giovanna, thereby exasperating his wife and driving her toward killing the maid. Why does Enzo pretend to betray his wife with Giovanna? And why do the others play along with the roles Enzo assigns them, as if on a theatrical stage, never interrupting this cruel and false soap opera? > Every man is, always, a bit of an actor,. (...) every human being must, sometimes, to feel alive, be able to imagine themselves a little . This novel met with great success upon its publication in 1970 and won the Premio Campiello that same year. In truth, the story is dull and trite; especially if approached from a psychological standpoint: the quality of the narrative falls far below that of Soldati’s other novels. What remain are the splendid descriptions, cinematic in their detail and colors. An example: > Giovanna is small, slender, sturdy, dark-haired. A strange, narrow face: dark, close-set eyes, thin and unpainted lips: a face with a closed, motionless, unfeeling expression, as if carved of stone. (...) She wore an amaranth velvet suit, rather vulgar in its elegance, and very loud. (...) She gazed at herself for a long time, admiring her reflection, pacing back and forth like a model, pulling and smoothing the jacket of the suit over her buttocks, turning once more to glance back over her shoulder. Why not read it? It pains one to say it: it is boring.

John Williams wrote three widely acclaimed novels: *Butcher's Crossing* in 1960, *Stoner* in 1965, and this biography of Augustus in 1972 (with this entry, all of his books have now been reviewed on this site). Williams is an exceptionally talented writer who continually reinvents his style, adapting it to the story and the characters. In this case, the author constructs the plot through letters written by various figures; Augustus himself intervenes in the first person only at the very end, allowing us to grasp key turning points—both political and personal—of his life from differing perspectives. It is an exquisite literary device, yet one that fragments the narrative and assumes the reader is already familiar, at least in broad strokes, with the complex events that led first to the Principate and later to the accession of Tiberius. Who was Octavian, later Augustus, in truth? When his great-uncle Caesar dies, naming him his heir, Octavian is an eighteen-year-old youth: he learns the news in Greece, where he is staying with his friends Maecenas, Agrippa, and Salvidienus Rufus. In his journal, the latter recounts how Octavian voices his uncertainties regarding the true loyalty of Caesar's legions and, turning to his companions, states that he will share his fears only with the three of them, > who are truly my friends, (...) a cold sorrow had settled upon him and pulled him away from us . It is as if the young Octavian had realized that youth was over and that upon him fell the grave burden of ending the civil wars and securing peace and prosperity for Rome: to accomplish this, he must become a shrewd and ruthless politician, relegating personal affection to the background and exploiting everything and everyone, even his oldest friends and his beloved daughter Julia. Paraphrasing the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Horace recounts Octavian's destiny. > His love was not a woman; his Eurydice was knowledge, a dream of the world, to which he sang his song. But the world of light that was his dream of knowledge was destroyed by a civil war; (...) and his dream vanished, as if evaporating, into the darkness of time and circumstance. He saw the world, and understood that he was alone, fatherless, propertyless, hopeless, without dreams..... It was only then that the gods gave him their golden lyre, and allowed him to play not as they willed, but as he himself desired . It is a magnificent synthesis of Octavian's destiny, elevating him to a singular and immortal role in history, pursuing an end to which everything is subordinated—even Julia's happiness. And it is here that we, too, venture into the darkness of the human soul. With a stroke of literary genius, Williams introduces Julia's journal on the island of Ponza, where she has been exiled. Julia’s sorrowful, resigned account is preceded by the gossip surrounding her dissolute life, almost as if to justify her father's dreadful decision. Yet one cannot help but feel sympathy for this still-young woman, who was forced to marry Agrippa, a man far older than she, and later the unsettling Tiberius. It may well be true that her father exiled her for her immoral conduct to spare her execution for treason against the state; what is certain is that Augustus's cold, cruel severity contrasts starkly with Julia’s gentle melancholy. These are exquisite pages that alone justify reading the novel: the fading of memories, rendered useless and bearing only grief, juxtaposed against the precision in the account of the encounter between Octavian and Julia, father and daughter. > His face was gaunt, and there were lines of weariness around his pale eyes; but in the uncertain light of the room, the face could have been that of the man I remembered from my childhood . Julia learns that the conspiracy has been uncovered by Tiberius, and her father can do nothing other than condemn her to safeguard his authority. > My child, he said, this has nothing to do with love. He turned away from me again and picked up some papers on the desk. (...) I have not seen my father since. I understand that he will (no longer) speak my name .   The elegance of the prose, the fictionalized yet masterly reconstruction of events that remain obscure to historians, the lexical richness, and the ability to capture the idiosyncrasies of the various figures (from Mark Antony to Cicero down to the minor players) are literary merits that dazzle the reader. In many reviews it is compared to Robert Graves's *I, Claudius*; yet it is an entirely different matter. Flitting superficially across the history and the dramatis personae, Williams fails to convey passion and mystery; the novel ends up being as detached and rigid as we imagine Octavian Augustus to have been. Why read it? It demands some effort, but Julia's diary is truly beautiful.

> Cipollino was the son of Cipollone and had seven brothers. (...) Decent folk, it must be said right away, though rather unlucky. What do you expect, when you are born an onion, tears come with the territory . Thus begins the book. In a few simple words, the author introduces the protagonist—Cipollino himself—the world of the novel, where the characters are fruit and vegetables, and the gentle irony that characterizes the entire tale. There are no humans, nor the typical figures of peasant life; with a stroke of genius, the author develops the narrative around the very foods we are constantly urged to eat in childhood and do so reluctantly. In this way, Rodari subverts the question: no moralizing for children; instead, the hated food becomes the protagonist of incredible, magnificent stories, offering an occasion to reflect upon freedom. What do Cipollino and these other extraordinary characters tell us? Freedom means fighting for an authentic life, free of superficial pretenses—a life in which what truly matters are friends, rather than social hierarchies, conventions, or deference to power. It is an invitation to be oneself, yet without affectation, leaving the child—and us adults—the pleasure of pure enjoyment. The story takes off from an act of abuse: Sor Zucchina has built himself a tiny house, where > the right hand is in the kitchen, the left hand is in the cellar, the legs are in the bedroom, and the head sticks out of the roof . Pomodoro wants to confiscate the little house, claiming it was built on the land of the Countess Cherries. Cipollino rebels, and from there the plot unfolds: the village folk (Mister Uvetta, Fagiolino, Pero Pera, and others) hide the little house with Sor Mirtillo, who "lived in a chestnut burr" and had posted a sign inviting the > gentlemen thieves, before entering kindly ring the bell . The narrative then introduces us to the Cherry Castle, where Ciliegino lives, a lonely and melancholic boy because, as Rodari writes, "oh, what an awful affliction it is to have no company." Cipollino and Ciliegino become friends—one among the lowliest of vegetables, the other among the most delectable of fruits. So much for social barriers! Together they fight to free their friends, who have since been thrown into prison, to save Sor Zucchina’s little house, and to defeat the story’s villains—yet without bitterness, almost with commiseration. The adventures are many, and they do not always turn out well. There are two minor characters who, more than others, highlight Rodari’s subtlety. Sor Pisello is the quintessential pettifogger, fearful and servile. Despite having been rescued by Cipollino, he betrays our friends to curry favor with the authorities: is he the archetypal Italian intellectual, ever ready to turn his coat depending on the whims of the powerful? Mister Carotino is a famous detective who, naturally, never uncovers a single thing. Whatever Mister Carotino says is repeated, yet amplified, by his faithful hound, Segugio; for instance: > We are in danger—Carotino noted, without batting an eye, reaching for his butterfly net—We are in great, great danger—echoed the dog . If we think of the police investigations in our own country, which often lead to nothing while generating an immense clamor, perhaps Rodari intended to demystify the police apparatus, as if to say: do not be afraid, they are all just like Carotino! In the end, the good triumph, but above all, the world is turned on its head. > Events rush headlong and we let them rush: days tumble one upon the other like sheets from a calendar, weeks pass seven by seven, and we have no time to see anything at all, just like when at the cinema the projector goes wild, and no sooner does it slow down enough for us to finally see what is happening than everything has changed. With Rodari, it is easy to fall into the trap of hunting for hidden meanings in his characters and stories; yet one is inexorably driven in this direction because the world he depicts is all too similar to our own, all too often mirroring the mechanisms of our society—absurdly oppressive and unjust. Could the world be anything other than a vast matryoshka doll, in which every social and ethical distortion is replicated across all tiers of nature? What pulls us back from this bitter conclusion, reminding us that we are before a splendid children’s tale, is the narrative style: elegant, witty, seemingly simple, light yet profound. Words are Rodari’s true magic, so much so that only by being read aloud does the story acquire its full charm and its true meaning: a flight of imagination, of fantasy where anything is possible, where even onions have a soul. Why read it? Thought-provoking, delightful, intoxicating.

The book collects three novels featuring Héctor Belascoarán as their protagonist. The first novel, *Days of Combat* (1986), recounts the protagonist’s life transformation: from a married engineer and corporate executive to a detective searching for clients and, on his own initiative, hunting down a serial strangler. In reality, the hunt for the strangler is a way to find himself, to escape a life that had sunk > slowly into the oblivion of an accelerated race, a car race in which he competed without even knowing it, a marathon of assholes running the prescribed forty-two kilometers along roads that weren't even recently paved . It is ostensibly a "noir" novel, but in truth an introspective one—in some ways a journey of liberation from a bourgeois, respectable existence that had grown far too constricting. And in the background, the true subject of the novels already emerges: Mexico, and Mexico City in particular—a violent city that "feeds on carrion." In the second novel, *The Ghost of Zapata* (1992), both the writer and the protagonist have hit their stride. The narrative pace has quickened, the prose has become taut and lean, and Héctor is now a detective taking on an unjust society where everyone, starting with the police, is corrupt and violent. The protagonist is dragged against his will into three cases: searching for Emiliano Zapata, who is rumored to still be alive; investigating the murder of a high-ranking corporate executive in the midst of a bitter union dispute; and preventing a teenage girl from committing suicide. And Héctor carries out these tasks > with the desire to believe anything, eager to see Zapata, who by now must have been ninety-seven, burst galloping onto the ring road atop a white horse, amid a hail of bullets . In the third novel, *Some Clouds* (1992), Héctor is resting on a Caribbean island when he spots his sister and realizes that > changes were coming and he was tired, listless, disheveled, unkempt, craving beers, boleros, and the sound of the ebb and flow of the waves. He wanted his solitary palm tree, the sunsets, and the occasional round, good-natured cloud in the sky . His sense of justice proves stronger than his indolence, and he finds himself entangled in a story of syndicates, crime, and corrupt cops against whom he must fight like a lone warrior. The reference point is undoubtedly Raymond Chandler, even if Héctor lacks Marlowe’s cynicism. Above all, he plays the solitary, righteous detective unassumingly, almost by accident. > "Listen, old Paco," Héctor said, stubbing out his last Delicado in the tin ashtray, "I'm not really such a great detective. The only certain thing is that, not knowing how to write stories, I butt into other people's. Me alone, against the system—give me a break! I've been working on my aim for five years, and with a .38 I couldn't hit an elephant at ten meters. I'm crippled, when it rains I limp, yesterday I found my first gray hairs, and I'm lonelier than a stray dog. I get pissed off just like you do, it eats away at me thinking about what this nation has come to. I'm as Mexican as anyone else . What do you say to that now? I'm a detective because I like people." Why read it? The first novel is heavy going, but the other two are a pleasure to read. And above all, one appreciates the protagonist’s civic passion—free of rhetoric, just like that of any Mexican.

As soon as one begins reading Collodi’s book, the mind immediately turns to a masterpiece: Gianni Rodari’s *The Adventures of Cipollino*. To our sensibilities, Pinocchio’s tale feels moralistic, with an underlying theme seemingly remote from us: > today (though too late!) I have had to convince myself that to earn an honest penny one must know how to make it, either through the work of one's own hands or the wits of one's own head , so says the Parrot to Pinocchio in the Field of Miracles. How much more amusing and captivating is Rodari’s novel, which speaks of freedom, of the struggle against the powerful, of daring imagination! And yet, looking more closely, one realizes that *The Adventures of Pinocchio* and *The Adventures of Cipollino* address the very same subject: the world is upside down, and it must be set back on its feet, onto the right path. It is evident that Collodi’s tale is a *Bildungsroman*: a child, thick-headed enough to be a puppet, learns from life how to become an adult, discerning good from evil. Yet all the characters are truly singular, beginning with Geppetto, the generous and solicitous father. who wishes to fashion a "fine puppet" in order to > travel the world, to earn myself a crust of bread and a glass of wine , and rightly the hidden "little voice" comments: "Bravo, Polendina!". And what of the Fairy "with the azure hair", the loving, sorrowful mother! Why does she not help Pinocchio, leaving him instead in the dark wood, at the mercy of the assassins? Pinocchio faces his ordeals alone—ordeals he himself brings about through his refusal to abide by social norms: instead of going to school, he goes off with the puppeteer; driven by greed, he allows himself to be duped by the Fox and the Cat; he forgets Geppetto in his destitution; he promises to be diligent only to forget it all to run with the other scamps; and thus he lands in prison, narrowly escapes being fried in a pan, and eventually lets himself be hoodwinked into going to the Land of Toys, turning into a donkey. What is it that redeems him? Good deeds. When the fierce dog Alidoro, who had chased him in order to devour him, is about to drown, after a moment's hesitation Pinocchio saves him: for indeed, > his father had told him many a time that one never loses by doing a good deed . And then, as if by magic, the various characters, the animals themselves, reveal themselves to be generous and obliging. When Pinocchio, searching for Geppetto, is swallowed by the terrible Dogfish, and there in the depths of the enormous stomach finds his "dear papa", it is a Tuna who helps them escape the mouth of the great beast: and > Pinocchio (...) planted a most affectionate kiss upon its mouth. At this display of spontaneous, heartfelt tenderness, the poor Tuna, unaccustomed to such things, was so moved that (...) he plunged his head back under the water and vanished . How it came about that Carlo Lorenzini, the real Collodi, > an implacable provincial, mythically lazy, moody and unpredictable , decided to write *The Adventures of Pinocchio* is a question best left to scholars. Perhaps because, as he wrote in the sketch *A Letter to Fanfulla*, "being born Tuscan is a misfortune that can happen to anyone." And it is precisely this provincial Tuscan character that breathes life and modernity into a novel that would otherwise be prudish and dull. Far removed from lofty, formal Italian, the language infuses the tale with vigor and brio: Pinocchio is a rogue, evoking every child in the world—their yearning for play and amusement, their naive openness to others, their reluctance to be hemmed in by the tedious social rules of adults. All of this makes the tale of Pinocchio timeless, transcending its nineteenth-century setting. Why read it? It is the story of the child we once were.

The novel, published under the pseudonym Guido Landucci, is an adaptation of one of the earliest Western-genre tales, written in 1837: *Nick of the Woods: A Tale of Kentucky* by Robert Montgomery Bird. Perhaps for this reason, the novel exhibits several unique traits compared to Salgari’s typical approach. The author’s traditional formula is as follows: a hero, often defrauded of his wealth and social standing, is flanked by supporting characters whose role is to lighten the protagonist's profile, which is most often rigid and unyielding. At times, the author introduces disconcerting and ambiguous elements: as in *La Stella dell'Araucanìa*, where a nobleman turns cannibal through his contact with savages, corroborating the dark side inherent in each of us, even the civilized. In *Avventure fra le pellirosse*, the paradigm shifts: a secondary character reveals himself to be the protagonist, while the narrative—dense with dialogue, as usual—is interspersed with accounts of gruesome, bloody massacres perpetrated by redskins; an element in stark contrast with Salgari’s naive anti-colonialism, which routinely championed oppressed peoples. Let us turn to the plot. Two young people, Rodolfo and Mary, arrive in Texas in search of gold: they have been stripped of the inheritance of an exceedingly wealthy uncle, whose will was contested by the guardian of a young boy named as heir. From the outset, it is evident that the two youths have no grasp of the perils awaiting them: a vast, desolate prairie that turns into dense thickets near the Pecos River—a river that must be crossed if one hopes to reach the areas rumored to harbor gold. Joining the expedition are other characters worth noting: Telie, a young woman desperate to find her father who was abducted by Indians, and Morton the Bloodthirsty, accompanied by his inseparable little dog. He is a Quaker, regarded as “the most inoffensive man on the plain,” armed with an ancient, “almost” ruined rifle and a knife that “had probably never left its sheath to slay an Indian.” Roaming the plains alongside the savage redskins is Scibellok, believed by the Indians to be an infernal spirit: he kills them by crushing their skulls, leaving a cross carved into their chests as his signature mark. We find ourselves squarely in the territory of the classic English Gothic novel! Rodolfo is a valiant youth, yet utterly incapable of leading the small party; indeed, after various misadventures, the two girls, Mary and Telie, are kidnapped by the Indians. In an attempt to rescue them, Rodolfo is taken prisoner as well. At this juncture, we discover that Telie’s father has become an Indian chief and, worse still, is in the pay of the treacherous guardian: the latter intends to marry Mary and murder Rodolfo, since the genuine will names the two youths as the rightful heirs. Morton, too, is captured. > The Black Vulture is not accustomed to sparing his prisoners. I love slaughter, and I do not disdain drinking the blood of white men. (...) Morton (...) had been seized by a nervous trembling so violent that he could no longer stand on his feet. Whether it was the shock, fatigue, or something else, the trembling had turned into a convulsive seizure . The Black Vulture believes Morton to be a great sorcerer capable of leading him to Scibellok, the exterminator of the redskins. Do you want to know the ending? I will not spoil the surprise; suffice it to say that it all concludes with a happy ending. The novel is a miscellany, effectively blending Salgari’s style—typically rational and mechanistic—with Montgomery Bird’s redundant, brooding Gothicism. Morton is the protagonist, and in his figure pacifism and hatred, communal belonging and isolation, strength and fragility converge: conflicting sentiments that cannot coexist for long, foreshadowing a terrifying and harrowing end. There is also a peculiar sidekick: a little white dog—a novelty for Salgari—the faithful companion of a recluse and an extraordinary guide across the vast prairie. Furthermore, all the ingredients that make Salgari so beloved are present: the relentless succession of adventures, the surprises, the cliffhanger chapter endings heralding further action, the compulsive urge to read on. The Italian author does not linger; he charges straight ahead with his brisk, gripping narrative pace. Why read it? It is not entirely Salgari’s own creation, but it is masterfully adapted and an absolute pleasure to read.

Kate lives in Dublin and is a middle-aged university lecturer. One day, she finds her husband dead in the bathroom and discovers herself buried in debt, hounded by creditors and banks. The man with whom she shared most of her life in an increasingly weary relationship was a scoundrel. > I wake up this morning with an awful headache, my new man had just left me a room and an empty bed . It is Bessie Smith's empty bed blues, a blues that echoes in Kate's mind with “the sax groaning in the background” and Bessie’s throaty, sensual voice. This state of stunned despair seems to offer no way out, until a young woman places a set of keys in her hand. From here unfolds a story of multiple narrative threads. Kate tracks down the house to which these keys belong: an apartment above Camogli, where “the sea eats away the land” and where Kate can see > the gleaming smoothness of newly tumbled stones beneath the cliffs of the Portofino sea, mica crystals sparkling in the winter sun, (...) the looming tenement blocks, the medieval arch, the old village, the little bars and restaurants bathed in pale golden sunlight, thin as cardboard silhouettes, (...) capable of radiating enough light and warmth to warm a soul or a heart. Perhaps even mine. In my head echoes the voice of change. Along with the splendid Ligurian harbor, Kate falls in love with Italian—with its musicality, but also its grammatical forms, which seem to reflect our own existence, > so uncertain or so complex that even the verb we use to express it must leap frenetically between different forms and even different roots . There is pleasure in addressing her husband's mistress as a *zoccola*, a sewer rat, only to discover that the masculine ending of the word carries many other meanings, but never that of a prostitute. In short, in Italian only a loose woman is a sewer rat—a subtle, ironic observation that perhaps only a non-Italian could make, accustomed as we so often are to taking the sexist usage of certain words for granted. Kate then meets Anna, an elderly neighbor with whom she forms an increasingly intimate friendship. In sketching this character, the author notes having drawn on Rossana Rossanda; what is certain is that this figure allows Wall to voice his own leftist sensibilities, mirroring himself in the image of a woman born out of the communist and activist traditions of Italian political culture. Yet an image it remains: a stereotype that impedes any genuine deepening of a singular friendship between a middle-aged, lonely, and betrayed Irish woman and an elderly, cultured lady still haunted by abandonment and nostalgia. Thus, the novel's core theme, “this headlong descent into Italy,” is not enriched by the psychological depth of an encounter, but is instead weighed down by reflections far too predictable to evoke wonder or stir our imagination. > Is it true that we can shed our lives just as snakes shed their skin? Or are we, on the contrary, tethered to old places and past times by invisible cables that bind us and thwart our every move . Wall answers these questions through Kate's journey, as she becomes a resident of Camogli and an adoptive Italian. It is striking that this question is posed on Bloomsday. Here emerges a defining trait of Wall's narrative: deceptively plain and straightforward, far removed from the stereotypically Irish idiom, yet replete with profound and evocative philosophical and literary reflections, the latter framed by quotations from Joyce's *Ulysses*. Could it be that the epiphany of the great Irish writer, in its apparent prosaicness, expresses a quest for renewal that remains too steeped in the Dublin world to ever truly succeed? The prose flows smoothly and pleasantly, marred only by an overreliance on rhetorical questions—a literary device that injects movement into the narrative but fractures and weighs down the discourse. The landscape and people of Camogli are depicted with immense affection and communicative vigor; the observations on the Italian language are engaging and gently wry. The plot, however, is fragile and ultimately unravels, and it is a pity that the psychological dimensions of the relationship between these two women—so divergent in history and culture—were not probed more deeply. Why read it? It is the chronicle of falling in love with a place and a language.

The year is 1971, in China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Two youths are sent for re-education to a remote mountain village. One is the narrator, while the other is his friend Luo. Unquestionably, a critique of the Communist regime runs through the entire novel—a critique mounted with irony and lightness, yet no less incisive for it. Were it confined to recounting how two charming and unfortunate city boys survived in an environment so far removed from their social and cultural origins, the book would remain trapped within its historically dated dimension; in truth, the author engages with the universal theme of the book as self-discovery and an instrument of emancipation. The two friends cross paths with a young woman, the daughter of the local tailor. > When she bent over the sewing machine, the gleaming metal base reflected the neckline of her white blouse, her oval face, and the sparkle in her eyes, undoubtedly the finest in the district . Sophisticated and elegant, “in a place where nearly everyone went barefoot,” the Little Seamstress captivates the boys, lending meaning to their wretched existence. Another event intervenes to alter the destiny of the two friends, and of the Little Seamstress: the discovery of a trunk containing the great masterpieces of French literature, from Balzac to Flaubert. They come into possession of the books and devour them ravenously. > Leafing through them with my fingertips made me feel as if my fragile hands were touching human lives . It is a wondrous yet insidious sensation, for immersing oneself in human nature through the pen of the great nineteenth-century writers will overwhelm the young men and transform the Little Chinese Seamstress. “She will no longer be a simple mountain girl.” In Luo, now her lover, there arises something akin to a delusion of omnipotence: the ability to govern the cultural maturation of the Little Seamstress. Is that possible? > She wants to go to the city, (the father) said. She mentioned Balzac. (...) She said she learned one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond any price . Was it perhaps better to have left her in ignorance? For the most part, the novel follows a linear plot, rich in delightful, surprising, and joyful episodes. It is as if the two friends were revelling in it: they disguise themselves, for instance, as Mao to coax the lyrics of folk songs from a wild old mountaineer and hand them over to the owner of the books in exchange for several novels—a scheme crowned with success, yet ultimately doomed because the songs are brazenly erotic, and thus at odds with socialist morality. At a certain point, the narrative shifts tone, turning somber and oppressive. Two metaphors emerge—the precipice and the raven—omens of the disaster toward which the two friends are hurtling (in Chinese culture, oracles bear fundamental significance, revealing as they do “the Way of Heaven”). Later, the narrator steps back to make way for the accounts of other characters: the old mountaineer, Luo, and the Little Seamstress. It is a lyrical juncture, detached from the narrative approach maintained until then. It is as though the narrator has definitively accepted a subservient role; nevertheless, we perceive that he too is traversing his own path toward an understanding of femininity. And finally, we witness the resigned, desperate account of the Little Seamstress’s abortion, as she makes her choices unbeknownst to Luo, who impregnated her. It is as though a woman’s freedom always demands a painful act. The writing is elegant, adept at orchestrating diverse lexical and syntactic registers. Fluid, spirited, effervescent, the author manages never to dissipate the narrative drive despite engaging with numerous themes, many of which overlap and even clash. He can steer a steady course through to the end—surprising and unsettling—because the story revolves around the mysterious allure of the book. Why read it? It is a gem!

Nineteenth-century fiction holds an enduring fascination, often inviting modern reinterpretations. Such is the case with *The French Nursemaid*, which rewrites a great classic novel: Charlotte Brontë's *Jane Eyre*. Here, the protagonist is a young French girl. The novel falls essentially into two parts. The first is set in Paris. Sophie is an impoverished child who lost her father during the glorious days of 1830, which brought Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, to power. Through workers’ mutual aid societies, Sophie learned to read and write, advancing from a “Bear” to a “Monkey”—terms that, in the vernacular of printshop laborers, distinguish the illiterate, fit only for manual tasks, from those educated enough to be entrusted with typesetting. Reading great novels, newspapers, and periodicals secures Sophie a social role within her modest community and, above all, fires her imagination while elevating her ideals and aspirations. This is the finest portion of the book, as the author diverges from much nineteenth-century fiction by embracing a realist, Zolaesque approach rather than a pious, sentimental one. Sophie loses her mother as well, but fortuitously finds shelter with a celebrated actress, Céline, who is married—or rather, believes herself married—to the villainous Edward Rochester. Sophie becomes both nursemaid and companion to Adèle, the couple’s daughter. In Céline’s household, Sophie meets a Black youth, Tùssi, and Céline’s godfather, an elderly French Enlightenment thinker. The author uses this eccentric aristocrat to articulate her ideal school: one where learning is inquiry, open equally to rich and poor without class distinction. Because Tùssi is still legally an enslaved person, this also provides an occasion to address slavery and colonial conditions, though it must be noted that this theme, which tormented the entire nineteenth century, is handled superficially, striking a forced and discordant note throughout the novel. Céline’s fortunes, and by extension Sophie’s, unravel abruptly upon the godfather’s death: grasping relatives have Céline imprisoned and turn Sophie and Adèle out into the street. Tùssi is forced into domestic servitude with one of the relatives. One might expect the wealthy Rochester to intervene; instead, this callous and self-absorbed man reveals that his marriage to Céline was an orchestrated sham and carries Adèle off, even as he disowns her as his daughter. In the second part, the setting shifts to England and the somber manor of Thornfield. Sophie manages to follow Adèle, securing employment as her French nursemaid by pretending not to understand English. This device allows her to recount, from her own vantage point, the narrative of Charlotte Brontë’s masterwork. Needless to say, the story draws to a happy ending for our protagonists, who eventually reunite in France, their fortunes restored once Céline claims the legitimate inheritance left by her godfather. A distinctive feature of the novel is its narrative structure. In the first part, the letters Sophie and Tùssi write to Céline, already behind bars, are juxtaposed with a third-person account of Sophie’s circumstances up to her departure for England. It is a device that enlivens the prose, effectively balancing three viewpoints: the authorial voice and the inner reflections of the two main characters. In the second part, the epistolary mode takes precedence. The correspondence between Sophie and Tùssi chronicles the happenings at Thornfield. It must be said, however, that this narrative device becomes repetitive and dull, not least because the letters possess so little intimacy or genuine emotion. Confronted with detached, formal accounts of the plot, the reader is left disappointed, expecting the two protagonists to probe their feelings and finally declare the love of which we are certain from the outset. In the final pages, Sophie assumes the role of first-person narrator, yet the text never rises above a perfunctory chronicle of events. The novel is plainly an amalgamation of nineteenth-century narrative conventions. The reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s work is trite, mirroring an overly romanticized and conventional reading of *Jane Eyre*. What weighs the story down most heavily is a sluggish narrative pace, a dearth of action, and an absence of psychological depth in the characters. An encouraging start soon gives way to mounting tedium. Why not read it? It is long and boring.

All too often we forget the importance of places for our lives, for the shaping of our feelings, for the transmission of an individual and collective memory. As Paolo Casadio observes, walls, objects, and landscapes have the task of bearing witness to the past, of making it outlive ourselves, even if > walls know, but they can never say anything, only bear such a heavy burden in their mute immobility . At times they are not well-known or particularly distinguished sites; they are “non-places,” like the decommissioned station of Fornello on the Florence–Faenza railway line. It is with a “knot of anguish” that Lucia, wife of Giovannino, the new stationmaster, observes it: > that place overlooking the viaduct, that opening of trees and broom around the station, that drop behind the building which could conceal a fissure or a torrent, those marl stratifications that surfaced powerfully amid the garrigue, reflected back to her the image of an exile, the feeling of an invincible hostility . These are the years between 1935 and 1943, and yet, perhaps out of some dark premonition and a naturally fearful disposition, Giovannino experiences this isolation as a shield against the outside world. > Mount Castelpotente watched over the valley, and that mountain had stood there ever since the seabed had risen to form the Apennines. Nothing would happen. And nothing will ever happen, stationmaster. We, here, are forgotten. So spoke the blind man of Piandolci, like an ancient seer. Fornello and the small family—Lucia and Giovannino with the young Romeo—stand as a metaphor for Italian familism, for a life strategy that encloses everything within the realm of affection and familiar, unchanging surroundings; yet we know this to be an illusion, a vain and dangerous hope. With a slow, dreamy rhythm, the novel traces little Romeo’s childhood: the mountain environment, the village school with teachers and classmates unimaginable to us city dwellers, the relationships with peasant families, distant in space yet close in heart. It is a wondrous world for a child, where the few dangers fall within the eternal order of things and events. Nature is ultimately a friend, even when the blizzard rages, or the fields, paths, and houses are buried under snow. Everything changes when the most terrible tragedy of the Second World War bursts onto the scene: the deportation of the Jews. A train laden with poor souls destined for death halts for a night at the small Fornello station. They are permitted to disembark, sleep, and take refreshment with Lucia and Giovannino. Romeo befriends a little girl: a childish infatuation that could have a tragic outcome. > He does not yet know it, but nothing, after all, has any meaning other than what we assign to it, since everything disappears. He has truly grown up, the experience having served as a kind of initiatory ordeal: he has entered the land of loss and regret, and there is nothing more adult than grasping their irremediability and their meaning. And meaning, in that December of 1943, is truly difficult to find . It is a novel about childhood, underpinned by a haunting question for us adults: is it possible to be children? No, if even in an isolated Apennine village a child cannot grow up in peace. It would seem that the blame for this existential unhappiness lies entirely with an outside world gone mad, that it is the responsibility of others, against whom familial affection, friendships, and a benign nature are utterly powerless. Is this truly so? We cannot reveal the ending; we can say, along with the author, that we are all powerless > to alter the course of things, to neutralize the hostile relentlessness of fate, which so often turns into unappealable verdicts . And nothing remains but > the embrace, involvement, meager consolation, (...) communion in sorrow. The fundamental merit of the novel lies in its writing—perhaps somewhat unfashionable in its classicizing Italian, yet so elegant and refined as to satisfy a nostalgia for fine language. What is lacking, unfortunately, is the plot: the narrative pacing unfolds without surprises, except in the final pages: a long wait that is not redeemed by the characters, who are too sketchily drawn, nor by the description of the Apennine setting; and this latter proves a bitter disappointment—the failure to convey the magical, ancient atmosphere of a landscape and a society that have now vanished. Why read it? Beautiful, even if a bit dull.

Gasparre lives on an island and is the son of a weigher. He excels at school, particularly in Latin, and moves to Turin with his mother to pursue his studies. At high school, he soon realizes that the teachers themselves demand conformity and integration, regarding him with apprehension as a student who is “too good.” Mediocrity is the hallmark of the school system, and Gasparre’s life is defined precisely by his fraught adjustment to this prevailing social value. Disillusioned, he earns a law degree but opens a bar, implicitly rejecting culture and formal education. Yet, in plants, he finds an outlet for his quest for freedom and self-expression, turning his home into a woodland. The opening of the book is thoroughly engaging: the young student’s experiences, the discovery of the school and the metropolis, the encounters with his peers, and the struggle to be accepted. It is a delicate telling of a story that could belong to any young person. The style is linear and simple, highly effective. Then the book veers toward the paradoxical, toward an escape into a New Age ethos—that of salvation through nature—which, though the author may not realize it, is itself a token of conformity. The style, too, grows heavier, and the rhythm becomes prolix.

Barriera is a suburb of Turin roughly two kilometers from the city center: once a working-class town, now a multiethnic neighborhood rife with petty crime and drug dealing. > Barriera never changes. (...) Families go to the supermarket or the shopping mall. The old folks to the cemetery. The poor to the flea market. The Chinese to their shops. The Senegalese pushers to their corners. Nigerian and Moldovan prostitutes dividing up the rest. Here, all you can ever become is a label they’ve slapped on you. A label you can’t shake off . If in *Il lato oscuro della Luna* (see the review on this site), Marco Magnone and Fabio Gedda recounted an ill-fated love story between two teenagers in a Berlin still divided by the Wall, here the core of the narrative is the relationship between two brothers: Malik, the elder, freshly released from prison, "carries wounds that don’t have time to scar over, they just kill you"; Yasin is gentle, slender, and slightly built, completely different from his brother; yet Malik > was the superhero. Mine. Even when he ended up inside. Even when, after getting out, he walked out of the house without saying a word. That’s why when he offered for me to go live with him, start over from scratch, together, I fell for it right away. Because it was him and me again. Playing piggyback. Fighting the bad guys. But now instead . Malik has become a drug dealer, peddling a dangerous synthetic drug on behalf of a Nigerian criminal organization; in doing so, he has caused the death of a girl with whom Yasin shared his first romance. "You killed her, (...) with those damn pills," Yasin shouts, > Now it’s my turn to step toward him. And raise my voice against him, for the first time in my life . Yasin pleads with his brother to go to the police to report the criminal syndicates he works for. It would be too neat if Malik actually went to the police; the culture of violence is too deeply ingrained in him to ever put his faith in the law. The narrative structure mirrors the one adopted in the previous novel: the events are recounted by both brothers in dedicated, alternating chapters. The story is thus observed from differing points of view, yet it all too often turns out repetitive and fragmented, losing any sense of the overarching whole. Moreover, violence is the defining hallmark of this book; at times, Castagna and Magnone seem fond of lingering over brutal scenes where the strongest always prevails—one need only think of the boxing bouts and the gym milieu, populated by brawling yet valiant characters presented in an almost edifying light. While in *Il lato oscuro della Luna* a sense of melancholic sweetness prevailed, however devoid of a future, here no hope remains, and these adolescents stand before the void: Barriera is a metaphor for our present day, > nothing but the damn cold biting hard. And the silhouettes of abandoned factories looming here and there as if out of thin air . The prose is characterized by short sentences that leave little room for depicting the setting and the characters; while this approach reflects the starkness of the story, it does little to deepen the tragedy of Malik and Yasin and their shattered brotherhood. The extensive use of full stops and frequent verbless clauses makes for an easier read, clearly targeted at young adults, but it impoverishes the language—and, it must be said, not everyone is Cesare Pavese (see the review of *La casa in collina* on this site). Why skip it? Fragmentary and superficial

The novel is largely set in Paris during the 1880s, the period of the Third Republic following the fall of Napoleon III’s Empire. France, governed by an unscrupulous and corrupt political class, is embarking on its colonial adventure with the conquest of North Africa. Georges Duroy is a young man > tall, well-built, fair, with a reddish-tinged chestnut blondness, upturned moustaches that seemed to foam upon his lips... he looked remarkably like the worst rogue of popular romance . He is a young man from the provinces who has arrived in Paris without any precise aim, save for the allure of > places where _filles publiques_ swarmed, their dance halls, their cafés, their streets; he loved to follow them, speak to them, use familiar address, breathe in their violent perfumes . In short, he is a good-looking fellow, shallow and conceited, who will rightly come to be nicknamed Bel-Ami. Penniless, he can do little more than drift with the crowd until he happens upon a former comrade from his military service, Forestier, who has become the political editor of the newspaper _La Vie française_, owned by Monsieur Walter, an ambitious social climber who entwines business and politics, weaponising the press for his own, often illicit, ends. His friend secures him a post at the newspaper, and thus, despite himself, the young man launches into a journalistic career. Maupassant depicts with subtle irony this nascent world of the press, already by that time a compliant instrument in games of power. Duroy’s swift indoctrination enlightens the young man as to the true nature of journalism. One day, he is dispatched alongside a more seasoned colleague to interview several ambassadors. The two stop at a café; after all, there is no need to gather actual news—it suffices to construct it from secondhand information, even inventing it if necessary, and to cobble together with minimal effort an article containing precisely what the master desires. Are we speaking of nineteenth-century France or of contemporary Italy? Moving in Forestier’s social circle allows the young man to meet two women who will prove pivotal to his Parisian fortunes: Clotilde, "a little brunette, of the sort one calls pretty dark-haired women," and Madeleine, Forestier’s wife. The former shares Duroy’s tastes: she loves pleasure, is unpretentious, and takes life as it comes. She soon becomes Duroy’s ideal mistress, the only woman in whose presence he feels truly at ease and for whom he feels genuine sexual attraction, perhaps because Clotilde is somewhat of a _fille publique_. Madeleine is a modern, independent woman who relishes meddling in political and financial intrigues. As a woman, she cannot expect to play a leading role in the public sphere; she operates instead from behind the scenes through her men—her husband (a mediocre sort), her powerful lover, and Duroy himself, who allows himself to be steered, even as he chafes at her intellectual superiority. For Bel-Ami is vain and frivolous, yet the acute awareness of his own intellectual and moral inferiority breeds in him a vengeful resentment toward the very people from whom he receives aid—often crucial aid—for his career. Upon Forestier’s death, Duroy marries Madeleine; their relationship resembles a business partnership far more than a conjugal bond. Bel-Ami knows full well that Madeleine has several lovers (all men of prominence and power), but he cares little, not least because he too reaps tangible benefits from his wife’s connections: confidential intelligence, money, and honours. Yet he consistently harbours a certain bitterness and disdain toward Madeleine, who endures it patiently, perhaps out of genuine affection for the young man. Out of pure caprice and vanity, Duroy also seduces Madame Walter, the wife of the newspaper’s proprietor; she proves, however, to be a tiresome mistress, having fallen genuinely in love with him and being plagued by guilt over betraying her religious and moral values. How curious—a sincere person in a world of artifice! Life suspended between Clotilde’s eroticism and Madeleine’s intellect might have carried on placidly enough—setting aside the tedium of his liaison with Madame Walter—were it not for Duroy’s decision to marry the newspaper proprietor’s young daughter (and thus Madame Walter’s child). He must rid himself of his wife, and so he arranges for Madeleine to be caught in flagrant adultery, thereby securing a divorce. He then succeeds in marrying the young and wealthy Walter girl, once again through deceit: he persuades the girl (not yet eighteen) to elope with him, creating the necessary pretext for a shotgun wedding. Has Duroy achieved his ends: power, wealth, success? In reality, Bel-Ami’s exploits—the betrayals, the ignominious acts, the abused affections—do not stem from the pursuit of grand ambitions: the young man seeks merely the gratification of his vanity. On the day of his lavish wedding, Duroy > walked slowly down the high steps between two rows of spectators. Yet he saw no one: his thoughts drifted back to the past, and before his eyes, dazzled by the blinding sun, hovered the image of Madame de Marelle (Clotilde), rearranging before the mirror the curls upon her temples, which were always dishevelled when she rose from bed The book may be regarded as a realist novel, insofar as it portrays, with a touch both light and brutal, Parisian high society, power struggles, the role of the press, the enchantment of the boulevards, and even emergent artistic currents. It is a period of monumental upheaval, cultural as well, yet an atmosphere of vacuity pervades the narrative. The social milieu, much like certain existential themes (death, for instance), serves merely as a backdrop to Duroy’s transformation into Bel-Ami, and thence into the wealthy son-in-law of a powerful bourgeois grandee. The young man slips down a moral slope, occasionally feeling revulsion at his own deeds, only to shrug off these fleeting qualms. He is embarrassed when Clotilde suggests he meet her husband—with whom the young man will subsequently become fast friends. When Madeleine inherits a substantial sum from a lover, the young man initially refuses with righteous indignation, as accepting would lay bare his wife’s liaison with the man; yet he soon convinces himself—and seeks to convince Madeleine—that if he pockets half the estate, appearances are preserved, and all is well. It has been called the novel of money, of the press, of politics and careerism; in truth, it is the book of vacuity. And it is noteworthy, whether intentional or not, that it falls to two women (the female sex being a mere instrument for Bel-Ami) to tear through this veneer of bourgeois morality. It falls to Clotilde to fling the truth in his face: > you deceive everyone, you exploit everyone, you take money and pleasure from everyone, and you expect me to treat you like an honest man? Yet what truly enrages him is his mistress’s accusation that he bedded the proprietor’s wealthy daughter before marriage—a girl he had, in fact, respected (out of vanity? or a genuine sense of honour?). "He could endure anything, but this falsehood drove him to distraction." The question remains, then, whether Bel-Ami is entirely incapable of decent feeling, or whether he is fundamentally swept along by circumstance. It falls next to Madeleine to prove that a path through life can be forged beyond the mere chase of petty gratifications. Unlike Bel-Ami, Madeleine possesses a project of her own: to act as a mentor to men, thereby redressing the subjugation of women in nineteenth-century bourgeois society. The greatest virtue of the book lies in the writing of _Bel-Ami_. Maupassant conjures a muted, realistic atmosphere across his settings, admirably capturing the spirit of nineteenth-century Parisian society. His descriptions often seem rendered in pastel, reminiscent of Degas’s portraits. His description, for instance, of the hotel room where Madeleine is caught with her lover succeeds, in just a few strokes, in evoking that sense of the vulgar and the drab one expects from an adulterous rendezvous (within nineteenth-century bourgeois culture): > it was an ordinary hotel room with standard furnishings, where hung that hateful, stale smell peculiar to hotel bedrooms—a smell that emanated from the curtains, the brasses, the walls, the chairs; the smell of all those who had slept or lived, for a day or six months, in this public lodging, leaving behind a trace of their scent, that human scent which, blending with those that had gone before, formed over time a confused, sweet, and intolerable stench, identical in all such places . Why read it? It is a remarkably modern work in its milieu and its characters. The prose is both pleasurable and refined.

Imagine a Martian sent to Earth to understand what Humans are doing: whether war is to be expected or if we may hope for peace, which would allow interstellar commerce to continue. On the one hand, this visitor, bewildered yet indifferent (Earthlings' problems, after all!), would glean only a muddled impression; on the other, he might be an inquisitive traveler, somewhat horrified by our squalor and somewhat captivated by ancient monuments and beautiful women. Poised between metaphor and history, Barbero recounts the experiences of an American gentleman, Mr. Robert Pyle, traveling through the Prussia of 1806, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, tasked with sending weekly dispatches to the United States ambassador in London. The first evident reality is that, traveling from Amsterdam to Berlin, he constantly encounters so many borders—some within Prussia itself—as to suggest that > the geography of European states resembles a puzzle left unfinished by a petulant child rather than a product of human reason, and it is hardly surprising that their politics should be guided above all else by fear of their neighbors. Could he be speaking of our own Europe? And then, with > that freedom the traveler enjoys to choose the roads to take, the dishes to savor, the girls to caress , Mr. Pyle can > spend the afternoon in the palace of a grand seigneur conversing in French , and end > the evening in the inn's courtyard, listening to the landlady's chatter and watching the scullery maid wash dishes in the kitchen by lantern light. Our gentleman does not merely observe; whenever possible, he reaps the fruits of fleeting encounters—be they prostitutes, young maidservants, or peasant girls persuaded by a few thalers, or fleeting, Byronic liaisons with noblewomen of the Berlin court. The only thing that holds him back is the risk of contracting some venereal disease. There are other pleasant diversions: conversations with Prussian officers, > capable even of philosophical reflections , card games where our Pyle unfailingly loses a tidy sum of thalers, the elegant salons where French is spoken and one is either for the war or against it, yet always admiring Bonaparte. Our gentleman even manages to meet Fichte and Goethe—the former just as history of philosophy presents him, the latter disappointing: a garrulous drunkard. Is this the mission entrusted to him? Amid brothels, grueling travel between coaching inns, and long conversations, our Robert even manages to meet Prussian ministers, Frederick William III himself, and the drowsy sovereigns of the minor North German states, such as Hanover and Saxony. And when he has no news to report, no matter: it is enough to read the Parisian *Moniteur*, even days old, or fabricate supposed intelligence to be denied or corrected in the following dispatch. For Mr. Pyle, it is an exhausting yet ultimately pleasant journey; for us, a splendid portrait of early nineteenth-century Germany awaiting an inevitable war, for at stake is the pride of a military caste forged by Frederick the Great and the nascent nationalism of the German nation. What shatters this grand tour, rendering all martial pretensions fatuous and reckless, are the disastrous defeats of Jena and Auerstedt, which lay bare the Prussian army's lack of preparation and the strategic backwardness of its generals. With a historian's precision, Barbero exposes the dark underside of war: soldiers marching to their deaths poorly equipped and in disarray, yet driven by the ancestral fatalism of obedient serfs; burned and pillaged homes, with civilians murdered, raped, or desperately fleeing; generals traveling in carriages, sticklers for protocol and mindful of their comforts; officers caught between discipline and solidarity toward their men, whom they cannot even provide with bread—though, after all, the soldiers are peasants accustomed to starvation. > It is all written in a little leather-bound notebook , says Mr. Pyle in the prologue, > which has been yellowing ever since, in the drawer of a wobbly desk, exiled for many years in the drawer, (...) a regrettable account of things done many years ago, and done poorly. Already in *Romanzo russo*, written in 1998 and set in Gorbachev's Russia (see the review on this site), one senses a kind of alienation regarding the moral and institutional dissolution of the Soviet Union; here, that feeling is even more pronounced, perhaps because the events are so distant in time. Robert Pyle is, at bottom, a spectator; even during the bloody Battle of Jena, his primary concern is his own survival, astonished to find himself caught up in this tragedy despite everything. On the other hand, Barbero is first and foremost a historian, and his profession compels him to remain detached, subtly ironic at times, but never emotionally enmeshed with his characters or their painful plights. To be sure, the author's convictions are clear: it is easy to talk of war from afar; one must experience it from the perspective of the humble, only then discovering the vast gulf between crisp, orderly maneuvers on a parade ground and what actually unfolds on a battlefield. Not to be seduced by technology, we must always remember that there are men and women, children and the elderly, and they are the true protagonists of war. Even more than in *Romanzo russo*, an intense ethical dimension shines through—a stern indictment of the fatuity of the ruling and intellectual classes, whether Fichte and Goethe or our American gentleman. One might say Barbero writes as he speaks: fluidly, laden with parenthetical remarks, precise and evocative in his descriptions. It reads smoothly, were it not for the fact that one all too often loses one's way in a repetitive, prolix plot. The extensive description of the Battle of Jena redeems the entire narrative, which had threatened to fray to the point of unraveling into formless excess. Why read it? For history lovers it is a gem—a remarkably timely novel.

Dad Lewis and his wife return from Denver > away from the mountains, back out onto the high plains: in the pastures an expanse of buffalo grass, sagebrush, weeds, and blue grama, in the cultivated fields wheat and cotton. On either side of the highway there were dirt country roads running in all directions under a pure blue sky. Holt is a small Colorado town like so many others, a place hardly worth identifying because it is the same everywhere, it is where normal life is lived, > the precious ordinary life: mundane stories, with nothing exceptional about them, stories that could belong to anyone, yet which hold within them love, familial affection, unhappiness, guilt, memories, and the expectation of Death. Dad has just learned he has only a few months left to live, due to lung cancer. We witness the man’s slow, inexorable physical decline. Through frequent flashbacks, the author offers glimpses of what now torments Dad. In the past, as the owner of a supermarket, he fired an employee who had stolen from him; Dad was unrelenting, cast from a single mold, offering no second chances—not even to the man’s wife, who had gone so far as to offer her own body to pay back what had been taken. The man killed himself, leaving his family in destitution. This unyielding attitude led to a rupture with his son. When he caught him, still an adolescent, wearing his older sister’s clothes, he beat him, terrified of scandal and rejecting his homosexuality; the boy ran away from home, leaving no trace behind. With his elder daughter as well, who has returned home to care for him, he was emotionally detached, stern, and distant. Now, he realizes he has never caressed his daughter. > I was too busy. I didn't pay attention. No, she said, You weren't. She put her hand on his cheek, now. Forgive me, he whispered. I missed out on so much. I could have done better. I have always loved you. He wants to see his son again, he waits for him, he longs to reach out to the woman to apologize, he wishes he could turn back time, but now the people of his life, those he has lost, are merely part of a terminal patient’s nightmares. While Dad’s inexorable journey toward Death is the central narrative, other lives revolve around it, all marked by suffering. > Every life passes through some kind of unhappiness, (...) but there is good as well. (...) There are only brief moments. And as in Kader Abdolah's *The Parrot Flew Over the IJssel* (see review on this site), the cycle of the seasons rolls across the Great Plains. > In autumn the days turned cold and the leaves fell from the trees and in winter the wind came down from the mountains and out on the high plains of Holt County there were night storms and three-day blizzards.   The novel demonstrates how our lives slip by without us seizing the opportunities to show humanity toward others, to comprehend the suffering of those around us. To be sure, Dad displayed great moral integrity in refusing the advances of an attractive woman; but wouldn't it have been better had he accepted them, had he been more forgiving of himself? Even in our prosaic lives, so far removed from those of great men, we are constantly faced with choices, and these decisions concern our relationships with others. At the end of life, nothing remains but remembrance, yet Death dissolves even that. > If one does not die, one lives, so writes Salvatore Satta in *The Day of Judgment* (see review on this site). > And this truth, seemingly obvious, is instead heavy with consequences, for life transforms everything; nothing can withstand its implacable truth. (...) To know oneself, one must live out one's life to the very end, to the moment one is lowered into the grave. The fundamental strength of the book lies in its prose: crisp, spare, and mesmerizing all at once. Short sentences, taut dialogue, and sparse digressions on the setting follow in succession; the characters are not merely described, but reveal themselves, always wrapped in that aura of mystery, of the incomprehensible, that shadows us throughout our lives. If Dad reveals himself in Death, who are the others? It is a pity that the narrative rhythm, elsewhere so intense, is compromised by an ending of a melodramatic and frankly verbose register. Why read it? Splendid prose.

On this site, we have already published a review of the first volume of the great Berlin saga, written between 2015 and 2018 by Fabio Geda and Marco Magnone (see *I fuochi di Tegel*). In a “worn and decaying Berlin,” an epidemic had wiped out all adults, leaving only those under the age of eighteen alive: they had plummeted into a > violent, primordial world beyond time, [that] was robbing them even of words . They must carry on living, even though > they were certain that something hideous would leap out at them from a balcony, or from inside a car, catching them unawares . They have banded together into factions with distinct values and dynamics, within a wall encircling the whole of Berlin—a kind of prison that protects them yet confines them to a claustrophobic fate, living with the knowledge that they will die at eighteen. While in *I fuochi di Tegel* the authors introduced the setting and characters, the subsequent volumes chronicle life in this feral world: in *L'alba di Alexanderplatz*, it is the fight against a panther, a ferocious beast lurking in abandoned subway tunnels; in *La battaglia di Gropius*, amidst a freezing winter, with the vast supplies of food and firewood from abandoned supermarkets and buildings exhausted, hunger and cold drive a major battle between the Tegel faction, led by the savage Wolfrun, and the Gropius faction, headed by the hesitant Jacob; in *I lupi di Brandeburgo*, our heroes must venture beyond the wall to rescue little Nina; and finally, in the last two books (*Il richiamo dell'Havel* and *L'isola degli Eroi*), the epic saga culminates in a clash between adults and youths, in a haunting finale albeit brightened by a Hollywood-style epilogue. The narrative is kaleidoscopic, multifaceted and rich in viewpoints, allowing each reader to pursue whichever dimension appeals most, should one wish to look beyond the adventure—which remains consistently surprising and compelling. Identifying a common thread might seem challenging, yet it becomes clear if one follows the trajectory of a single character. Sixteen-year-old Jacob has found himself reluctantly thrust into leadership of the Gropius group; Sven, the former leader, was a charismatic figure, confident in his choices because he was always guided by the values of solidarity and peace. Jacob, by contrast, longs to continue living his adolescence (first loves, friendships, nostalgia, melancholy), but cannot; he must shoulder his responsibilities. And he does so in his own way, not always conforming to conventional notions of leadership: he is hesitant, often ponders what Sven or his father would have done, and does not always make decisions that prove right. It is his conscience that drives the pivotal choice of the entire epic saga. In a frozen and hostile landscape, a brave few have ventured beyond the wall in search of Nina. They cross paths with Wolfrun, the ruthless leader of the Tegel faction, an unsparing enemy driven by hatred toward life. Stranded with her horse, Wolfrun has fallen into icy water and would surely perish were it not for Jacob’s decision to rescue her. > Jacob thought of that idea of the world they had tried to build day after day, a world where saving one's own life was not enough to feel safe, and without giving himself any more time to think, he turned back . And it will be Jacob and Wolfrun, so divergent yet now allied and perhaps already in love, who lead the youths to face their final, most daunting challenge. Deftly constructed in terms of style and narrative, it reads like an epic poem, a blend of the *Aeneid* and the *Iliad*. Alongside the grand battles shines a sense of mutual humanity, a Virgilian *pietas*, the bedrock of familial sentiments of care and friendship. To be sure, the narrative depicts mechanisms of power and domination, extending to the racist attitudes of adults toward the young, yet the numerous positive characters consistently make choices that defy the delusion of subjugation. It is regrettable that the authors eventually abandon the backbone of the narrative—namely, the rebuilding of a society liberated from the burden and errors of the “grown-ups”—only to become ensnared (who knows why) in a plotline recalling the horrors of Nazism, weighing down the narrative unnecessarily and redundantly. Why read it? It captivates through its setting and characters.

In a Berlin still divided by the Wall, a virus has wiped out all adults. The sole survivors are girls and boys under the age of eighteen; once they reach that threshold, the fate of the grown-ups awaits them as well. > They procured food through hunting: they had learned to build traps for rabbits; to dig pits to snare wild boars and deer. (...) They had taken over urban vegetable gardens, trying to tend them with clumsy, inexperienced gestures. (...) It had not been easy. They had suffered, especially during the first winter. But then they had learned to get by . As Francesco Petrarca wrote, “both remembrance and expectation grieve my heart”; the new masters of Berlin live in a continuous, anguished oscillation between memory—increasingly evanescent and imagined—and reality: a present orphaned of parents. > As for me, when I try to focus on their faces, I see them all blurred. But I hear their voices. And every now and then, in the air, I feel like I catch the scent of my mother’s clothes. As Ryszard Kapuściński writes in the final chapter of *The Shadow of the Sun* (see the review on this site), dissolving the memory of one’s yesterday means turning into > people without a past, which is to say, nobody. Those men would lose what bound them together, scattering each on his own way, alone. In *Berlin*, there is no future simply because they know they will all die upon turning eighteen. The girls and boys live without prospects because there can be no utopia when one is alone. Within the group, they seek that bond which might give meaning to existence, while carefully avoiding interference with the other clans—especially those with radically different values and rules. And it is out of respect for this overarching norm of coexistence that Sven, the charismatic leader of the Gropius, chooses not to aid the girls of Havel in taking back Theo, an infant kidnapped by the terrifying boys of Tegel. > Sven looked at Nora gently; she reminded him of a classmate he had fallen in love with in another life. (...) Cooperation. Solidarity. Weren’t those the rules? Sven dragged his eyes along the stained walls, down to the floor, and finally fixed them on his own feet. He knew those had been his words, just two years earlier. At the dawn of the new world.   Was Tegel right, then, when mocking the Gropius kids for trying to replicate their parents’ society? > Young flesh, danger, excess: such was Tegel’s revolution, their response to the cruelty of fate. Their way of denying that the virus had snuffed out an extraordinary season of life, the one in which physical strength gives way to awareness and experience . We stand at a crossroads: we must choose between a world of solidarity and coexistence or slide madly down into the dark tunnel of blind force. It marks the opening of a battle from which a new humanity may yet be born. The reader must not be misled by what I have written. *Berlin* is not a treatise on moral philosophy; it is an adventure novel, a kind of chivalric tale, rich in plot twists and populated by characters, some of whom we will grow to love as the narrative unfolds (the book is the first installment of a saga). Adopting the adolescents’ perspective, Geda and Magnone plumb the forces beneath youth’s turbulence (the perpetual swinging between friendship and anarchy, detachment from and attachment to parents, the lure of risk and the dread of it) and confront us adults with a question: we, the absentees and the indifferent—will it fall to our children and grandchildren to find their own way alone? Will they be forced to fight for a better world without us? One is left with the urge to read on, both for the plot and to see who is right: the madness of Tegel, the solidarity of Gropius, or both. The prose is nearly flawless—perhaps excessively so. No distinct idiosyncrasies emerge, in either vocabulary or syntax, capable of mesmerizing or imparting an unusual rhythm to the narrative. The characters remain suspended within the roles they occupy in the group, lacking distinct personalities and backstories of their own.  Why read it? Adventurous, distinctive, and profound.

The book is a collection of short stories set in a town in South-Western India, Kittur. The author traverses the various corners of the city, its people, and its social life, like a modern-day Guy de Maupassant. Yet in truth, as an editor remarks when rejecting the stories, > your characters want absolutely nothing. They simply walk through richly described situations and think deeply. They walk through cows, trees, roosters, and think, and then walk through roosters, trees, and cows, and think a bit more. That is all. The narrative, in fact, unfolds between the realistic, stark, and often repetitive depiction of modern Indian society, and the pessimistic chronicle of an unalterable social and existential condition. Despite India’s intense economic dynamism, there is no real shift in the social fabric, in caste relations, in the mechanisms of power—ever dominated by corruption and abuse—nor in the lives of the characters, who, whenever they aspire to or believe they have attained even a modicum of social mobility, are thrust back into the immutable roles of a stratified society. All the stories are remarkably fine, but the most emblematic of the entire collection is *“Market and Maiden”*. Keshaya is a boy from the countryside looking for work in the city: “he is small, thin, dark-skinned, with huge eyes that wander dreamily.” Full of energy yet at the same time “capable of staring at the ceiling for hours,” the boy does not quite know what he wants, but remains captivated by the life of the tram conductor, who works outside, clinging perilously to the vehicle. He manages to secure this job and is thrilled because he rides to work on a bicycle given to him by his employer. It belonged to a former tram conductor, who now begs in the street after being crippled in an accident. One day, Keshaya falls, strikes his head, is fired, and finds himself wandering through the market like a madman, like a wild man. And everyone pretends not to recognize him, yet “he was the king of tram number 5,” cries the lame man, the only one standing by him, bound by the solidarity shared among the poor and the wretched. “That is the way of the world,” remarks the protagonist of another story, “and so it’s a rotten world.” And what can the writer do? If he does not wish to go mad, like another character in the book, he must convince himself that > every true word, as soon as it has been written, is like the full moon, in a day it vanishes and passes entirely into darkness. And this is the way of all things . What is truly remarkable in these stories is Adiga’s writing. It succeeds in transfiguring social realism into the anticipation, or the possibility, of an escape—wholly contemplative and interior—from the deterministic and inexorable forces of economics and sociology. In *“The Bunder”*, Abasi is a small-business owner, beleaguered by the corruption of public officials, who endures a profound inner conflict between the necessity of providing security for his family and the harrowing awareness that the manufacturing processes in his factory will inexorably lead the female laborers to blindness. What is to be done? He climbs onto the roof of his factory: > from here a man can see the limits of Kittur... and see the Arabian Sea stretching out from Kittur. The setting sun is shining above it. A ship is slowly leaving the harbor, sailing where the blue waters of the sea change color and turn a deep dark. And it is about to meet a broad swath of the brilliant setting sun, an oasis of pure light Will Abisa throw himself from the roof, or will he submit to the inexorable laws of economics? We are left in a state of suspense, of waiting, which forms the resolution to most of the stories. Why read it? Splendid stories, marvelous prose, and human and social narratives of powerful resonance.

> The earthly USSR was a crude, imperfect body, but in the hearts of old romantics and the children of happy cities, its artistic ideal existed apart: the Celestial Union. With the disappearance of mental spaces, the inanimate geographical body had died as well . The dissolution of the Soviet Union was not merely a shattering political and institutional phenomenon; it inflicted a deep psychological and cultural laceration upon the collective consciousness. In present-day Russia, small communities attempt to recover an identity by reading the works of a deceased writer. There are six books which, read exclusively in their original editions, are capable of transmitting positive feelings and energies. These groups—the smaller ones known as reading rooms, the larger ones as libraries—fight among themselves to defend their own volumes and seize others. The battles, invariably brutal, are waged according to the customs and rules of medieval armies, reminiscent of the feudal lords who held sway in pre-Tsarist Russia. Aleksej, a disoriented young man lacking any clear perspective for his future, finds himself drawn, against his will, into the bloody conflicts between the rival communities, inheriting the role of Librarian upon the death of his uncle, who held this position in a small reading room. Aleksej is hardly a warrior at heart, yet he must acquire the courage and resolve necessary to lead his faction in clashes with other gangs. In truth, the book is an unrelenting succession of combats, painstakingly detailed by the author. The most significant of these, and the decisive one for the protagonist's future, unfolds in a forest. Aleksej’s small reading room takes refuge in a now-abandoned village, specifically in the Village Council building—where the council of elders once gathered in Tsarist Russia and the soviet convened during the Soviet era. Here, numerous gangs, led by a malevolent old crone, attack Aleksej’s group while singing hymns lauding the heroic deeds of Soviet Russia’s soldiers and workers. The depiction of the battle evokes the *Iliad*: a valiant few hold off hundreds of assailants, only to be slaughtered in the end, save for Aleksej. The young man is captured and taken to a retirement home that has been seized by its elderly female residents, invigorated by reading the six books after massacring the staff. The protagonist is locked in a cell to read, and reread, all six books. And it is then that Aleksej's destiny is fulfilled: to be the living icon, the eternal repository of the soul of Great Mother Russia. > If the Motherland is free, its borders inviolable, it means that the librarian Aleksej Vjazincev stubbornly stands guard in the underground bunker, tirelessly weaving the thread of the protective veil of the Intercession cast over the Country. In defense against enemies visible and invisible . The idea of small communities dedicated to safeguarding a country’s historical heritage and the appeal to the power of books to awaken and fortify human consciousness are truly two brilliant premises. In a fragmented and violent world, what remains to us if not the solidarity of comrades and the defense of the past? Yet might this not lead to a new Middle Ages? The problem is that well over half the book’s pages are devoted to describing savage clashes and bloody combat, while a modest—and decidedly insufficient—space is allotted to the characters' personal stories and their relationship with the books. The narrative arc suffers heavily as a result, growing verbose, tedious, and redundant. The conclusion feels weary and muddled, leaving the reader exhausted by an excess of battles. In short, it is a missed opportunity. Why not read it? If one has no fondness for battle scenes, it is better left unread.

This book belongs to a literary genre whose pinnacle is *Gomorrah*, and which could offer an opportunity for revival to an otherwise bloodless Italian literature. It is a hybrid of novel and investigative journalism. Fabrizio Gatti is a journalist who conducts his investigations into immigration by masquerading as a migrant, thereby experiencing their living conditions firsthand. The novel arises organically, as the author personally lives through the events narrated and the encounters depicted. In the first part of the book, the author retraces the route between Dakar and the Libyan border, chronicling the inhumane conditions and, above all, the violence inherent to these journeys. In reality, people are at the mercy of criminal syndicates—colluding with local police forces—who seize every opportunity to extort these desperate souls. Transit relies on makeshift vehicles (dilapidated trucks, off-road vehicles) that routinely break down along the way, abandoning passengers to certain death in the desert. The lack of funds to continue the journey reduces migrants to a form of servitude in transit hubs, where they are forced to work merely to have something to eat. This is the finest section of the book, both for its descriptions of place (at times almost evoking travel literature) and, above all, for the bonds of friendship the author forms with some of his companions. Here, the author's driving impulse behind these experiences becomes strikingly clear—a quest for adventure coupled with an investigation into the roots of one of the great agonies of our era: > and tonight, as I update my journal, tucked inside my sleeping bag with the mini flashlight wedged between my neck and shoulder, I feel that I am at the mercy of this immense river of arms. I realize there are no safe havens. It is no longer I who am making this journey. It is the journey, in its boundless cruelty, that is shaping me . In the second part of the book, the author reproduces an email correspondence with two friends, met during the earlier leg of the journey, who became stranded in Libya. It is the novel's weakest section, yet it still offers an insight into Libya and the plight of migrants within this country—which is not merely a transit point, as commonly assumed in Italy, but frequently an end destination for labor. Under Italian pressure, Libya carries out a veritable persecution of migrants, who are often rounded up in camps at the edge of the desert and subsequently abandoned to certain death. There are then two sections of the book that do not allow us to detach ourselves from the issue by dismissing it as someone else's affair. First, Fabrizio Gatti manages to pass himself off as a Kurd and gets himself "imprisoned" in the Lampedusa reception center. What emerges is a shameful picture of the material living conditions and the conduct of the Italian police, in flagrant violation of the principles enshrined in our constitution. Next, the journalist recounts his undercover investigation into the living and working conditions among tomato pickers in Apulia. The essence of its impact on the reader is encapsulated in a reflection by the author: > would you have let them be killed? The answer is a watershed. There is no middle ground. There is no room for compromise between a world of civil struggles and its surrogates of violence . Finally, in the closing section, the author retraces the journey "in reverse" from Libya to Dakar, partly to document the expulsion of migrants from Libya and partly in search of his lost friends. It is a muddled section, one where the limitations of Fabrizio Gatti’s prose become starkly evident—too journalistic to sustain a book of such length and complexity. The question one must ask is why such a "forceful" book met with such modest resonance. A primary explanation certainly lies in the shortcomings of style and narrative pacing: the former too fragmented to be fluid, the latter frequently repetitive and verbose. A second reason is to be found in the general Italian apathy toward the plight of migrants. We are confronted with pervasive indifference toward the "modern slave trade." Alas, dear Fabrizio Gatti, there is indeed a compromise between a world of civil struggles and its surrogates of violence: burying one's head in the sand and retreating into the seclusion of one's apartment building.

Il romanzo si avvia in un'atmosfera kafkiana: l'ingegner Robert Fahmel, esperto di calcoli strutturali, si lamenta con la segreteria per aver disubbidito a un suo preciso ordine: non dire mai dove si trova, se non alla madre e al padre, ai figli, e a un certo Schrella, che scopriremo poi essere suo cognato e amico di liceo, quando entrambi non aderirono alla gioventù nazista. Siamo nel 1958, nella Germania dell'immediato dopoguerra, quando > everything seemed submerged in the past, yet present. In the regular, even liturgical routine of his life, the distinguished engineer Fahmel goes every day, from nine-thirty to eleven, to play billiards in a grand hotel, doing so solely in the presence of an errand boy, to whom he recounts his high-school years when his classmates had partaken of "the sacrament of the buffalo" (a clear reference to Nazism, which is never explicitly named) and beat the "lambs of God," those who refused to adhere to Nazi ideology. > He struck a ball with a stroke now gentle, now hard, seemingly without reason or purpose; (...) five times, six times, as the struck ball hit the cushion or the other balls. (...) The carousel of lines was always anchored to the corners, obedient to the laws of geometry and physics. Is the daily, solitary game of billiards the pastime of a man enamored of the laws of statics, or does it conceal some mystery that engineer Robert Fahmel carries within himself? For a while, the question finds no answer in a novel characterized by a continuous shifting of narrators, from the third person to the first, and by ever-new windows opening onto the past and the present, as the laws of remembrance dictate. For pages on end, we follow the account of Robert’s father; of when, in 1909, he arrived in the city from the countryside to take part in an important competition: the construction of the Abbey of St. Anthony. The description of the hours spent in a café preparing the project drawings, eating cheese with ginger, is a light and amusing interlude in a grim, hopeless novel. Robert’s father, on the other hand, harbors great expectations, confirmed when he is awarded the construction of the Abbey, which will open up for him a future of success and renown as a great architect, and allow him an advantageous marriage, with the promise of a large family of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. But at the very moment he was submitting the drawings, Robert’s father sensed an omen of the future: > squinting my eyes, the entire massive construction seemed to stand before me, already real, as if I were looking at it from a window: the monks bent over their work, the pilgrims quenching their thirst, and the female workers already singing below, anxiously awaiting the end of the workday, their voices bright and somber, reaching me up here like a death knell. Then I closed my eyes and already felt that chill that only fifty years later, as a grown man in the midst of swarming life, I was to feel again. Illness, Nazism, and the Second World War will take away many of his children and his young daughter-in-law, culminating in his wife’s descent into madness; the Abbey itself will also be destroyed, demolished by the Germans themselves to leave scorched earth for the Allies. From the past we return to the present, in 1958, with a seemingly marginal scene. Joseph, Robert's son, is with his fiancée, but he is taciturn, withdrawn into himself, unwilling to speak and reluctant to attend a family lunch. An architect himself, Joseph is working on the construction of the new Abbey and has discovered some numbers written by his father in several spots among the ruins of the old building: they are the markings indicating where to place the dynamite to demolish the Abbey. It was Robert, then, an officer in the combat engineers, who destroyed that masterpiece, which had meant so much in his grandfather's life. The balls, > red on green, white on green, the monotonous music of the balls, like the rhythm of a Gregorian chant, (...) almost tokens of a severe poetry , are the metaphor for the quest for an order that might heal, through its daily liturgy, the incurable wounds of a Germany in which the guilt of a people is intertwined with that of individuals, and torn family destinies are bound up with a nation's delusion of power. "Why why why"—this questioning refrain recurs often in the novel. How is it possible that an intelligent and cultured people spawned so much death? And is reconciliation with the past even possible? Through a family history pivoting on the meticulous rationality of engineering—in construction as in demolition—Böll succeeds in conveying the pain and confusion, the disorientation and despair of a people. In *And Never Said a Word* (1952), Böll depicted the condition of a people reduced to starvation amid the rubble of post-war Germany; later, in 1963, in *The Clown*, Böll would delineate the moral ravages of the economic miracle (see the reviews on this site); in this novel, the writer seems to want to distance himself from the Nazi madness, yet without succeeding: the past resurfaces incessantly, and the characters are like extras, groping between madness and indifference—perhaps the only way to process their grief. Whatever the outcome, Böll reckons with history without taking refuge behind an easy self-absolution. Have we Italians done the same? Did the likes of Moravia, Calvino, and the other post-war writers write of our own guilt, or did they retreat into familism, abstraction, or victimhood, as in Elsa Morante's *History* (see the review of this novel on this site)? We must not expect a linear plot; to appreciate the novel, one must let oneself be captivated by the writing, by the allure of a prose that at times recalls Thomas Mann (see the review of *Buddenbrooks* on this site) and at others the musicality of László Krasznahorkai (see the review of *The Melancholy of Resistance* on this site). It is a pity that, in the end, the novel loses itself in a delirious drift toward nothingness. Why read it? An anguished masterpiece upon which we Italians ought to reflect.

The initial premise is a true event that took place in 1875 in Sicily. The prefect of Caltanissetta, a Florentine, insisted that the town’s new theatre be inaugurated with a virtually unknown opera, namely *The Brewer of Preston*. Numerous disturbances ensued, left largely unresolved by the inquiry that followed. Taking this real-life occurrence as his point of departure, Camilleri crafted a novel open to multiple readings, so much so that the chapters themselves could easily be rearranged in an order different from that of the narration. One possible trajectory is undoubtedly the detective plot, centered on the police delegate, Puglisi—the novel’s sole genuinely honest character, who may well be regarded as a precursor to Montalbano. In Camilleri’s imagination, the theatre is set ablaze by Mazzinian agitators on the very night of its opening. Acting as a true investigator, Puglisi uncovers the arson behind the fire, a crime for which the police commissioner is equally culpable, having chosen—out of petty political squabbles, and despite having been alerted by Puglisi himself—not to arrest the Mazzinian agitators upon their arrival in the city. Puglisi’s death at the hands of one of the arsonists proves expedient for many, not least the authorities of the newly formed Italian state. The book’s other interpretive key lies precisely in the corruption and arrogance of the officials dispatched to Sicily, chief among them the prefect himself, who colludes with the local mafia: an unholy alliance that bodes ill for the future of the island. Then there is the world of Sicily itself, and it is here that the author is at his finest, offering evocative, affectionately ironic, and at times paradoxical portraits of a society that watches, from the heights of a millennia-old history, the descent of new conquerors (the Piedmontese): a mix of pessimism, cynicism, pride, and stubbornness in defense of its own *sicilianità*, alongside an ingrained habit of submitting to the powerful and to violence. Further narrative threads and motifs can also be identified, particularly as the author structures each chapter around references to masterpieces of Italian and world literature, which one presumes are among those Camilleri held in highest regard. In this sense, the novel’s table of contents serves as a reading guide to other authors. The novel unfolds through continuous temporal shifts back and forth, with the result of fragmenting the plot into numerous vignettes, thereby compromising the narrative’s cohesion. The recourse to the Sicilian language, both in dialogue and narration, intrigues and at times makes for an agreeable read, yet on the whole it leaves an overriding impression of mannerism and literary preciousness pursued for its own sake. Why read it? It is an engaging read, even if one is ultimately left somewhat disappointed. What was the author trying to say?

The book’s subtitle is “the epic story of Kit Carson and the conquest of the West.” Indeed, the book spans a very long period, from 1809, the year of Kit Carson’s birth, to his death in 1868. Even though the great scout lies at the heart of the book, in reality it features all the protagonists of those years who contributed to an exceedingly complex and multifaceted history, shaped by competing ambitions: the imperial dream of the United States aimed at conquering the entire continent from East to West at the expense of a weaker nation, Mexico; economic expansion toward territories whose wealth was often overstated; the American Civil War and the role played by Indigenous nations; the clash of cultures (North Americans, Mexicans, and Indians); and, finally, the heavy imprint of a Methodist vision intent on imposing its own rules without acknowledging particularities and cultural distinctions. At the core of the book, therefore, lies the American dream: the conviction of being inherently in the right, and consequently the inability to understand the indigenous peoples. The latter, accustomed to a nomadic society rooted in raiding, fail to realize that they are up against a new adversary—one quite different from the Spanish and the Mexicans, equipped with technological superiority and, above all, an obstinacy driven to see matters through to the bitter end. It is the Navajos who pay the heaviest price, despite having been one of the strongest and wealthiest Indian nations. They are destroyed: first by starvation, then by the long march toward a settlement intended to serve as an experiment in civilization, which proves instead to be an inhospitable wasteland where disease, poor harvests, and contaminated water deal a mortal blow to the Navajos. It is a chronicle of clashes and battles, of plunder and cruelty, laying bare a violent society on both sides. A curious code of conduct effectively binds Americans and Indians alike: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In this context, Kit Carson—already a legend in his own lifetime—stands as an emblematic figure: a consummate scout gifted with both diplomatic and martial prowess, a commander, yet ultimately an executor who, against his own inclinations, is compelled by obedience and gratitude toward others to wage wars and endure conditions he does not himself condone. Deep down, he is frail, a weakness evident in his physique and his voice to such a degree that visitors who had read accounts of his life and exploits failed to recognize him when meeting him in person. He is a hero who becomes one in spite of himself, almost an artfully crafted figure within the American collective imagination. This persona served to open the conquest of the West to the American people and to rationalize the slaughter of the Indians. Like all heroes, he is also an antihero. The book is a compelling work. It appears historically well-documented, and while not a novel in the strict sense, the narrative possesses all its hallmarks. The overlapping of episodes, which develop in parallel before converging into a central storyline, likewise generates an atmosphere of suspense typical of a detective story or contemporary fiction. The approach is cinematic. Its most compelling aspect is the extensive reliance on the very diaries of those who took part in the events. For instance, a woman who followed the wagon train toward the conquest of Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, writes with scandalized outrage about a ball held in honor of the conquerors, where Mexican women appeared in low-cut, provocative gowns.

The protagonist loses his wife and children in a plane crash. To escape despair, he writes the biography of a silent-film actor who had vanished without a trace. Tracked down by Alma, with whom he falls in love, he learns that the former actor lives on a farm, where he has continued to make films that he has resolved to destroy upon his death. The protagonist reaches the country house to witness the former actor's death, manages to watch one of the films that had been produced, and then stands by as a spectator to the fire that destroys the entirety of the cinematic works. The narrative concludes tragically with Alma’s death. It is a complex novel, in many respects intellectualized and erudite, unfolding through paradoxical events around two philosophical and existential themes: the world is entirely an illusion, where the boundary between what is real and what is fiction or the product of our imagination remains blurred; and destruction—death—is the arbitrary outcome of the illusion in which we live. The theme of illusion is personified by the former actor Hector: his origins are unknown, and he does everything to keep them obscure; he leads a double life in love that ends tragically; he is perpetually on the run, pretending to be someone else and fabricating situations until finally secluding himself in the countryside to produce cryptic films destined never to be shown in theaters. The theme of destruction, of tragedies overwhelming human lives, of inexplicable events, is embodied in the very plot of the book and in the protagonist's torments. > It is a book of fragments, a gathering of nostalgias and dreams only partially remembered . The book is very well written, in a pleasant and fluid style. Yet there is an intellectualist undercurrent that frequently renders the narrative pace cumbersome and redundant.

*Borders* (2022) and *No Borders* (2023) are two novels that develop the same story and must be read and reviewed together. The common thread can be identified in one of the many literary references found in both books: the short story *The Seven Messengers* by Dino Buzzati. The prince, having set out to explore his father’s kingdom, after years of travel recognizes that > there is no border, I suspect. (...) There are no separating walls, no dividing valleys, no mountains closing the pass. I will probably cross the boundary without even noticing, and I will keep going forward, unaware (see the review of Buzzati’s *Sessanta Racconti* on this site). Borders are those between peoples, just as they are the barriers we erect between one another. Following an epidemic triggered by the environment’s revolt against human exploitation, the survivors built themselves a technological city, enclosed within high walls and surrounded by a vast desert of concrete. In this metropolis, called Magnolia to evoke the cruelty of Nature, > the past has been erased, and with it the literature of the past. (...) In Magnolia there is only one version of our history! With food and attentive care, they have turned citizens into faithful servants incapable of thinking! (...) everything is eco-sustainable, recyclable, and interconnected, where civil society is satisfied and the youth is confident in its own beliefs, disdainful of the beliefs of old. In this world where Utopia is forbidden, an elderly poetess continues to live, having adopted the metaphorical name of Olmo. She has taken in four young people. They bear the names of forgotten writers: Lindgren is a Black girl with a mass of bushy hair, and like Pippi Longstocking she looks at the world from her own perspective, wilful and stubborn; Dickens, like the English writer, is a great storyteller > but he is so charming that you forget about it ; Alcott, like the author of *Little Women*, > is so serious, always thoughtful yet always willing to listen ; Verne > sees beyond , capable of envisioning the future in harmony with animals and plants. Between the four of them is a deep bond of brotherhood: they grew up together, feel different from their peers, and are guided by Olmo, the bard of a different world, of an Earth regenerated to new life, which she remains convinced still exists somewhere out there. And so, when Olmo urges them to leave Magnolia without her, the youths feel abandoned. > You want to make explorers out of us! Deep down, nobody cares about us. We are worth nothing. Then, they realize that they are > the children of Olmo, (...) Magnolia cannot tolerate the presence of four young people endowed with the strength and power of Olmo. (...) To be sure, they have absorbed all her knowledge, but would they know how to use it?. Like the protagonist of the film *Poor Things*, who must break away from her creator to claim the world for herself, Olmo's children feel they must leave. It is time to cross borders, to venture toward the unknown, retracing a journey once undertaken by the great explorers and, further back still, the Argonauts: the quest for a Promised Land, the pursuit of a Utopia. Lindgren, Dickens, Alcott, and Verne abandon the safety of Magnolia and take to the road, like the father and son in Cormac McCarthy's *The Road* (see review on this site); awaiting them is a desolate, deadly reality at first, followed by a lush, wild nature that has reclaimed the planet, and ultimately a community of men and women desperately striving to safeguard the past—books, for instance—despite living an existence regressed to primitive levels, devoid of technology and science. Which is better? The hyper-advanced city where everything is regulated and diseases no longer exist, or returning to the dawn of humanity, when one fought merely to survive and ensure the reproduction of the species? Here lies Utopia: fighting for a world where an equilibrium is struck between Technology and Nature, between Progress and Freedom, and where Poetry may once again become the driving force of Humanity. Alongside the “Grand History” in which fundamental material and ideological forces contend, there is also the story of the four young people. Leaving the protective wing of Olmo and Magnolia leads them to encounter other youths, thus fracturing their bonds of kinship. Lindgren slowly discovers she has fallen in love with the very nephew of Magnolia’s Dictator, yet unlike *The Black Corsair* (see review on this site), she overcomes these barriers through a gradual journey of growing trust; Alcott meets a young woman who > walks straight as a queen, (...) uses unusual words, (...) raised by the characters of her novels preserved in the great library of the Lighthouse where she lives in solitude; Dickens falls in love, without knowing why, with a girl who wishes to live in Magnolia, where women are not forced to bear children as in her primitive village; and finally Verne finds, within this society returned to a primitive state, that loving bond with animals he has always yearned for. At first, the intruders are received with mistrust and threaten to break the brotherhood; then, affection, the desire for mutual support, and understanding of the other lead them to evolve from a closed group into an open community, where borders are blurred and constantly shifting. As Dino Buzzati’s character puts it, > Tomorrow morning a new hope will draw me even further ahead.... One should not think that this is a novel dominated by philosophical digressions. The narrative is rich in adventure, even if a lyrical dimension prevails and consistently overshadows the plot. The narrative structure is akin to that of *The Road*: short, almost self-contained paragraphs, providing occasions for evocative descriptions of nature and psychological insights into the characters—analyses that remain, however, perpetually suspended; the dialogues, very well constructed, alternate with detailed yet fantastical representations of the setting: consider the allure of the Lighthouse on the coast of Brittany, one of the most intense moments of the entire novel. The author fails to create plot twists, dramatic turning points, or moments of genuine tension. Perhaps it is a book addressed more to adults than to young adults. Why read it? Enjoyable, interesting, with a beautifully drawn figure in Lindgren.

Those who listen to music often fail to realize just how much the quality of sound depends on the tuning of the instrument. Between musician and tuner there exists an intricate bond, rendered by the author through the imagery of magpies. In an ancient Chinese legend, magpies form a bridge across the Milky Way between the stars Vega and Altair on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month: celestial lovers, sorrowful in their separation, who on that day can finally unite in the fulfillment of a great love. Sound—an inexplicable and captivating creation of both nature and man—lies at the heart of this novel. Tomura is a high school student living in an isolated mountain town; for him, it was enough to > scrape through school somehow until graduation, find any kind of job, and keep on living . It would have been sufficient for him merely to contemplate, year after year, the miracle of spring in the mountains, when “the bare trees all bud at once.” (...) > The entire mountain seemed to radiate light, from the vast expanse of branches softly suffused with a reddish glow. Overwhelmed by the sight of those illusory flames burning across the mountains, I stood spellbound, unable to do a thing. And I was happy for it . His life changes when a piano tuner arrives to service the school’s modest piano. Watching the man work, Tomura chooses this vocation. He enrolls in a vocational school and is subsequently hired by a musical instrument firm. At first an apprentice accompanying more experienced colleagues on client visits, he is gradually—and not without setbacks—permitted to work on his own. > I have no talent (Tomura told himself). (...) I couldn't hide behind the word talent: I mustn't use it as an excuse to give up. Experience, practice, effort, wisdom, presence of mind, perseverance, and then passion: if talent wasn't enough, I would replace it with these. (...) Clinging to something, and using it like a cane to lean on and pull oneself up. Once again, the turning point erupts from the outside. He attends a piano performance by the very young Kazune and is entranced, captivated by the music and by the girl's playing. > Kazune's piano was a spring connected to the world, one that never ran dry; indeed, it would have continued to pour forth ceaselessly, even if there were no one to listen . And an episode from his childhood comes back to him. As a boy, he was walking in the woods when he saw lights that > crowded upon the slender branches of an elm and shone dazzlingly. I don't know what phenomenon it was. But it was beautiful. Almost terrifying. Listening to Kazune's music, Tomura is certain that somewhere in the mountains, in a place unknown to him, a tree was glowing. Love, unreserved and unconditional—a feeling that expects nothing in return—compels Tomura to overcome his self-doubt and become a concert tuner, in service of Kazune, the piano, and music itself. It is undeniably a *Bildungsroman*. Tomura learns a trade while simultaneously coming of age. Aided by a workplace environment that is benevolent, perhaps beyond plausibility, the young man comes to understand that his humble, rustic mountain origins are not an impediment; rather, they grant him a stubborn tenacity that will prove to be his strength. Up to this point, it might seem a conventional narrative, woven from protracted dialogues with colleagues who dispense “nuggets of wisdom,” and weighted down by technical minutiae regarding the art of tuning—intriguing yet redundant curiosities. What endows the novel with an original and compelling dimension is that sense of the magical arising from the juxtaposition of the piano's sound with the lights and murmurs of the forest: a Shinto-inflected touch quintessential to Japanese culture, possessing nothing of the Romantic nor of the trivially pantheistic. While the piano is an invention of nineteenth-century Europe, its sweet melody and luminous atmosphere evoke sensations of the forest that our own positivistic and idealistic culture has forsaken for centuries. Beneath its ostensibly realistic veneer, the tale beckons us to achieve harmony with the Universe, guided by music. The narrative style is spare, almost minimalist: short sentences, sparing with adjectives—fitting, after all, for a narrator in his early twenties who was never particularly gifted in school. The recurring allusion to Hara Tamiki, where the poet of the Holocaust defines the complex ambiguity of style, signals that the prose’s simplicity is a deliberate aesthetic choice by the author, and an entirely successful one. Paraphrasing Tamiki, we might say: > a style that may seem gentle, up to a point, but is instead fraught with severity and depth; a style as beautiful as a dream, yet as certain as reality . Why read it? Luminous, quiet, replete with love and nostalgia.

*The Bottle Imp*, in Italian *Il diavoletto nella bottiglia*, is a short story that revolves around man’s ambiguous relationship with evil. Keawe, the protagonist, > was a poor man, brave and industrious; he could read and write like a schoolmaster, and was furthermore a first-rate sailor . One day, in San Francisco, he stops to admire a splendid house. When Keawe expresses his desire to possess such a home, the owner tells him that his entire fortune originated from a bottle in which an imp resides. Whoever purchases this bottle will have all their wishes granted. There are, however, drawbacks: one goes to hell if one dies while still in possession of the bottle, and it must always be sold at a price lower than its purchase cost. Keawe is torn, but ultimately agrees to buy the bottle for fifty dollars. His life swiftly undergoes a radical transformation: he becomes a wealthy man and can afford a magnificent home. He manages to sell the bottle and is thus able to live peacefully and happily, not least because he has since fallen in love with a young woman, Kokua, whom he intends to marry. One day, however, he discovers he has contracted leprosy and resolves to track down the bottle once more so that the imp may cure him. Thus begins a search that leads him to discover that the price of the bottle has been steadily falling, down to a mere two cents. Yet the bottle would then have to be bought for one cent—and how could it ever be sold afterwards, given that the cent is the smallest coin available? Keawe buys it nonetheless and marries Kokua, but finds no happiness, knowing that upon his death he will go to hell. Once she learns the terrible secret, Kokua decides to secretly purchase the bottle herself through an ingenious expedient: she travels to a French-held island where coins of lesser value than a cent are in circulation. Yielding to evil has created a sort of “reverse chain letter,” breeding further evil to the point where the two lovers become entangled in a paradoxical short-circuit, wherein the happiness of the one becomes the source of the other’s torment. Then, as in a fine fairy tale, comes the happy ending: Keawe manages to sell the bottle to a drunkard, ridding himself of it forever. The story mirrors the structure of a fable (the presentation of the initial situation, the hero confronting hardships until he successfully overcomes them) and also bears the hallmarks of a maritime yarn, unfolding as it does among ships and southern cities. The underlying concept, however, is the depiction of the trajectory of evil, played out entirely through its progressive loss of value. As if to say: the more one lives immersed in evil, the more one grows accustomed to it, to the point that the imp is worth less and less. Why read it? It is remarkably well written, if at times repetitive, but above all, the moral underpinning the tale remains profoundly relevant. In recent years, Italians have gradually accepted increasingly illegal, immoral, and vulgar behaviors, the cost of which drops ever lower because they have by now become part of the collective ethos. Beware! There is no end to the worst.

Massimo runs a bar in a fictional coastal town near Livorno. Like so many provincial establishments, the bar is frequented by a group of old men who pass the time playing *briscola* and talking (or gossiping) about the affairs of the world and those of the small village. Then an extraordinary event comes along to shake up the daily grind: the corpse of a young woman is found in a dumpster. Needless to say, Massimo turns amateur detective, making his share of mistakes, but ultimately playing a decisive role in uncovering the killer. To avoid being accused of spoiling the culprit and the resolution, I will say nothing of the plot, confining myself to noting how trite and predictable it is. At first, Massimo’s attention to certain seemingly insignificant clues entices the reader, but the author’s eagerness to deliver a twist ending ruins the gradual buildup of evidence, motives, and the very logical architecture of the noir. The setting could open up intriguing possibilities if, for instance, the old men played a meaningful role in the detective plot or, conversely, if the writer were capable of portraying the atmosphere of the bar. Nothing of the sort! Setting aside the use of the Livornese dialect, the bar and its patrons remain in the background—flat, insipid, and superficial. The novel’s sole merit is the writing: simple, accessible, and clear. The reader breezes pleasantly through the pages without being subjected to any particular effort of concentration, yet without lapsing into boredom. Why not read it? It is the classic travel novel, but it leaves nothing behind.

Anyone who has read or seen *The Bone Collector* in the cinema is already familiar with the book's main characters. Lincoln Rhyme is a renowned criminologist who bases his investigative techniques on the rigorous and meticulous use of "physical" evidence, even the most insignificant. Despite having been left paralyzed following a shootout. Rhyme continues to collaborate with the police, assisted by a team of detectives and by Amelia Sachs, a close and capable collaborator as well as his life partner. Rhyme's cousin is accused of rape and murder. All the evidence points to his guilt. Rhyme is quickly convinced that the clues have been fabricated by a serial killer who "knows everything." In the course of the investigation, Rhyme and his team discover the existence of a massive private organization that collects, stores, and processes information on virtually everything, selling it to corporations (for market research, for instance) as well as to public and state institutions. It is a "Digital Big Brother," whose data is seemingly inaccessible, yet which the criminal has managed to exploit and even manipulate. The thriller is skillfully constructed, boasting a plot rich in twists and an unpredictable conclusion. The best part of the book is its depiction of the world of big data processing corporations. Rhyme’s team proves remarkably inexpert (perhaps excessively so, given they do not even know Excel) and ventures into this realm step by step, left stunned, fascinated, and alarmed. Rhyme himself is disconcerted: can access to such vast amounts of information truly supplant the method and intuition that must govern criminology? And the reader, too, begins to wonder. On the surface, possessing powerful databases and sophisticated data collection tools would appear to be a monumental achievement. But is it worth it if a criminal can exploit them to commit rape and murder with impunity? Is the availability of so much information—which even enables the prediction of events—truly helpful in tracking down killers, or do traditional, obsolete investigative methods remain more effective? The premise is intriguing, the prose concise and effective, the plot well-engineered, and the characters—especially Amelia Sachs—compelling; it is a pity that, as so often happens with thrillers, the novel's sheer length renders it wordy and meandering. Are these authors paid by word count, as Salgari once was? Why read it? It is a solid thriller, and the theme is compelling.

Henry Molise is the son of a tyrannical, drunken father. Summoned by his siblings because their parents appear poised for divorce after yet another of the father’s abusive outbursts, Henry finds himself roped into helping his father build a small stone shed at an out-of-town motel. During the journey in the company of his father’s old friends and by working alongside him, Henry rediscovers, with horror, his own familial matrix and his affection for his father. The shed, scarcely finished, is destroyed by a windstorm, starkly demonstrating that the aging father, once a renowned and skilled craftsman, is no longer physically and intellectually capable of carrying out a job, however simple. At this point, the story hurtles to its crisis: the father falls ill, is hospitalized, and subsequently flees the hospital to die at the home of an old friend who owns a vineyard and produces excellent wine. The overarching threads of the book are fundamentally two: the familial context, from which Henry sought to escape, only to rediscover through this homecoming that he belongs to it indelibly. This familial context is composed not only of the characters (the mother, the siblings, the father’s friends and the barroom regulars, the neighbors who endure the father’s excesses), but also includes objects (above all, wine and food) and the memories of a childhood deeply shaped by Italian roots. *The Brotherhood of the Grape* is the setting of a series of primordial relations that forge profound bonds among men. Emblematic in this regard is the figure of Angelo Musso, a sublime winemaker deprived of speech, who represents a “Greek god” to the members of the brotherhood, and who, when Henry comes to retrieve his father to return him to the hospital, proclaims with wise fatalism: “it’s better to die drinking than to die of thirst” and “it’s better to die among friends than among doctors.” Evident here is a nostalgia for an ancient time in which the rhythm of life and the bonds between men were determined by an authentic wisdom; the relationship with the father, who shaped the lives of all his children without ever succeeding in fulfilling his desire to pass on his craft as an artisan. This is not merely a question of traditional bonds, forged of conflict and affection toward the paternal figure; the core of the narrative lies primarily in the trade of stone quarrying and masonry, handed down to the father by his parents. The children reject this trade, which has weighed heavily upon their lives. The father’s failure in his final endeavor exposes all his fragility and weakness, thereby reopening the relationship with his son, who rediscovers an affection and a bond with his parent, but also with his craft, which had been lost over time due to the presumed omnipotence of the paternal figure. The style recalls that of the great American writers, such as Faulkner and Chandler, yet it is grounded in the deliberate use of words, in their careful juxtaposition so as to articulate a poetic and musical rhythm. The meaning of the narrative emerges not so much from the plot, nor from character study and the description of settings, but above all from the sensations that arise from the sequence of words and sounds.

The title and nineteenth-century framework suggest a great social novel centered on the decline of an upper-bourgeois mercantile family. As often happens with great books, as one delves deeper into the reading (and we imagine the same occurred for the author while writing it), another theme emerges: the unstoppable force driving toward dissolution, decay, and death. To express the novel’s profound meaning, Mann makes brilliant use of music. The adolescent Hanno, the last descendant of an entrepreneurial dynasty, plays “one of his improvisations” on the piano. He plays a motif > extremely simple, (...) a short-breathed invention, a meager invention, which nonetheless acquired a strange, mysterious, and significant value . At first the motif remains in the background, submerged by “bustling runs,” vigorous, as if urging on to “ever new efforts.” Then the first > sweet, wandering, tormenting motif, that first mysterious motif , takes over. > The tide of surfacing cacophonies fell upon her, gathering threateningly, surging forward, retreating, climbing, sinking, and straining once more toward an ineffable goal that had to arrive, to arrive at once, in that very instant, at the dreadful climax where the yearning torment had become intolerable. And it arrived: it could no longer be stopped, the convulsions of longing could be prolonged no more; it came as if a curtain were torn aside, as if gates were flung open (...) it was the motif, the first motif! What brought about the end of the Buddenbrooks was not ruinous speculations, the squandering of wealth through disastrous marriages, or competition from rival merchant families; it was an internal decay, a weariness, a slow yet inexorable loss of the founders’ primal energy. We are in Lübeck, a Hanseatic city on the Baltic Sea, and the story unfolds between 1835 and 1877. The firm of Johann Buddenbrook (founded in 1768) is at the height of its wealth and prestige. The novel centers on the siblings Antoine and Thomas. The first three hundred pages recount how the young Antoine, clever and restless, renounces love out of loyalty to the “firm,” in order to contribute through a marriage of convenience to the family’s good name and prosperity. Already betrothed to a Hamburg merchant, she falls in love with a young man, but upon reading the thick ledger recording the Buddenbrook genealogy, she feels > like a shiver, (...) like a link in a chain, her father had written. Yes, precisely as a link in that chain, she held great importance and responsibility: she was called upon to contribute with deeds and resolve to the history of the family . Antoine unhesitatingly devotes herself to being the vestal virgin of the family, the custodian of an upper-bourgeois decorum. Then emerges the figure of Thomas, who reaches the pinnacle of the social ladder with his election to the city senate. > Thomas Buddenbrook (...) showed in his face and carriage a pronounced sense of dignity; yet he was pale, and his hands especially (...) were as white as the cuffs emerging from his black sleeves, with an icy pallor that betrayed how cold and dry they were. Those hands, whose well-tended oval nails bordered on a bluish tint, could assume at certain moments, in certain postures of convulsive unconsciousness, an indescribable expression of hostile sensitivity and almost morbid reserve—an expression that hitherto had been alien and ill-suited to the rather broad, bourgeois, even if shapely, hands of the Buddenbrooks . From his very appearance, the inner suffering of Thomas is evident—one for whom shouldering the firm and the family is a duty, not a pleasure. > He felt a void in his soul. (...) But his need for action, his restlessness, his activity had been fundamentally different from the tenacious, steady industriousness of his fathers: an artificial thing, then, a craving of the nerves, a narcotic, (...) a martyrdom . Now ill, Thomas confesses to his sister how he has grown increasingly fond of the sea. > Long waves rolling in and breaking, one after another, endlessly, aimlessly, wild and desolate . His sister falls silent: > but one does not say such things! she thought, looking away so as not to meet her brother’s eyes . And so, when in its final pages the novel descends into long descriptions of the deaths of Thomas and Hanno, with sorrowful scenes of the few surviving women, helpless and stunned by the tragedies that have destroyed the Buddenbrooks, we are not surprised; for we are well aware that the vitality, the sense of sacrifice, and the allegiance to a great dynasty have all withered away. The anticipation of death lies at the center of Thomas Mann’s world, and this novel is no exception. At first, death seems distant, for prosperity fosters an atmosphere of placid bourgeois serenity; only the depictions of the characters and their surroundings are soft, ambiguous, decadent. And yet we are in the triumphant nineteenth century! More than the plot, it is the writing that skillfully, subtly conveys the sense of decay. Then, past a certain point, the narrative becomes explicit: the accounts of agony and illness (even of visits to the dentist) are meticulous, attentive to every physical and moral suffering; the settings turn dull, gray, joyless; the characters grow ever sadder. It is neither a social nor a psychological novel; the context always lingers in the background, the characters are drawn through their physical appearance without delving into their emotions or existential conditions: they are brushed in rather than delineated. It is the writing itself that speaks to us, creating the atmosphere, conveying the overall meaning of the novel. Why read it? It is long, at times redundant, but one must let oneself be carried by the words.

The novel recounts the experiences of Japanese women sent to the United States to marry compatriots who had immigrated long before. > Some of us were from a small mountain village in Yamanashi and had only recently seen our first train. Others among us were from Tokyo, and had seen everything, and spoke a beautiful Japanese. (...) Many more of us were from Kagoshima and spoke in a thick southern dialect that those from Tokyo pretended not to be able to understand. (...) On the boat we were mostly virgins. (...) We had long black hair and broad flat feet and we were not very tall. What did they think when they saw their husbands, so different from the photographs in age and appearance? “The past was behind us, and there was no way of going back.” The novel follows these women into a reality where they must say > Yes, sir, or No sir, and do as they were told, Better still, say nothing. You belong to the invisible world . They learn to obey, to work hard, to speak English, or at least enough words to survive, and they even take lovers or find husbands among the Americans: they are hardworking and docile, just as men like them to be. When World War II breaks out, from good immigrants the Japanese turn into traitors, spies, and enemies, to be interned in concentration camps. And so Japanese women, even those married to Americans, find themselves locked away. “The Japanese had disappeared from our towns. And soon,” you can still see the official notices posted on telephone poles, (...) but they are already beginning to fray and fade. (...) What those instructions were exactly, no one can clearly remember. (...) In autumn there is no Buddhist harvest festival..(...) All we know is that the Japanese are out there somewhere, in one place or another, and we will probably never meet them again in this world.” To make overall sense of the novel, one can start from the title *The Buddha in the Attic*, banally translated into Italian as *Venivamo tutte dal mare* > . Japanese identity, a blend of Buddhism and Shinto, is put away in the attic the moment the women arrive in America: the new culture must be assimilated, they must become American. It is a mere suspension, because when they are consigned to an unknown place, a non-place > , these women disappear; they are no more; it is as though they had never been. There are two chapters worth reading: *Come, Japanese!* > the journey of these women: nostalgia and the severance of ties, fear and anticipation. These are the components of exile, whatever the origin and destination, feelings common to so many migrants. *The Disappearance* > recounts the evaporation of the Japanese, and the mind wanders to an evanescent novel by Coetzee (see on this site *The Childhood of Jesus* > ). The author intended to give the narrative a choral quality. To achieve this end, she resorted to a literary device: the use of the "we" when recounting the lives of the women, and the impersonal form when narrating the disappearance of the Japanese people. Unwilling to follow the stories of individual women, making them protagonists in their own right, she turned them into a mass, weighing down the narrative and rendering the novel verbose and repetitive. Why not read it? It is boring.

Kosovo is a small Balkan state, nestled between Serbia and Albania: it declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and is inhabited by an overwhelming Albanian majority, alongside a Serbian minority along the border with Serbia. The latter has not recognized Kosovo, and the Serbian community lives in a state of suspension, in constant tension with the Albanians. In Sumor, the small village where the novel is set, > almost everyone had remained to live there, perpetually suspended between choice and damnation. They had adapted to the inclemencies of History, surviving as best they could. Miroslav is the village doctor, esteemed by all, Albanians and Serbs alike: a man who has always sought to keep to the sidelines, quiet and balanced, letting himself drift along with the flow of life. Thus Ludmila, the peculiar sister of his best friend, teasingly mocks him: > Miroslav, Miroslav. With such a name, / will you manage to become a lion? / Or will they sing over your corpse, / oh Miroslav, Miroslav, glory to calm?. But is this very meekness the man’s true nature? Often Miroslav recalls his mother’s last words: > I always thought you had killed someone, (...) the more people spoke well of you, the more I understood you were hiding something. The man’s dark side emerges when he has himself elected mayor of the village, in the hope of mending relations between Albanians and Serbs; he seems the right person, yet he would need to display a courage and determination that he unfortunately lacks. The man dispatched from Serbia to act as shadow mayor, on the other hand, has them to spare. Humiliated and marginalized, Miroslav feels the desire to kill for the first time. In a delirium, aided by a few drinks too many, he dreams of going to the man and shooting him. > The deafening gunshot startles him, he recoils, he fails to register what happens to the man he has shot; he can only discern the splatters of blood on his pajamas. (...) In the darkness before his eyes, the figure of his mother in the hospital bed materializes, along with that final question she had asked him before dying: > have you killed someone? She already knew back then; it was a question coming from the future!. It is only the dream of an anguished man. The plot will take a surprising turn, which I do not wish to reveal. The good conduct > of Miroslav as mayor does not alter the condition of the small village, for better or worse. Everything remains locked in a fragile stillness; the past continually resurfaces with its wounds and rancor; there is nothing left to do but flee or conform. The novel can be read as a metaphor for contemporary reality. Indeed, we all live in a claustrophobic world, waiting for a change that never arrives. We are inundated with apocalyptic reports, with high-sounding declarations, yet nothing seems to alter; everything remains motionless. We dwell in an enormous dystopia, within which we forge relationships, dream of the past with nostalgia, and draft the future without knowing whether it will ever genuinely come to pass. The interpretive key of the metaphor lends the novel a universal dimension that extends far beyond the small village of Sumor; this approach, however, relegates Kosovo and its tragedy to the background. Along with Bosnia and Herzegovina, this small nation has lingered for decades in a state of suspension: sustained by the European Union, opposed by Serbia, its inhabitants live as though in a prison, oppressed by a past that shows no sign of dissolving, within a forgotten and suffering microcosm. The author’s gentle and affectionate irony, her deft narration, and the cast of characters conceal the drama in which the population lives; and while underscoring its universal value, she neglects the claustrophobic plight reminiscent of Dino Buzzati’s tales, characterized by an oppressive dread (see the review of *Sessanta Racconti* on this site). > Taking the pill at the fountain / is better than rum from Havana , hummed the eccentric Ludmila as she tossed back her daily dose of psychotropic medication. The narrative structure centers upon the cast of characters: Miroslav and his wife, with their weary marriage; the homecoming of Zbranko, in search of a center of gravity; the eccentric and intriguing figure of Ludmila (in Serbian, dear to madness") and her romance with Nebojia, the shadow mayor, an ingenuous and ill-mannered petty delinquent. The novel's merit lies precisely in its ability to delineate these figures, skillfully portraying their personalities and their mutual relationships. Sumor remains in the background, a setting for personal histories that do not seem to possess any genuine development. The psychological depth, the oneiric brushstrokes of the narrative, the character profiles, and the lightness of touch are the novel’s fundamental virtues. Why read it? It is well written, yet one comes away somewhat disappointed: one expected it to speak of Kosovo.

The year is 1873 and Butcherʼs Crossing is a Kansas town, in reality a small settlement of buffalo hunters. Andrews is a twenty-year-old youth; he has abandoned Boston for a vague notion of freedom. > Sometimes, after listening to the hushed voices in church and school, he would pass beyond the borders of Cambridge into the lands and woods lying to the southwest. There, in some solitary place, standing motionless upon bare ground, he felt his mind fill with the clear air and plunged into infinite space: the emptiness and constraint he felt were dissolved in the wild nature that surrounded him . The young man meets a hunter and allows himself to be drawn into a venture: to go beyond the Great Plains, into the mountains, where thousands of buffalo still graze. > He realized that the hunt was merely a stratagem, a deception practiced upon himself. (...) No business impelled him... he was going there for freedom . An odd team is assembled: Miller the leader, a paranoid hunter who kills buffalo for the sheer pleasure of it, and not merely out of greed; Schneider, a pragmatic and cynical man, tasked with skinning the beasts with Andrewsʼs help; and with them an old alcoholic madman, Charley Hoge. With this group, Andrews ventures into the Wild West—at once an adventure and a physical and spiritual transformation. They represent another vastness and another horizon, yet the young manʼs mind remains “full of the wonders he had known as a child.” Francine, a prostitute, tells him affectionately, smiling gently: > you will come back; but you wonʼt be the same. You wonʼt be so young; you will become like the others. Andrews looked at her, confused, and in his confusion cried out: I will only become myself . The stages of his transformation, from youth to adulthood, are marked by the different phases of the journey. First, they travel for many days across the Great Plains, and Andrews must accustom himself to the long hours on horseback in a flat and monotonous landscape: > he felt like the earth, identityless and formless (...), he sensed his body slowly becoming lean and strong: he thought at times that he was entering into a new body, or a real body, previously concealed by an unnatural softness, whiteness, and delicacy . The second phase consists of the buffalo hunt: the merciless slaughter, the beast skinned and butchered. > To Andrews, the entire business seemed like a dance, a dark minuet ; the endless slaughter like > a mechanism, an automation, (...) like a cold, senseless response to life. (...) He realized he was turning away not out of some womanish nausea at the blood, (...) but from the shock of seeing the buffalo, moments before proud and noble and full of dignity, now stripped and helpless, an inert piece of flesh. (...) Its being had been killed, and in that killing he felt the destruction of something within himself, and he was unable to face it . And finally, there is the long winter: the group finds itself trapped by snow until spring, freezing and completely isolated. > He came to accept the silence in which he lived, and no longer sought any meaning in it. (...) He vaguely recalled the comforts of his home in Boston; but that seemed unreal and distant, and of those thoughts there remained only faint ghosts of remembrance : a sort of alienation, a loss of consciousness and identity. The wilderness, inscrutable and indifferent, gets the better of the young manʼs dreams: it creates a hard man, incapable of affection, solitary and individualistic. And when the party finally returns to Butcherʼs Crossing, having lost their entire cargo of hides while crossing a swollen river, and when Miller and his men discover that the price of hides has collapsed, that their toil was for nothing, Andrews wonders what the meaning of it all was. Where had he been, and why? Nothing remains but to leave, to take to the road again, alone. > Even now, in the light of dawn, the town was like a small ruin; the light struck the edges of the buildings and made all the more evident a emptiness that was already there. (...) He did not know where he was going; but he knew that (the direction) would come to him later in the day. He rode on unhurriedly, and felt behind him the sun rising slowly and warming the air . One must not be deceived by the story, by the meticulous descriptions of the landscapes and the buffalo hunt: the subject of the narrative is not the Wild West. Nor are we dealing with a *Bildungsroman*, because Andrews has not truly become an adult—borne out by the fact that he abandons the woman, Francine, who welcomed him with love upon his return from the long journey. The subject of the novel is estrangement from the world: the sense of not belonging to anything, a solitary man in an incomprehensible world, devoid of friendships and values. If the great conquest of the West, the American myth, had been this, what would become of the values of community and freedom that nevertheless underpin American society? The novel does not speak of this, though it might seem to; the narrative unfolds within the authorʼs own consciousness, addressing the failed search for a balance between individuality and sociality. The story is very well written. The style is elegant, the sentences flow smoothly and pleasantly, and the documentary element is well integrated with the plot and characters. One senses, however, a pronounced intellectualized quality, something contrived—the product of research rather than a lived world, at least in its ideals. It speaks of wilderness, of men struggling against a hostile environment, but if one compares the novel to the works of Jack London, and in particular to that masterpiece *White Fang*, it becomes quite clear how John Williams is merely yet another intellectual, writing about himself and—why not?—about men and environments he knows only from books, because he has studied them. Why read it? Fine prose, superb descriptions of setting, admirably etched characters.

> My name is Rajab Shaaban. It is not my real name, but one I borrowed. (...) It belonged to someone I knew many years ago . Already from this sentence, which introduces one of the two protagonists, we can grasp several of the novel's hallmark traits: the lie, as both subterfuge and a relish for storytelling; destiny and absolution from sin, for Sha'ban is the eighth month of the year, > when the fortunes of the coming year are decided and the sins of the truly repentant are forgiven ; the flight from memory, > before it becomes so solid as to hold us in its grip and crowd out every other thought . We also stand before a crossroads of civilizations and languages: Shaaban is in England and speaks English—the place and language of the colonizer; he hails from Zanzibar and East Africa, yet the entire narrative is steeped in Arab culture and wondrous, neighboring India. Shaaban has pretended not to know English; an interpreter is needed, and Latif, a young literature professor also hailing from Zanzibar, is called upon. As it happens, Latif’s father is also named Rajab Shaaban; is it a mere coincidence, or does someone else lurk behind this name, perhaps even Saleh Omar, who brought his family to ruin? The lengthy conversation between Shaaban and Latif, indicatively titled "Silence," is preceded by two preparatory sections. The first, "Flotsam," recounts Shaaban's arrival in England, the divestment of his culture of origin and of his past, like an old piece of furniture, the useless relic of a life that is no more and can never return. One must not be misled by the subtly ironic portrait of English society, nor by the reflections on British colonialism: the true themes are dislocation and remembrance. In the squalid room of the reception centre hangs a mirror, > too wide for that small, dark room, (...) in that oppressive light, my reflection looked like that of a creature suspended in an encroaching gloom, the circle of light slipping into shadow, hanging over my shoulders like a loose noose . But the darkness was precious to him because it was full of "murmurs and whispers," whereas before, (the noises) had been so dreadfully obvious. (...) Moments slip through our fingers. Even as I tell them to myself, I can hear the echoes of what I am suppressing, of something I have forgotten to remember. > The second part is characterized right from its title by narrative realism: Latif is the name by which the young man is known in East Germany, where he went to study, fleeing his family's social and economic decline. Lucidly, almost detachedly, Latif recounts his family’s vicissitudes: the inept, naive father; the mother who uses her beauty to engage in scandalous love affairs; his affection for his older brother and the latter's descent into ruin up to his disappearance; and the figure of Hussein, a Mephistophelian character, manipulator, and rogue. It is a commercial society built on deals, trade, negotiations, ups and downs, where one must be shrewd and where reputation is paramount. A prosperous transit hub of trade between India and the Arab-Muslim world, Zanzibar is swept away and impoverished by oppressive, obtuse British rule; yet it endures, ever in search of new commerce and sources of wealth. It will not be the colonialists who destroy Latif's family, but familial rivalries, Hussein's deceit, and Saleh Omar’s lust for financial retribution—Saleh Omar being, in Latif's eyes, the true culprit. Yet, into this expansive social chronicle, something magical creeps in. In rationalist East Germany, in the cradle of Marxism-Leninism, Latif has been deceived: he believed he had an epistolary romance with a young German woman, only to discover that she is a fifty-year-old lady who concocted stories, eager to dream and recount something out of the ordinary. And here we come to the pivotal section of the novel. Latif visits Shaaban to understand what happened, to complete those missing stories, (...) like a child or something like that, when your parents tell you what you did and said, and you have no memory of it." Yet, "some things are not worth knowing." And why does Shaaban agree to tell his tale? "I needed to be released. Not to be forgiven and cleansed of my sins. (...) I needed to be released from the burden of events and stories that I had been unable to tell, and that in telling I would fulfill the strong longing I felt to be heard and understood > . Shaaban is not interested in telling the truth; on the contrary, his narration of events transforms him from culprit into victim, destabilizing Latif. Shaaban needs to tell stories, like the narrators of *One Thousand and One Nights* (see review on this site), like Herman Melville's *Bartleby, the Scrivener*, "the unshakeable authority of that man's defeat, of the noble futility of his life > : in short, a fabricator of words. As in the *Odyssey* (see review on this site), the reader no longer wonders whether Ulysses is telling the truth or lying shamelessly: one surrenders to the spell of the narrative, to a fascinating, magical world of family quarrels, love and betrayal, lost affections and vendettas, until poor Latif loses all certainty about his own past; only in this way is it possible to begin a new life, to forget to remember. It is a mistake to chase the plot, to make futile attempts to reconstruct the backstory, to bring order to the characters and their mutual ties. To appreciate the novel, one must allow oneself to be carried along by the fluidity of the prose, as when floating in a splendid, saline, deep sea, yielding to the currents, swimming only occasionally to regain one's bearings. As in Dino Campana's *Canti Orfici*, the narrative winds around itself again and again, abandons and resumes, views the same episode from different angles; only occasionally does it open a parenthesis on history and society, but that is not what matters; what the author is eager to explore are the charms and perils of remembrance, the necessity of abandoning memory—as a mere chronicle of what has been—to advance into the present. To this end, the lie is also useful. The novel's flaw is not confusion or fragmentation; it is that in the end it runs on so long as to become verbose and redundant. The contamination of the English language can occur in many ways. Think of Nadine Gordimer, the great Achebe (see the review of *Things Fall Apart*") and Chimamanda Adichie ("*Half of a Yellow Sun* > on this site), where indigenous tongues innervate the English language, which retains its composure while enriching itself with new lexicon; think of the talented NoViolet Bulawayo, who transitions effortlessly from Zimbabwean English to the slang of American teenagers (see *We Need New Names* > ), and finally the D'Annunzian Salman Rushdie, with his magnificent neologisms (see his masterpiece *Midnight's Children*" also on this site). In Gurnah we encounter an elegant, clean style, which finds in the very fluidity of its storytelling the imprint of Arabic and East African languages. Why read it? It is captivating to get swept up in, if a little too long.

This short novel recalls a novella by Giuseppe Verga: *La Varanisa* (see the review of *Le novelle* on this site). The Sicilian writer admirably synthesizes the peasant condition by describing the feet of a wretched girl: > those feet accustomed to walking in the snow and on rocks scorched by the sun, to tearing themselves on thorns, or hardening on stones, could have been beautiful . In the same way, Amado repeatedly emphasizes the large feet produced by the harvesting and processing of cocoa on the vast Brazilian *fazendas*. > The cocoa was dumped into the troughs to ferment for three days. (...) Then, freed from its pulp, the cocoa was put out to dry in the sun in the drying trays. There too we danced on it and sang. Our feet grew broad, our toes splayed. (...) Jaca! Jaca! The children climbed the trees like little monkeys. The jackfruit fell—thud!—and they pounced on it. (...) Their broad feet were like those of adults, their bellies swollen, huge, from the jackfruit and the dirt they ate . The young Amado chronicles the lives of day laborers on the vast cocoa plantations: > that yellow fruit, with sweet seeds, which made them prisoners of a life of dried meat and jackfruit ; "a proletarian novel" imagined as written by a young man reduced to poverty by the greed of a capitalist uncle; exploited and humiliated in factory labor, he pursues a nebulous destiny of redemption among the field hands, among the *affittati*, forced to work like slaves for the great landowners. What drives him? To belong among the wretched of the earth, to break radically with the ambiguities of the bourgeoisie in order to discover that the future lies solely in solidarity among the poor, in their desperate and resolute resistance to exploitation and abuse of power. The narrative bears the stamp of the social novel: a sort of Brazilian Émile Zola, Amado intends to describe coldly—"naturally," as Boccaccio might say—the peasant condition and the transformation of the young narrator and protagonist into an experienced and wretched field hand. The stages of this transformation, both physical and mental, are marked by the grand themes of humanity: the environment, magnificent and violent; communal life, complete with its festive moments; friendships and loves; revulsion toward the ruthless, greedy master and his arrogant, amoral family; the gradual awakening of class consciousness; and ultimately, taking a definitive stand. The protagonist courts the owner’s daughter, who wishes to marry him. > We will do what cannot be undone. (...) You will become a master. I bowed my head to stare at the ground. I was piling up leaves with my hand. (...) No, Maria. I will keep working. If you want to become the wife of an *affittato* . One must not be deceived by the spare, almost investigative style. A certain sense of the fantastical, the unreal lingers, fed by an ambiguous relationship with cocoa, as though amid such wonder social redemption were inevitable. > Darkness enveloped everything. Guitars wept, birds chirped. The golden cocoa fruits and the serpents. Stars shone in the sky. The lanterns along the road looked like souls taking flight. Night on the *fazenda* is sad, gloomy, painful. It is at night that people think...(...) We looked at the cocoa plantation and could find no answer. The question that naturally arises upon reading *Cacao* is whether the human condition of the poor is not fundamentally the same across all latitudes. What difference is there between the characters of this novel and the protagonists of Verga’s *I Malavoglia*, Zola’s *Earth* and *Germinal*, or Steinbeck’s *The Grapes of Wrath* (see the reviews on this site)? Always the same desperate struggle for survival under the rapacious, ruthless weight of the rich? There seems to be no hope, leaving the intellectual with nothing but a resigned detachment: at times adopting a socialist rhetoric (see the "manifesto" section of *The Grapes of Wrath*), in other cases merely describing while invoking literary justifications, as with Verga’s *verismo*, and in still others withdrawing into a melancholic irony, as in Jorge Amado’s later books. It is as if the writer and the poet have accepted defeat, entrusting journalism with the task of reminding us, without exaggeration, that social suffering exists in the world, and not merely bourgeois torments. I read the book after the great lexical and imaginative binge of *Grande Sertão: Veredas* (see the review on this site), which makes Amado’s essential, linear style feel like fresh air—like plunging into clear waters over a sandy bed, free from the lights and shadows of deep, reef-strewn seas. The sentences are short, the adjectives few; the charm of the narrative relies on the events themselves, as if they spoke on their own. Yet, what nostalgia for the writing of João Guimarães Rosa! Why read it? A great social novel.

It would be wrong to think that this novel is about Afghanistan, which nonetheless constitutes its frame of reference. The theme of the book is cowardice. Amir lives in a fine house in Afghanistan with his father, an important and courageous man, and two servants, Ali and his son Hassan. The latter is Amir’s childhood friend, whom Amir treats with arrogance, albeit tempered by brotherly affection, believing himself superior in caste and culture, and envious of his father’s affection for Hassan. Amir and Hassan are champion kite runners, and on the very day of Amir’s greatest triumph—having won the kite tournament—he fails to intervene to save his friend, who is beaten and raped by Assaf. Amir is a coward, and this guilt haunts him throughout his life, even when he is forced to move to America, marries, and becomes a renowned writer. Only by returning to Afghanistan to rescue Hassan’s son will Amir succeed in redeeming his own cowardice, discovering along the way that his father—to him, an unattainable, flawless figure—was not blameless either, having never told him that Hassan was his brother. The first hundred pages of the book, which recount Amir’s childhood in a peaceful and happy Afghanistan, are very fine, written in a delicate and poetic style. Subsequently, the book loses its luster, ultimately losing its way in the final twenty pages, which recount how the protagonist manages to bring the child to America. The closing scene, a kite tournament in America, is predictable and trite, partly undermining the spiritual and narrative depth of the novel. In this final section, the only scene of real impact is Amir’s fight with Assaf, who has become a ruthless Taliban commander and reduced the boy to his sex slave. Assaf is beating Amir to death, yet Amir is content because he is finally freeing himself from the guilt that has haunted him all his life; he is ultimately saved by the intervention of the boy, who strikes Assaf with a slingshot.

Grossman lost a son, killed during military service. It is a wound so immense that he feels > mutilated in memory.... a prisoner of a remote cell in the penitentiary of my spirit , as though "my life resembled something that never happened." And so he feels the need to create a tale. > That motherfucking thing that happened to me and my son, yes, I must blend it into a story, I must. With a plot, and imagination! And visions and freedom and dreams! Let it burn! A boiling pot!.... if I do not write I will not even be able to understand who he is now, my son, I mean Grossman imagines a village where everyone has lost a child, but they cannot fully express their despair by decree of the duke—that is, of power: > indifferent, slow, sluggish, without a doubt: an exemplary duke . The scribe is tasked with spying on the inhabitants to monitor any violations of the ban. In a way, he performs the function of the external narrator. He transcribes the voices of the grieving parents who, as in a Greek tragedy’s chorus, cry out in a funereal chant—at once sweet and wrathful—their own stories and their yearning to have their child back. Their chant gives voice to all the nostalgia and anguish of a bond between parent and child abruptly severed: the tender memory of birth and of his boyhood, the remorse of not having been a good father, of not having been close to him, the desire to smell his scent, if only for one last time, to touch his skin, to embrace him. > And suddenly, inside us, rises the vapor of his whole body, intact, and for an instant we can imagine: he is here . The immobility of grief could last forever, but it is broken by a man who decides to set out toward "down there," where he believes his son to be. The man’s desperate act sets the other inhabitants in motion as well. As in a sacred procession, they walk toward that mysterious place that is the afterlife. Their march halts before a wall, in front of which they drop to their knees > and each of them, and each of us, whispers their child's name And then Grossman understands that his son is dead: > I recognize the truth of these words. He is dead, he is dead, but his death has not died . Memory detaches itself from pain and, as far as possible, we remember without suffering. Yet then the story, like the ritualization of mourning, allows the son to be distanced: > it is only that my heart breaks, my darling, at the thought that I could find words for all of this . The book is a hybrid of prose and verse poem. Written in prose are the notes of the scribe and the reflections of the Centaur—half writer and half desk—who unquestionably represents the author. The verse structure is used for the chorus, which serves two functions: recounting the dialogues between the various characters, who, rather than speaking to one another, communicate with their lost child; and giving collective voice to the "wanderers," the group heading into the afterlife in search of their deceased children. The narrative form is typical of Greek tragedy, with the significant difference that there is no plot development, no final moment of genuine catharsis. There is no dramatic tension in the overarching plot; in fact, there is no real story. On the other hand, the narrative is introspective, entirely contained within the author's consciousness. The setting is Kafkaesque, surreal, not tragic. It is an interior journey in which the characters are nothing more than instantiations of Grossman’s despair, of his anguish, and of his desperate attempt to accept the death of his son. The lack of a narrative plot allows the detail to prevail over the overarching world of the tale. The narration fractures into poetic fragments, evocative in themselves, yet isolated and sprawling within a narrative context devoid of development. The reader must therefore surrender to the spell of individual words and phrases. Consider the following passage: > as in the moment when a newborn bursts from the womb and from the mother's body, my son's death transformed me into the father I never was, pierced me with a tear and a wound and a sense of emptiness, while filling me with his presence, which has overwhelmed me ever since with an intensity never before seen. His death made me capable of conceiving him. His death made me an empty shell of a father and also of a mother. His death leads me to bare a breast to one who will never suckle, and upon the walls of my womb, formed that day, carves with the nails of an escaping prisoner the tally of days spent without him. Thus, with a transparent chisel, his death carved into me an awareness: whoever loses a child is inevitably a woman . Why not read it? Too many evocations within a story devoid of narrative rhythm. In the end, it is boring.

The protagonist returns to Trieste to await custody of her son. In an exhausting wait, mingled with encounters and tragic events (the murder of a young woman), the protagonist experiences the sensation of losing herself. > Suddenly, as if that silence had reached its critical point, the air seemed to congeal, shattering into petals that slipped, swaying, along the pale wall. A rapid decomposition, the dust motes fermenting unforeseen transparencies. In that pause, alarmed glances resumed, and a sense of menace took shape in the atmosphere . The sentence I have quoted encapsulates the virtue and the limitations of the book. One is confronted with refined writing, more akin to poetry than to prose, yet the pursuit of preciousness fragments the narrative, leaving the reader in turn disoriented and struggling considerably to grasp the meaning of the whole. Why not read it? It ought to be read in small doses, but I was unable to finish it.

The book brings together football-themed short stories by various noir writers, some well-known—such as Aykol, Giménez-Bartlett, Malvaldi, and Manzini—others less familiar: Gian Mauro Costa, Francesco Recami, and Gaetano Savatteri. The plots, characters, and writing styles vary, yet a common thread emerges: football, even at the amateur level or played in the minor leagues, is invariably a sordid, violent affair that brings out the worst in people. The already established authors are predictable: the narrative patterns are those of their novels, unfortunately compressed within the short story form, inherently brief. The contributions of Costa, Savatteri, and Recami are far more engaging; the first two set their stories in Palermo, while the third unfolds against the backdrop of Milan. Recami’s (*«Progresso - Audace 3-2»*) stands out as the finest story, well worth lingering over for its subject matter and deft narration. We find ourselves at a youth match, with parents cheering from the stands. Gianmarco is eleven years old, wrestling with the typical adolescent doubts about his sexual orientation, compounded by the fact that—being gentle, sensitive, and polite—he is mocked by his teammates with taunts like «Giorgi is gay». A talented player, he is targeted by a boy on the opposing team, egged on by his father («break him, take him down, finish him, kill him...»). The man, > an overweight man in his fifties, a third-generation immigrant from Puglia, rather potbellied , «in the throes of an aesthetic crisis», hurls unspeakable abuse at Gianmarco's mother, slaps her, and unleashes the fury of the other mothers, who chase after him intending to beat him. He takes refuge in an abandoned warehouse, where he is caught by Oleg, a giant of a man, clearly a criminal hailing from who knows which Eastern European country. And here the tables turn for our potbellied bully: the braggart turns into a lamb, such a coward that he literally shits himself, completely unable to protect his family from Oleg's threats and violence. Instead, it will be his wife who shields the children and the home, ready to sacrifice herself to do so; yet how could this be? A woman, belonging to the very sex the potbellied man routinely addressed with terms like: «fucking whore...». Meanwhile, Gianmarco makes an astonishing discovery: a famous player, «one of his idols, a tough guy, someone who commanded respect», had come out as gay. How was this possible? «You shouldn’t be surprised in the slightest», Sciacca the school janitor told him from the heights of his wisdom, > in the world of football, they're all faggots. (...) It was undoubtedly the most intense sex education lesson Gianmarco had ever had, and would ever receive in his entire life. He reflected. There was the principle, there was the truth, that’s why at Juventus they’re all faggots. So if I'm gay, does that mean I'm more manly than the pansies who go with women? The female janitor chimes in. > What are you doing, Sciacca, telling the boys your usual dirty little stories? What on earth are you talking about, we were discussing football. The short story format does not lend itself well to noir: it is too brief to allow for the development and suspense that form the very core of a mystery. It feels like watching an episode of *Murder, She Wrote*: at a certain point it must wrap up, and so the story either tumbles into a predictable denouement or remains suspended, leaving the reader unsatisfied. Of greater merit are the settings, the characters, and above all the prose: the latter occasionally proving to be a pleasant surprise. Why read it? It offers the chance to discover lesser-known, yet valuable writers.

A teacher at the end of his career, married without children, with a wife who is an accountant by trade, decides to recount two pivotal events from his adolescence. Had he been—who knows?—an astronaut, a Silicon Valley adventurer, or simply a sensitive, and therefore fragile, person, he might have given us a tale less prosaic and intellectualized, yet rich in emotion and feeling; instead, the sprawling novel sets out to demonstrate how > the best thing to do in life, to survive, is to bear losses well. (...) the world changing around us does not care how I feel . The novel is divided into two parts. In the first, the setting is a small Montana town: an ordinary family, husband and wife, fifteen-year-old twins, a girl and a boy (our narrator-teacher). The father is strapping, amusing, the classic charmer: a former army officer who, after leaving the armed forces, chased far-fetched schemes, ending up in petty dealings skirting the edge of the law; the mother is slight, shy, introverted, and a dreamer. > The strange union of their ill-matched physical traits is always in my mind as one of the reasons for their tragic end: they were without question simply wrong for each other and should never have married . To the children, home seems normal, until the parents commit an incredible and unpredictable act: a bank robbery, following which they are arrested and sentenced to many years in prison. Why did they do it? What drove them to commit such an absurd act? Never mind the father, superficial and incurably optimistic, but why the mother, so sensible and on the verge of separating from her husband? > She might have felt not despair or terror or greater alienation (which would have been normal). But freedom. From all the forces that oppressed her. She might have concluded that this uncontrolled sensation came directly from the very qualities that isolated her. (...) This might have made her feel better than she had in a long time. The mother is undoubtedly the most interesting character in the novel, and it would have been worthwhile to investigate her further to grasp the full measure of her reckless act, which will lead her to suicide. Yet > my parents began to recede in my vision, as when you are sick and fever shrinks the world and stretches distances. My parents grew smaller and smaller until I was alone in the dimly lit kitchen, and they were on the verge of vanishing, almost disappearing . And indeed, in the novel's second part, the setting and circumstances are far removed from the still-adolescent world of the first. To escape the clutches of the authorities, a friend of the mother takes the boy to Canada, to a small town where her brother Arthur runs a hotel. Here, the narrative takes on an artificial cast, typical of a contrived armchair literary construct. The boy comes of age in short order (a coming-of-age novel?) and is drawn to the figure of Arthur: a cultured yet violent failed revolutionary who seems intent on assuming the role of mentor to the protagonist—a sort of *Great Gatsby*, a mysterious superhero, a failed and nonetheless arrogant intellectual. The friendship between Arthur and the boy ends abruptly when the youth becomes entangled in a murder. Arthur kills two people, and the boy is used, unbeknownst to him, to create a diversion and deceive the victims. And it is then that the protagonist realizes that the only possibility is to maintain life in a generally acceptable state, regardless of the borders crossed: like a puzzle, like a symphony, like > the game of chess, in which the individual competitors are part of a long, single enterprise that pursues a condition not of adversity or conflict, or defeat or even victory, but of an equilibrium underlying it all . It is a cynical and pessimistic conclusion, according to which, in order to survive—to avoid being overwhelmed and destroyed—one must not get involved; that is to say, one must not truly live. It is a dreadful novel, not merely due to its disproportionate length, but above all because it lacks tension, pace, and genuine psychological depth; the characters are stereotypes, mere pretexts for philosophical reflections that are, moreover, frequently impenetrable. The premise upon which the first part rests held real promise: an incomprehensible event upends everyone’s lives; parents can commit acts that alter their children’s lives, radically and for the worse. How often have we seen this happen! Yet the development of the idea disappoints through its absence of emotion, of real suffering. The second part is a series of clichés, of characters and settings that evoke literature rather than real life. What is Canada to the narrator-protagonist? An escape, an unreal country, the setting for his coming-of-age? We will never know, for the pointless digressions are far too numerous. Why not read it? It is long, prolix, tedious, and contrived.

> But look here, my good sir, the two of us cannot go on like this. (...) I haven’t quite grasped what you need, but (...) if I say they did something, they did it, and that is that; you have to believe me, otherwise we might as well drop it. I’m not inventing anything. At most, my memory might fail me . Imagining a dialogue with an interlocutor, Pennacchi adopts a colloquial tone to narrate the saga of the Peruzzis, sharecroppers from the Rovigo area forced to abandon their land under a crushing burden of debt, who travel to the Agro Pontino to colonize the areas reclaimed by the Fascist regime. It is an expansive narrative spanning from the end of the nineteenth century to the early 2000s: a sprawling feast of history and family tribulations that one would wish were a continuation of Riccardo Bacchelli’s *The Mill on the Po*, but unfortunately is not (see the review of Bacchelli’s novel on this site). The Peruzzis are a prototypical large peasant family: anchored by the central figure of the mother and an extensive brood of restless sons and daughters for whom suitable husbands must be found. While in the others the inherited “fury” is tempered by deference to social conventions and expedient cohabitation (with the landlord, the authorities, and fellow peasants), Pericle, the favored second son, cannot contain himself, especially after his experience on the front lines of the First World War. He rebels against the agricultural workers' leagues that still dominated the countryside, throws in his lot with the *squadristi* to the point of murdering an anti-Fascist priest, and, having fallen in love with Armida, a captivating beekeeper, takes her as his own and marries her despite her initial rejection. His active adherence to Fascism enables Pericle to appeal to a powerful *gerarca* to secure a settlement for the family in the Agro Pontino. The Peruzzis' establishment in the still-marshy terrain, the discovery of a different rural reality (with the crucial role played by the cattle), and the founding of Littoria are the most compelling parts of this long novel, not least because it is evident that Pennacchi possesses a thorough knowledge of the region's history, and especially of its reclamation canals, including the Canale Mussolini. Had he explored the colonization of the Agro Pontino more deeply through the perspective of a peasant family, the novel would have attained significant social weight; instead—who knows why?—the author felt compelled to traverse the entirety of modern Italian history: the Ethiopian War, the North African campaign, the partisan resistance, and so forth. The conversational register degenerates into a soliloquy of banal, inaccurate ruminations, a cloud of dust into which Pennacchi dumps his entire ideological baggage; despite the social and political upheavals, the Peruzzis remain frozen like “marble statues,” forever unchanged and deferential to ancestral codes. Even when Armida betrays Pericle, everything is smoothed over beneath the protective wing of the great matriarch, ever vigilant in safeguarding the family’s unity. One detects a sort of nostalgia for a harsh yet orderly world; but perhaps this is merely the reader's yearning to find some genuine sentiment within a narrative that seems to serve only as a pretext for verbose outpourings. The novel has been adapted into a graphic novel by Graziano and Massimiliano Lanzidei alongside Mirka Ruggeri. Setting aside the draughtsmanship, which I am not qualified to appraise, the translation into “comic” form injects dynamism into the plot, bringing several figures into sharper relief: Armida (the carnal passion kindled by her young nephew, the maddened swarm of bees as misfortune gathers), Adelchi, transformed by the Ethiopian War into a racist Fascist, and the young Pericle and Iseo, the designated casualties of an uncritical, opportunistic adherence to Fascism. The graphic novel redeems the book, yet it accentuates the characters’ rigidities—perhaps deliberately—while the Agro Pontino fades, the pencil failing to conjure the atmosphere of the reclaimed lands, much as the author's own pen fails to do. Why skip it? It is verbose; you are better off buying the “comic.”

The case of Grazia Deledda was a singular one: the only Italian Nobel laureate honored as a prose writer (Montale and Quasimodo were poets; Pirandello and Dario Fo essentially dramatists), Deledda’s oeuvre unsettled our literary establishment, which puzzled for a long time over the reasons behind the prize. As had already happened with Matilde Serao, critics sought to pigeonhole Deledda within literary schools, denying her autonomy and originality: a failed *verista*, the very accusation leveled at Serao? A corollary of Verga and D’Annunzio? Of Federico Tozzi, to whom she was bound by deep friendship? Lyric–visionary and symbolist? It would have sufficed to read her without prejudice to discover how unique Deledda is in Italian literature: an ancestral author, she speaks of sorrow as destiny, of life as a journey toward an elusive haven of stillness (death?), of a living, magical, and indecipherable nature, indifferent to the suffering of mankind. > The red twilight glow, overcome near the altar by the gleam of tapers, covered the crowd as if with a veil of blood, but little by little the veil turned black, faintly illuminated by the gold of the candles. The crowd could not bring itself to leave. (...) It was like the distant murmur of the sea, the stirring of the forest at vespers; it was an entire ancient people moving on, moving on, chanting the naive prayers of the early Christians, moving on, moving on along a dark road, intoxicated with sorrow and hope, toward a place of light, yet distant, unreachable . If we limit ourselves to the plot, one cannot but share the judgment of Benedetto Croce, for whom Deledda’s novels were > all equally plausible, and none fashioned in such a way as to leave a deep impression on the hearts and imaginations of readers . To grasp the emotional and spiritual power of *Canne al vento*, one must let go, surrendering to her prose, beyond the storyline. The novel’s protagonist is Efix, the old servant of three women, once well-off landowners and now reduced to living off the yield of a “smallholding,” tended by the man. The narrative opens precisely in this corner of the world. > The moon rose before him, and the voices of the evening warned the man that his day was done. It was the rhythmic call of the cuckoo, of early crickets, an occasional bird's cry; it was the sigh of the reeds and the ever-clearer voice of the river: but above all it was a breath, a mysterious panting that seemed to rise from the earth itself; yes, the working man’s day was over, but the fantastical life of elves, fairies, and wandering spirits was beginning. (...) Efix heard the sound the *panas* (women who died in childbirth) made washing their clothes down at the river, (...) and believed he caught a glimpse of the *ammattadore*, an elf with seven caps inside which he keeps a treasure, leaping here and there under the almond grove, pursued by vampires with steel tails. Nature, inhabited by malignant spirits, mirrors and feeds the terrible secret Efix harbors within: he killed his mistresses' father, an authoritarian and violent man; he did so to allow the other daughter to flee, to find freedom on the mainland. It is also for this reason that Efix has dedicated his life to the three women, to whom he is bound by a deep tie, as servant, friend, and protector. He wishes for them to be well; he fears dying before seeing them safe, delivered from poverty, with another man to protect them. When Giacinto arrives—the son of the sister who fled to the mainland—Efix hopes he might be the right person, capable of restoring prosperity and peace to his mistresses. He is mistaken: Giacinto is a petty rogue, who flirts with a local girl and flatters Noemi, the youngest and proudest of the women. What is more, Giacinto loses substantial sums gambling, pledging as collateral the “smallholding,” their sole source of income. Efix was unable to defend them, to protect them; thus, he flees, leaves the village behind, and embarks on a prolonged wandering across the Nuoro region, keeping company with beggars and asking for alms at the numerous village festivals. It is a journey that leads nowhere. > A nightingale sang on the solitary tree still suffused with smoke. All the cool of the evening, all the harmony of the serene distances, and the smile of the stars to the flowers and the smile of the flowers to the stars, and the proud joy of the handsome young shepherds and the pent-up passion of the women in red corsets, and all the melancholy of the poor who live waiting for the scraps from the rich man’s table, and the distant sorrows and the hopes beyond, and the past, the lost homeland, love, crime, remorse, (...) the laughter and weeping of the world, trembled and vibrated in the notes of the nightingale atop the solitary tree that seemed taller than the mountains, its crown grazing the sky and the tip of its last leaf driven into a star. And Efix began to weep. He did not know why, but he wept. He felt as though he were alone in the world, with only the nightingale for a companion. (...) All the elves and monsters had stirred and were dancing in the shadows, pursuing and surrounding him . Efix will return home and die in peace, because Noemi has agreed to marry a cousin of hers, a wealthy landowner. The happy-ending narrative, steeped in religiosity, drains the novel of its tension: it is an awkward and affected attempt to give meaning to Efix’s life, to offer us hope. Yet that is not how it is. Like the grieving parents in David Grossman’s *Falling Out of Time*, we all walk in a sacred procession toward that mysterious place that is the hereafter. Yet our march grinds to a halt before a wall. All is silence. "A yellow point shone behind a castle (...). Slowly its light illuminated the entire mysterious landscape, and as if at the touch of a magic finger everything vanished; an azure lake flooded the horizon (...) In the silence, the stream beat like the blood of the sleeping valley. And Efix felt death drawing near, slowly, as if climbing silently up the path, accompanied by a cortege of wandering spirits, by the beating of clothes by the *panas* down at the river, by the gentle fluttering of innocent souls transformed into leaves, into flowers.... Why read it? No one in our literature has sung of living nature with such depth.

> The whole world was full of enchantments brewing in the sprawling mist. The blocks of lava turned into fortresses, the rock peaks into towers.... the mist hovered over the valleys, transforming them into boiling cauldrons, cauldrons of the Norns, and glided over the lava, over sacred places, over distant heights invisible from the beaten horse trails. And the mist pours in. Where do you come from? What are you waiting for? Do you have something ahead of you?, something behind? Or is it just this, just your life, here and now, which is to say nowhere? How, why, you? An unreal atmosphere and existential anguish run through the entire novel. We are in the Middle Ages, in mythical Iceland; Sturla is a historical figure who pursues the ambitious design of unifying the whole island. In the first part of the book—the most evocative, perhaps because it is set amidst the mysterious nature of an island cold and warm at the same time—the easy friendship of youth turns into betrayals, killings, and violence that mark the relentless clan warfare. The opening storm scene is magnificent, where solidarity allows the group of youths to survive: yet it is a bond that can endure only in dreams, within an enchanted castle from which one must emerge to meet one's destiny: > then he was overcome by such a torpor that it was impossible for him to stay awake. And it was as if the halls within were closing themselves into the mountain. It seemed to him that he started awake, and that the landscape vanished into the mist. Then he woke. And never again did he find that castle and its dwellers . The inter-clan feud drives Sturla to commit crimes, even against the Church. In the second part of the novel, Sturla goes on a pilgrimage to Rome to seek absolution: a journey across a medieval Europe torn apart by violence, through a bleak, somber landscape. Remorse haunts Sturla, manifesting in nocturnal nightmares, in terrifying visions of butchered bodies. Great must be his surprise when what greets him is not a holy city, but a picturesque and corrupt Rome, which absolves him in a surreal, Dionysian, Felliniesque scene, amidst masked figures more befitting an orgiastic revel than a ceremony of expiation. On his return from Rome, Sturla stops in Paris to master the arts of black magic, thereby gaining another means to conquer Iceland. The third part of the novel is an epilogue. Sturla embarks on new battles and commits further atrocities: but he is no longer sure of himself; his weakness will ruin him and lead to his death. He is now a two-faced man, like a legendary figure of whom it was said that > on one side his face was ugly and frightening, and so too was his body, while on the other it was as fair and handsome as one could ever desire . The strength and weakness of the novel lie in its fragmentation: a sequence of scenes, formed by an accumulation of episodes and dreams, the character's thoughts, sustained by an evocative prose that in some respects verges on poetry. Although deeply rooted in the Icelandic setting, from which it draws its fascination and inspiration, what truly emerges is the drama of a man moving toward modernity, unable to let himself be confined, or curtailed, by the rules of medieval society. In his doubts and internal conflict, Sturla is truly a two-faced character: the past, and his social role, which demands he be a warrior and clan chieftain; and the awareness of existential futility, of becoming. In the titular chapter, the metaphysical description of the morning crystallizes this suspension and illuminates the allure of the writing. > It is morning. All was still as the sun climbed the mountain ridge, first flooding the pass with light, then hastening to embrace rock faces and crags. It softened boulders and jagged stones, whitening some, gilding others, blunting the harshness of peaks and cliffs. The wind was so faint that the blades of grass stood motionless, mirrored straight and stiff in the small stream, waiting. For what?. For the time to come, once again. And the flowers exulted when the sun embraced them so gently that not a calyx nor a petal stirred. Neither joy nor sorrow held sway; they were one and the same. They were one and the same, it made no difference. Yet if it was sorrow, it was so mild in that newborn glow, in that golden resurrection, that it was not grief; if, instead, it was joy, it was not happiness. But time lay in wait, with the transience inherent to all things within the eternity of the whole, when everything tends to return to the earth, to crumble and dissolve into primordial matter in search of new, unknown forms . Why not read it? The evocativeness of the vignettes, the depth of the concepts, and the beauty of the natural descriptions fail to compensate for the narrative's fragmentation and the frequent incomprehensibility of its content and sequence of events.

If the Strega Prize has rewarded the best book of the year, one must conclude that Italian literature is in a truly dire state. The book offers two interesting premises. First, the theme of grief, with the difficulty of feeling sorrow over the death of a loved one. The protagonist has indeed lost his wife, yet he exists in a state of suspended animation (hence the title *Quiet Chaos*), being neither shattered by grief nor capable of resuming normal life. Indeed—and this is the second interesting premise—he decides to spend his days waiting outside his daughter’s school. Within this vigil, his life unfolds through a series of encounters: his sister-in-law and his brother, colleagues concerned with the fallout of an ongoing corporate merger, the company’s owners, the prospective buyer himself, and other minor characters. The protagonist remains indifferent to everything happening around him, continuing to wait for something to break this state of limbo. It will ultimately be his daughter who points out that her classmates mock her for his constant presence outside the school, and that it would therefore be advisable for him to return to normal life. The initial premises are therefore interesting, but they dissolve into the banality and superficiality of episodes that lack any clear connection, rendering the story fragmented, prolix, and inconclusive. The narrative device of a first-person account—a tumble of racing words and clauses meant to convey the illogical flow of thoughts—translates into a tedious, ponderous rhythm that fails to penetrate the depths of the situations and emotions. The themes overlap, ultimately obscuring the central issue: the processing of grief.

We stand before one of Salgari’s most astonishing novels. The events of *Capitan Tempesta* are set in 1571 during the Turkish conquest of the island of Cyprus, which until then had been in Venetian hands. But who is Capitan Tempesta? > He was a remarkably handsome youth, indeed too handsome to be a warrior, somewhat tall, slender, elegantly proportioned, with two pitch-black eyes like glowing carbuncles, the mouth of a maiden with superb little teeth... all in all, he seemed more a most graceful maiden than a soldier of fortune . This very introduction by Salgari brings forth the underlying motif of the novel: the disguise of a splendid Neapolitan noblewoman in search of her betrothed, who has been taken prisoner. The plot unfolds around the ambiguity of Capitan Tempesta. A skilled swordsman and valiant combatant, he/she triumphs in duels over the finest opponents, both Christian and Turk, who then fall in love with the courageous maiden. After fighting in the defense of Famagusta and defeating in single combat one of the most renowned warriors of the Saracen army, the Lion of Damascus, Capitan Tempesta rushes to the castle of Ussif, where her beloved fiancé is held captive. Through cunning subterfuge, she manages to enter the good graces of the cruel Haradja, who becomes infatuated with the handsome youth, unaware of her true nature. Capitan Tempesta succeeds in freeing her betrothed and flees by sea, but is overtaken and captured after a typically Salgarian naval battle. She is freed, however, by the Lion of Damascus, who, hopelessly captivated by the young woman, flees with her to Italy (in the meantime, her beloved fiancé has been murdered). All the quintessential ingredients of Salgari’s novels are present, yet with something more. Not only does the narrative skillfully play upon the dual nature of Capitan Tempesta, but the other characters also rebel against the roles to which society seeks to confine them. Take, for example, the surprising and magnificent figure of Haradja. Fate would have her relegated to a harem, among the many wives of a pasha. Yet > I had the blood of a pirate in my veins, and woman though I was, I felt all its savage impulses . She could not help but fall in love with warriors, with a passion that, once spurned, turned into ferocious hatred. Even the opposition between the Christian and Muslim faiths, which at the outset of the book seemed an irreconcilable conflict, gradually tempers as one reads on, because it becomes evident that everyone moves along a ridge where rules and ideologies lose value and substance. Finally, the character of El-Kadur, Capitan Tempesta’s slave, is magnificent. Smitten with the maiden himself ( > I see you again when, on the sandy beach, you held out dripping seawater before me and rested in the shade of the palms, happy to look upon me ) he suffers terribly because he can never make her his. This unrequited love, of which Capitan Tempesta is fully aware, and his longing for “the vast, luminous horizons and the sand dunes” overwhelm the man to the verge of madness. In forms distinct from those of *Il Corsaro Nero*, where all is gloom and sorrow, here too Salgari operates on a psychoanalytic plane, wherein the characters and events are the iceberg of a subterranean world, forged of fantasies—even erotic ones—and of desires for a different life. Why read it? To adventure, it adds the complexity of the characters.

The novel is set in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898, which led to Spain losing its final colonies. A “yacht,” the *Yucatan*, must run the United States naval blockade to bring weapons and provisions to the Spanish troops, who are in dire straits due to the concurrent advance of the pro-independence rebels and the pressure of the mighty American fleet. It is a small vessel, yet a masterpiece of engineering: its engines allow it to reach twenty-six knots, its steel hull is divided into several watertight compartments and fitted with a protective belt made of coconut fibers, rendering it unsinkable. And a marvel of technology! The “yacht” can submerge itself, leaving only its deck visible, so as to appear as a piece of drifting wreckage. Salgari too was dazzled by the wonders of technology, or perhaps sought in this way to emulate the allure of Jules Verne’s *Nautilus*, his direct rival. In command of the *Yucatan* is the Marchioness de Castillo. The Capitana > had a handsome head, crowned with an abundant mane of hair, of a deep, sombre black and wavy like that of Spanish gypsies, (...) she had skin of that lusterless pallor, of a strange hue found only among the Creoles of the Greater Antilles, (...) eyes of a consummate black, (...) long, silky eyelashes, (...) lips as red as a pomegranate. After such a description, we would have expected an enthralling tale like that of *Yolanda, the Daughter of the Black Corsair* or an ambiguous and mysterious one like the story of *Capitan Tempesta* (see reviews on this site); instead, the Marchioness de Castillo remains on the margins, emerging only fitfully and in a supporting role, while the true protagonist is Lieutenant Cordoba, > a sea dog (...) rather short in stature, all sinew and muscle, with an angular face bronzed by the sun of the torrid zone and the brine of the sea air. It is he who leads the *Yucatan* and its crew through a succession of adventures, at sea and on land. In one of these exploits, Cordoba, aboard a small launch, releases torpedoes against a gunboat, blowing it up and clearing the way for the small vessel; in another, the *Yucatan* conceals itself in a sea cave; in yet another, it skillfully slips away amidst a multitude of reefs and shoals. We are on the southeastern coast of Cuba, facing Mexico, riddled with islets and fjord-like sea channels, rich in a luxuriant nature that is consistently depicted in sombre tones, as if to foreshadow the sorrowful conclusion. The sea is inhabited by > splendid jellyfish resembling large lamps of frosted glass, of an exceedingly pale hue ; the flamingos take on a fantastical appearance, with their tails > covered in feathers of a splendid carmine pink, which along the wings turns into a magnificent coral red or fiery red ; in the forests, giant mango trees predominate, with > immense lianas climbing up and down the trunks in a thousand contortions or clinging to an infinity of parasitic plants that formed dense festoons ; and > the air is so heavy with moisture that it corrupts everything , everything spoils, turns moldy, decomposes; over all hangs the terrible yellow fever. Amidst these noxious miasmas, the *Yucatan* runs its final course. The power of the United States is overwhelming! The marvelous vessel cannot be surrendered to the American imperialists; far better to scuttle it with dynamite. > The Marchioness cast a tearful glance upon the smoldering hulk, half-submerged between the water and the sand, and murmured with a sigh: “Our mission is ended!” To a greater extent than in other novels, Salgari the popularizer comes to the fore. Interweaving landscapes familiar to him with the accounts of travelers and geographers (who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, were also possessed of vivid imaginations), the writer depicts the sea and coasts in meticulous fashion, rich in naturalistic and nautical detail. He adopts the same approach in recounting the Siege of Santiago, enumerating American warships and illustrating the various engagements. On one side stand the valorous yet ill-fated Spaniards, and on the other the treacherous Americans, > the financiers' syndicate , the cowardly blacks ( > huge, clumsy hats, gigantic feathers, (...) a frantic trembling) , and the Creoles who lack courage—perhaps, Salgari wonders, owing to the climate or the relentless Spanish oppression. One detects a whiff of racism or, more mundanely, a desire for vindication following Italy's crushing defeat in Ethiopia (the Battle of Adwa took place in 1896). This didactic intent weighs down the narrative pace, fragmented and bogged down by excessive digressions. Moreover, the character ensemble typical of Salgari’s novels, which usually helps leaven the plot, is conspicuously absent: a dark, brooding protagonist flanked by two sidekicks, often lightly ironic and shrewdly pragmatic. Here, Cordoba dominates the scene, a figure far too conscious of his own superiority as an old sea dog to leave room for the other players—even the Capitana herself, who, indeed, professes to be his pupil. Why read it? It is verbose and at times repetitive, yet it offers a compelling glimpse into a little-known chapter of history.

> I wish it were she who wrote about me. To gather thoughts about those years centuries away. To justify my cowardice, my need for certainty... I am a seeker of gold nuggets, I collect precious fragments, intersections of my life with hers, thoughts of her, sudden emotions that interrupted years of my heart's silence, years of absence. I stretch time so as not to reach the epilogue with which I cannot make my peace . The protagonist and narrator, Maria, recounts her life, but above all speaks of her sister, the indecipherable Isabella, with her stark white skin, her > fine hair of an indefinite shade between brown and red, greenish eyes like the bottom of a lake . The sisters possess "opposite natures," yet precisely because of this their bond is profound and troubled, a perpetual pursuit wrought with unspoken words, misunderstandings, and above all, regrets. Childhood sees them closely knit, with Maria fraught with dread over the trouble Isabella might cause—Isabella immediately revealing herself to be adventurous, reckless, and irreverent beside her elder sister, cautious, meticulous, and rational. It is only natural that Isabella should be the first to take an interest in the movements of 1968, dragging into this political chapter a recalcitrant sister and Marco, Maria’s fiancé. Rapidly, the roles are reversed. The mercurial Isabella abandons the revolutionary factions to roam the world, while Maria and Marco become committed activists.Maria’s verdict on those years, so momentous in the history of our country, is merciless. > They did not fundamentally alter the course of my life. They seem distant to me, the words hollow. We wanted to shoehorn the world into a century-old idea. There were no others to be found . Yet for Maria these are momentous years: she marries Marco, has a child, separates, and goes to live on her own. Why, then, is it an insignificant period? The sister's absence weighs heavily, a void she cannot fully bridge through caring for her child, through work and study. And Isabella resurfaces in a singular manner, true to her unpredictable nature. A Turkish man arrives at Maria’s door, sent by Isabella. Mehmet is a man, > built like a wardrobe.. dark eyes and a drooping mustache.. wearing a military overcoat of an undefinable color . A love affair ensues.«I spoke with him as I used to speak with you», Maria will one day say to Isabella, who has just confessed that she too had an affair with the Turk. > Except Mehmet had given himself to both of us by presenting opposite sides of himself. With me he had pretended to be a good husband, telling me I was a strong woman.. and to her, who instead loved taking the plunge, he had offered his experiences and his adventurer’s fantasies . And so the Turk’s coat becomes the metaphor for the relationship between the two women: united yet distant, ever seeking one another out, yet incapable of finding a serene stability in their bond. It takes very little to shatter a fragile equilibrium and lead the two sisters to say and do things they will regret. Isabella returns home pregnant just as Maria is herself expecting a baby girl with Marco, with whom she has reunited. First, Isabella, in a moment of fury toward her sister, causes a car accident that forces Maria into premature labor. Then Maria discovers that Isabella and Marco have shared a kiss. The outrage is such that it drives Maria to write a letter steeped in vitriol: «Stay away from me, you stink, you disgust me». She immediately regrets what she wrote, but fails to reach Isabella, who drowns during a boat trip. > I folded Mehmet’s coat into four and slipped it into a large plastic bag, along with the old clothes... in this anonymous room, on my table, her photographs have multiplied. Now only she lives here; I feel dead. It was not what I wanted . The novel addresses a relationship often left unexamined: that between siblings. Lovers and friends are, in some way, chosen; siblings are found «already given». Yet it is a bond that endures for a lifetime, even if from the intensity of childhood it subsequently wanes into a more distant, often deeply estranged dynamic. «We concealed nothing from one another, at least up to a point». These words, which the author places in Isabella's mouth, encapsulate with great precision the trajectory of a sibling relationship, just as the image of the coat, folded into a plastic bag to be discarded, symbolizes the conclusion—perhaps inevitable—of an «inheritance» of childhood. The new family, formed with a partner, becomes paramount. The prose is spare yet expressive, rich in poetic resonance. The narrative plot is taut, relying more on the description of events and situations than on dialogue—as if to signify the incommunicability that hallmarks the relationships between the characters, particularly between Maria and Isabella. Reflections are entrusted to dreams, introducing occasional yet evocative oneiric vistas. Why read it? A magnificent novel, concise yet intricate.

The novel revolves around a question to which the reader cannot find an exhaustive answer: who is the "Cardillo Addolorato", and what role does this omnipresent and obscure figure play among so many characters? And what is the meaning of the verses that recur throughout the tale, up to its seemingly tragic conclusion: «e vola vola vola lu Cardillo! e vola vola vola... oh! oh!»? To answer, one must venture into the reading of the novel, letting oneself be enchanted by the mystery of narration, which, like life, resides in the > freshness, fluidity, flow and precipitous fall, the continuous vanishing and resurrection of its infinite forms . We are at the end of the eighteenth century, in the midst of the Age of Enlightenment. Three friends—Prince Naville, the merchant Nodier, and the artist Albert—arrive from the cold North in Naples, a "strange city, wretched yet rich, softly colored," alternating "days of a purest, glittering azure" with others rainy and somber. The three young men, > radiant with a gaiety, an excitement, a pride justified by their age and, we might add, by being in a city so full of mirages, pay a visit to a well-known glovemaker. It is in the merchant’s house that the events determining the fate of the three friends unfold. First of all, they meet Elmina. "Full, yet delicate forms, stunning arms," a gaze > grave and reserved... a coldness... a distance, an abyss... that could be conquered (thinks Naville)... that could never be bridged , so it seems to Albert. The impression is so breathtakingly intense as to produce "a bewilderment of the soul"—more mundanely, causing the three young men to fall in love suddenly and like a bolt of lightning. Their lives are marked forever. Yet precisely at this moment of enchantment, a disturbing episode occurs. Elmina's little sister compares Albert to "their old goldfinch," left to die of neglect, without fresh water or millet. From a twofold and contradictory emotion, of ecstatic wonder and gratuitous cruelty, unfolds an apparently senseless story. As in an eternal return, the characters remain the same, events seem to repeat themselves identically, yet continually take on new forms and meanings: the only constant is the presence of the Cardillo, the mysterious bird, "entirely invisible and hidden." After all, is it possible to bestow > a legitimate name on the people and things of this world, all so unclear... and slowly slipping away ? Albert marries Elmina, who has undertaken a mission transcending all love and human bonds, even maternal ones: she must care for a child who might be her secret brother, but, naturally, is not. An imp, an evil spirit, or an innocent soul? In this predicament, poor Albert, a fragile and defenseless soul, cannot but succumb. Nodier, for his part, also in love with Elmina, after daydreaming of marrying her, being the pragmatic and superficial man he is, beats an orderly retreat once the incomprehensible mission the girl has set for herself becomes clear. Naville cannot accept this easy way out; he too is infatuated with Elmina, but, an Enlightenment thinker and cosmopolitan, he stubbornly attempts to find an explanation for incredible and mysterious events, to offer Elmina a definitive and fitting arrangement, showering her with gifts that are always refused, planning to marry her and take her away from Naples. All his efforts are futile, not only because events unfold in an increasingly indecipherable manner (characters are never who he thought they were; even the dead resurface to have their say...), but above all because, at decisive moments, the voice of the Cardillo bursts forth, that agonizing refrain: > Oh, had he never abandoned his home and the dull worldly life of the wealthy, solid, cold, reasonable, and thoroughly respectable society into which he was born! A kind of destiny dragged him to Naples, and against it poor Naville desperately fought, only to end up defeated. The prince returns to his homeland, to his majestic palace in Liège. To anyone who "boasted of that famous, though still newborn Progress," the prince—no longer worldly, no longer amused—would ask whether they > had heard the absolute silence of the world, the imperial joy of dawn.... the presence of the avenging Cardillo . Until one evening, just as he is about to set out once more for Naples, the Cardillo is announced to him. The familiar refrain echoed everywhere, and the prince > (blessed) the Cardillo who was arriving, and would finally explain everything to him. The madness and the separation, the grief and this joy that now arrived with him: all calm, cold, infinite . Who, then, is the Cardillo Addolorato? It is the underworld, the magma bubbling beneath ordering rationality. To grasp the meaning of the goldfinch’s voice, one must be a > patient reader, bereft of common sense and endowed instead with a private antenna to catch the glacial silence of the Universe, the quarrels of the underworld’s children, the spitting, the tears, the nein... nein of their imploring . Only in a Naples both fantastical and sorrowful, generous and cruel, could a book narrating the defeat of Reason take place. The novel’s chief virtue is its style, mesmerizing if not easy. The reader is immersed in an intricate syntax, rich in parenthetical clauses, representative of life’s complexity and vagueness. It is a prose that heralds dream, mystery, a world that refuses to be reduced to overly simple and linear narrative schemes. Its flaw lies in the confusion of the plot and character system. At first, the author manages to maintain order and logical progression; beyond a certain point, disorder bursts in victorious. The reader loses their way, and annoyance and tedium set in. Why read it? Its allure lies in the writing, but one must have the patience to press on through the final hundred pages.

This is a short story in which two parallel narratives unfold. In the first, an aspiring screenwriter, forced to sell insurance for a living, desperately pursues a script reader to whom he has submitted his work. In the second, a poet, now famous and wealthy, is forced to endure futile meetings with publishing house staff and submit to demands for revisions to his poems. Regardless of the initial premise, the publishing world remains stupid, superficial, and arrogant, and the outcomes can be unpredictable: the aspiring screenwriter manages to have his work accepted in its entirety, whereas the renowned poet is forced to suffer alterations. The story might well have been interesting, but the style is so disjointed—riddled with constant narrative leaps and a spasmodic reliance on colloquialisms and neologisms—as to render the text arduous to read and, effectively, incomprehensible.

Let us imagine a young woman, somewhere between her thirties and forties. She was never a brilliant student, she works a monotonous office job, she has had a few romantic relationships that nevertheless came to nothing. She is alone. > All alone I took the bus, all alone I walked the streets, all alone I did my shopping, all alone I went for a drink (...). A cheerful life. Sad. Pleasant. Sweet. Bitter. Harsh. Stimulating. Irritating. Warm. Cold. Lukewarm. In short, how on earth have I lived for so long? One day, by chance, at the bar where she goes to drink (seemingly her only pastime), she runs into her former Japanese teacher. At first, it is a vague sense of feeling at ease, "settled," like buying a book and choosing to leave its wraparound band intact. Then something else takes over. > The teacher and I do not see each other often. It is only natural; we are not together. Yet I never feel he is distant, not even when he is not beside me . Finally, love emerges. > From what point onward, drawing near to him, did I begin to feel the warmth radiating from his body? Through his starched shirt, I perceived his presence. (...) A presence I was never able to grasp firmly. Just when I am about to seize it, it eludes me. When I feel it growing distant, it draws near once more . In a dream, the young woman searches for the teacher, but cannot find him. > Ah, there it is, I have already put him in the box! Now I remember. I shut him in the big box (...) that I keep at the back of the built-in wardrobe. (...) Now I can no longer take him out. Because the wardrobe is too deep . Yet what does the teacher represent, with his briefcase, his voice and his body, his past laden with mysterious meaning? Is he like the moon that must illuminate the path for a young woman who does not know herself? Is he the conscience unwilling to emerge from the depths of the soul? Or, more simply, an older friend to cling to in order to come of age and escape the loneliness of existence? We shall never know, for the novel offers no conclusion. We know only that when the aging teacher passes away, "on evenings like this," the young woman will open the briefcase and look inside. > But there is nothing in the briefcase, only emptiness, an expanding void. A hopeless void that swallows everything . To characterize this tale in some way—one that resists labels nonetheless—we might say that the novel articulates an existential suffering not confined to youth. Across the narrative, we discover that the teacher, too, has suffered from events beyond his grasp, such as his wife’s flight and sudden death. The older companion is therefore not a font of wisdom and certainty; rather, like the young woman, he is a tangle of certainties and doubts, expectations and disappointments. Their relationship, which becomes intimate and not merely spiritual, is the fruit of two kindred spirits seeking mutual support, facing existence together. The meaning of the tale must not be reduced to the trite story of an affair between a young woman and her former teacher. The slow acceptance of their love stems from the fear of opening oneself to the other, of acknowledging that one is a person only through another person. Distinctly Japanese, the novel thereby takes on a universal resonance. The charm of this brief novel lies in its narrative style: delicately ironic, thoughtfully gentle, the two protagonists, the wondrous Japanese landscapes, and ultimately the prose itself lead us softly and pleasantly along a path that might otherwise have proved somber and oppressive. Regrettably, the plot is fragile, often meandering and repetitive. A curious note: reading the novel reveals that Japanese cuisine is not merely sushi and raw fish; one can discover many intriguing recipes. Why read it? Distinctly Japanese, and therefore unique.

> I know a city / that every day fills with sun / and everything is enraptured in that moment (Giuseppe Ungaretti, *Silenzio*, from *L'allegria*). The city is Alexandria, Egypt: > here is the sky, free of black clouds; here are the little white clouds scattered in the air like children skipping with joy across the immensity of space. Thank you, God! Here you are, you who never abandon your son Shagara Muhammad Ali, this strange name that caused him so much trouble during childhood and adolescence, and which your discontented servants still do not know well. God, please let me finish what I am doing... Shagara is a petty crook: he works in a factory, in a dusty office cluttered with paperwork, and is often assigned the task of organizing rallies and trips for workers chanting praise for Sadat, who succeeded Nasser in Egypt. Shagara skims off this assignment, pocketing a portion of the money given to him to pay the workers and bus drivers. Everyone knows it, but it is par for the course in a corrupt country. He moves through a city that is surreal, turbulent, and ever identical to itself, and > that old feeling came back with a vengeance: that I owned it, that I had built it myself, that I had traced its boundaries and erected the buildings along its sides . Is Alexandria real or merely Shagara's delirium? Strange, inexplicable, and unsettling things occur: a corpse was found in a sack, yet when they opened it, a breathtaking woman emerged; drunken dogs wandered all alone, shouting, "to hell with the British Empire on which the sun never sets"; a bird had seized a child in its talons and flown off "toward the seventh heaven where God reigns." And there were other incredible events that left the people stunned, even as they carried on living just as before. Rising prices, rampant corruption, peace with Israel after so much bloodshed, and the arrogance of a technocratic government set fire to the revolt. Alexandria is engulfed by an irrepressible, furious popular uprising. > But why, at this very moment, do I fix my gaze on the faces of women and young girls? (...) Perhaps because things drift past before my eyes and I take no notice at all? What is the source of our indifference? Is it perhaps that mysterious "house of jasmine," repository of enigmas no one can fathom, becoming a metaphor for the dark, unfathomable human soul; or is it rather "that dark mass stretching into infinity"? > That foolish water, for millions of years, knew nothing but low tide and high tide, alone, with itself, never anyone sharing anything with it . Just as the house of jasmine is demolished to make way for a hideous real estate speculation that destroys the splendor and allure of the ancient city, so nothing remains for us but to be annihilated in a bleak existence, shackled to petty bourgeois routines. > Where is God, how could he have abandoned us? He gave us a paradise; how is it possible that it all vanished in such a short time? What a fool I am! So much time has passed and I didn't even notice . Of this splendid novel, one could say anything: surreal, realistic, cruel, and ironic. Undoubtedly, the author chronicles the transformation of Alexandria in the wake of Sadat's savage, uneven modernization—a man lauded by the West, yet bereft of charisma and utterly estranged from the "religious heart" of the Egyptian people. And yet, the novel rises above historical contingency, developing in an admirable and captivating manner a discourse that is at once social and intimate: social, because it reveals how deeply the detachment of a cosmopolitan ruling class wounds a people, only to resort—after so many lofty proclamations—to the heaviest repression (and thus ends Alexandria's great uprising); intimate, because through the metaphor of the house of jasmine and the boundless sea, it speaks to our impenetrable inner world and urges us not to lose ourselves in the mundane, nor in futile invocations of God. Only understanding ourselves can save us from indifference. Reading this novel was an intense pleasure, an immersion into fantasy and sublime impressions, rendered through incisive prose characterized by brief sentences woven into an articulate, fluid syntax. Why read it? To afford oneself pure aesthetic pleasure.

Amedeo Consonni, the novel's protagonist, has been retired for many years and lives in Milan in a *casa di ringhiera*, built at the beginning of the twentieth century around a rectangular courtyard and now housing twenty flats. It is a «curious microcosm» bearing traces of industrial architecture, today severely deteriorated: crumbling stucco, dilapidated plaster, window frames—traditionally wooden and now replaced by others in anodized aluminum, in silver and brass tones—not to mention the numerous TV satellite dishes mounted on the railings, imparting a sense of globalized «squalor» > . On the surface, Consonni’s life is typical of a retired widower: tidying his small, comfortable flat each day, going to the supermarket and cooking his meals alone, reading the newspaper accompanied by an afternoon nap, exchanging a few words with the neighbors, and looking after his young grandson on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But Consonni harbors a strange hobby: he loves collecting crime news, cutting out any article concerning murders from the papers and archiving these clippings in binders meticulously ordered by crime. Over time, he has begun investigating in the field unbeknownst to the police. Alongside Consonni’s pastime, somewhat perverse yet harmless, Recami depicts the other inhabitants of the tenement: in particular, a family of four (father, mother, and two boys), where the man is frequently drunk and violent, the eccentric and noisy couple next door, and the octogenarian madly devoted to his old car. From reading this detailed and fascinating portrait of this microcosm > one might think we are in the presence of a novel of manners in which the detective plot is merely a device; Consonni’s investigation into a recent, savage, and mysterious crime is intriguing, yet the narrative seems aimed more at describing the character than at offering us the suspense and intrigue expected of a noir novel. When, suddenly, the murder of a female tenant sets off a shocking and astonishing sequence of events, entangling the inhabitants of our microcosm. Without giving away the ending—a genuine plot twist—we can say that the unfolding of events confirms how we Italians, all of us, even children, have, or think we have, something to hide, and in any case want to say nothing to the police. I read the novella in one breath". In the first part, I was captivated by the physical and social setting of the *casa di ringhiera*, almost suspended out of time: one need only think of the minute description of Consonni’s apartment with its nineteenth-century wallpapers, or the rivalries and petty slights over parking in the courtyard. In the second part, the narrative pace gathers speed and we cannot put the book down, eager to read the next episode. The narration is punctuated by suspenseful hints of dramatic twists, skillfully crafted to fuel the desire to press on, much like in a serialized novel. The prose is refined and succeeds in blending everyday speech with dialectal idioms, thereby conjuring the nostalgic atmosphere that pervades the tale. It is a minor gem that marries the novel of manners with noir, alongside a pleasing vocabulary and elegant syntactic construction. Why read it? It is intriguing and well written.

> He sets off between walls, prey to the light..../perhaps it was you, now it is an apparition/or perhaps it is all that knows no peace/ (...) It is a figure, it has no rest.../it is ours, I thought it a chimera (from "S'avvia tra i muri" in the collection *Avvento notturno* by Mario Luzi). These lines come to mind when reading this novel, which speaks of timeless presences, shadows and light dwelling in the realm of the dead during winter and among the living in summer, as in the myth of Persephone. Vera, a timid English girl of the early nineteenth century, certainly could not have expected such an extraordinary experience: becoming friends with Ginestra, whose destiny is to live for eternity like Persephone, poised between the underworld and the world of the living. The story begins in England. Vera is orphaned of both parents and has only an older brother, Caspian, who is passionate about archaeology. Vera studies Italian in the London schools founded by the exiled Mazzini (I appreciated this nod to an important, often forgotten role played by the founder of *Giovine Italia*). Caspian decides to take his sister with him to Pompeii, where he is engaged in the excavations. Vera wanders freely among the stones of the Roman city when Ginestra appears at her side. Just as in Luzi's poem, Vera becomes aware of Ginestra's sudden presence > not by any sound, because she makes none: what makes her turn around is a draft, an air pocket, like when you are swinging too high on a swing. Ginestra is > as tall as she is, (...wears flat sandals of slightly scuffed red leather... , but describing her is pointless; it is better to admire the portrait drawn by illustrator Elisabetta Stoinich of the two girls, together, hands affectionately clasped like two friends, jaunty, full of life—Vera smiling, Ginestra faintly melancholic in her Roman tunic and unruly hair, so alike yet so different from Vera in her composed Victorian attire. Yet why is a faint melancholy sensed in Ginestra? The girl knows she will lose Vera with the coming of winter, just as she will never again be able to live like mortals. There is a turning point in the story: the archaeologists succeed in capturing in a plaster cast the figure of a woman who died in the great eruption of Vesuvius; this woman is Ginestra’s mother. Ginestra's eternal vigil has become pointless; having seen her mother again, she can now leave the realm of the dead. She asks the Goddess for permission to depart the cheerful, vacuous sisterhood of her companions; in exchange for freedom, the Goddess demands Vera. Love prevails, and Ginestra condemns herself to eternal imprisonment. > They slipped away from one another, their clasped hands parted, the weave of their fingers loosened. The earth split before them, driving them apart. (...) Instead of letting Vera fall into the chasm (...) Ginestra looked her in the eyes for a long moment. Returning to cold London, will Vera remember her friend and her sacrifice? Beatrice Masini has written a delicate, subdued, almost evanescent novel. Her passion for Greek mythology and archaeology led her to intertwine Vera's coming-of-age journey—a true rebirth—with the history of the early excavations of Pompeii, suspended between conservation and greed for profit, between new technologies and the grueling, hazardous labor of the workers. One thinks of the evocative figure of little Nico, forced to work while still a child, and the description of the plaster casts, a method widely used in the nineteenth century to both preserve and popularize the works of antiquity. These realistic references frame a story of strong philosophical import: time, > which erodes and leaves nothing intact. Time, which is always hungry, and devours everything. Whereas before -- before, now, after, when it was, when it has been, when it will be -- over there, before, it was, it is all so perfect and polished. Overshadowed by so much metaphysics, the plot ends up crushed, weakened, fragile; the protagonists are not explored in existential and psychological depth, beginning with Vera and Ginestra. The prose is elegant and musical, aptly complementing the faint melancholy of the story. The sentences are concisely flawless, the vocabulary rich yet modern. The reader glides effortlessly through fine Italian prose, but at a certain point is left wondering: where is the fire amid such stylistic virtuosity? Why read it? The plot is fragile, but it makes for an enjoyable read.

The Resistance is most often narrated from the perspective of those who took part in the partisan struggle. Pavese’s novella speaks of those who waited, even while caught up in it. > In essence I was asking for lethargy, an anesthetic, the certainty of being well hidden. I was not asking for world peace, I was asking for my own . Thus reasons Corrado, protagonist and first-person narrator, as the surrounding world is swept away by war. He has taken refuge in the hills, which > for me was not one place among others, but an aspect of things, a way of living. (...) I felt no sorrow; I knew that in the night the entire city could go up in flames and people die. The ravines, the villas, and the paths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged . During the day he often goes into town, to a tavern: here there is music, dancing, and badmouthing of fascism. > Each time I swore to remain silent and listen, to shake my head and listen. Yet that cautious equilibrium of anxieties, of waiting, and of futile hopes in which I now spent my days was made for me, I liked it: I would have wanted it to last forever. The impatience of others could destroy it. For a long time I had been accustomed to staying still, to letting the world go mad . Neither the fall of Mussolini and September 8th, nor the rediscovery of a woman from his youth—with whom he perhaps had a son, now twelve years old—are enough to shake him. > Now I was forty years old, and there was Cate, there was Dino. (...) Was I not being futile and boorish this time as well, hovering around her, half bewildered, half humiliated? The fragile and illusory equilibrium is shattered by Cate’s arrest. Corrado escapes by chance and takes refuge in a monastery, where Dino joins him. > What else to do under the empty portico if not savor once again, morning and night, that ancient dread? The monastery is no longer safe, so he decides to seek shelter at his parents’ home in the Langhe. Meanwhile Dino > has left, and in earnest. At his age it isn't hard. It was harder for the others, who nevertheless did it and are still doing it . The journey from Turin to the Langhe takes him into the very thick of the partisan struggle, yet he manages to save himself. > Despite the times, here on the farmsteads the corn has been husked and the grapes harvested. (...) Now that the countryside is barren, I roam it again; I climb and descend the hill, reflecting on the long illusion from which this account of my life began. (...) Here every step, almost every hour of the day, and certainly every unexpected memory, sets before me what I was, what I am and had forgotten. (...) At times, after listening to the useless radio, looking through the pane at the deserted vineyards, I think that living by chance is not living. And I wonder whether I have truly escaped. Can one go on living after a civil war? > One has the impression that the same fate that struck down those bodies keeps the rest of us nailed there to look at them, to fill our eyes with them And why did they die? > I would not know what to answer. Not now, at least. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only the dead know, and only for them has the war truly ended. Corrado’s failure (he could not even protect Dino) culminates in a meditation on the destiny of humankind that transcends the narrative: from the depiction of historical circumstance and internal existential anguish, it ascends to a cosmic dimension, singularly relevant in light of the civil wars that bleed many parts of the world today. From a stylistic standpoint, the novella is an absolute masterpiece: lean, spare, yet capable of evoking the sweep of history and the destiny of its characters. The writer works deftly with the phonetic juxtaposition of words, so much so that one often feels confronted with a poetic composition rather than a prose text. Equally extraordinary is the author’s ability to avoid fracturing the rhythm despite relying predominantly on the period, and thus on short sentences. The use of the comma to create a suspension between subject and verb (granting autonomy to the latter) is a stylistic gem, requiring an exceptional command of syntax, vocabulary, and the Italian language in general. The fusion of American narrative with classicism yielded exceptional results, rarely matched in Italian literature. Why read it? It is a masterpiece and a meditation on war.

In the prologue, Ricardo Piglia cites a note by Karl Marx on evil, as > the fundamental principle that makes us social creatures, (...) here lies the true origin of all arts and sciences, and from the moment evil should cease, society would necessarily decay, if not perish altogether . If we consider the history of Argentina—a history the author traverses skipping here and there—violence, the extermination of native peoples, repeated military coups, Peronist populism and ruthless neoliberalism, police repression culminating in the *desaparecidos*, are not anomalies but elements inherent to a capitalist society; and only through a rational approach can a plausible explanation be found. To achieve this end, Ricardo Piglia invented Commissioner Croce, a "brilliant investigator" bearing the name of an Italian Hegelian philosopher, Benedetto Croce. Is it a coincidence? Certainly not, considering that "the true destiny of a Kantian is the police academy," even if > no one is master of their own thoughts. There is no such thing as one's own ideas; thinking is either appropriate or it is not appropriate and also "if we do not destroy thoughts, thoughts destroy us." To range freely, Piglia does not develop a single plot, but relies on short stories, which the author seems to present as random, included without a logical thread. In reality, perhaps stretching the author's intention, we can group them into several strands. *The Film*, *The Exception*, *The Impenetrable*, *The Promise* > , are stories that deal with salient moments in Argentine history. Take *The Impenetrable* > where Croce is tasked with solving the disappearance of engineer Panizza, a well-known industrialist with an obscure past. Croce travels up the Río de la Plata, which was easy for him because he had spent many summers on the vast lagoon (...) to escape routine and lead a philosophical life." And when he meets him, Panizza utters enigmatic words (such as "the organization of time, and not the invention of the steam engine, is the key to capitalism > ) only to slip away for good. Who is Panizza? Is he one of the many Europeans who fled after the Second World War and do not want to be found? And what of the commissioner's weeping at the end of the story *The Film* > , when Croce discovers that the blonde girl starring in the pornographic film is Evita Perón, that woman whom so many had loved as a virgin > . Other stories represent the essential traits of Argentine society: melancholy ( *The Music*), superstition as in *The Astrologer* and in *Tigre*, virility as in the paradoxical and indecipherable *Mrs. X*, the love of risk as in *The Gambler* > . And finally, Piglia dwells on the crime genre, revealing his predilection for detective stories in the vein of Agatha Christie and for the bewildering mysteries of Poe. The stories are a manual of instructions and reflections, from which we discover that Croce's method operates "through metaphorical analogies, combines poetic intuition with mathematical precision" (*The Lecture*, *The Resolution*, and *The Method*). In the background, there is always Argentina: > the streets are deserted, there isn't a soul anywhere, there's no one at the port, everything is dead, something demented, acres and acres of countryside and behind it there is nothing, stray dogs, bones in the sun, and only wind, dust, and solitude. (...) We have been defeated so many times that now we no longer change . One would need to know Argentina and its history to truly appreciate these stories; and yet, these short tales arouse a certain envy, imagining what our own Noir—so successful today—could be if it retraced our recent past, fostering the transmission of Memory. From a narrative perspective, the reading brings to mind Dino Buzzati's *Sixty Stories* (see review on this site): the same sense of paradox and the very same resigned disillusionment. Considering that *The Cases of Commissioner Croce* is Piglia's final book, written when he was already suffering from advanced ALS, we find ourselves before a truly poignant testament, coupled with the desire to bequeath a literary approach and convey a passion for the crime genre. It is a struggle to finish reading; at times the stories are rambling, with numerous narrative digressions, and at times too paradoxical—as happens with Buzzati—making it difficult to remain engaged. Why not read it? It is interesting, but prolix and fragmentary.

> In Somali, *jirro* means "illness"—literally so. (...) But for us, *jirro* is a vaster word. It speaks of our wounds, our pain, our post-traumatic, post-war stress. *Jirro* is our broken heart. Our life in precarious balance between hell and the present. This book speaks of this illness, both physical and spiritual, searing and nostalgic; and it does so through an autobiographical lens, constructed > in constant motion. The past is never still; it follows our transformations , as Scego writes in her afterword. The author imagines a dialogue with her niece living in London, and the plot is punctuated by Somali keywords, which, beginning with *Jirro*, progress through a series of stages encompassing personal, familial, and collective history: events, relationships, physicality, memories, prophecy. There are two pivotal events: 1971, when her parents fled Somalia following Siad Barre's coup d'état, and 1991, when Somalia collapsed into the chaos of gang warfare. > "No road will lead us back home, my daughter," she (Halima, Scego's mother) says, with a harshness I had never heard in her before. > The roads have been cut off. The houses have caved in on themselves. We have become beasts. And Mogadishu has been buried by its own inhabitants beneath an endless heap of corpses . Somalia at war, yet ever-present in the heart, tears at the relationship between mother and Igiaba. One day in 1989, her mother crosses Rome for a prospective job as a domestic worker, only to be rejected because she is Black. > She screams in the silence. (...) And with that voiceless scream, with that timeless humiliation, the Mogadishu skyline creeps into a mind flooded with nostalgia. Arriving there, at the center of her sighs, to comfort her. She returns to Somalia; she vanishes for two years without word, swallowed up by the civil war. For Igiaba, still an adolescent, this abandonment has a devastating impact: she begins to suffer from bulimia nervosa. > Dagalka wabu dilai je'eelka. War kills love. (...) I vomit the war. Until every dream inside me is erased. Until every self inside me is erased. Like those relatives of my mother lost in the haze of their discontent. And in the *Jirro* that gave them no respite. Upon her return, Halima begins to speak to her daughter, > woman to woman. If before she had told her of her childhood, in the countryside herding sheep, she now recounts her real life. > The trauma of having lost the homeland—she her country of birth, I my country of origin—united us in mourning. (...) She wanted, on an unconscious level, (...) to pass her life on to me. Because it was no longer just a family story. Halima recalls how she was infibulated, and naturally > she spoke of Dad. She constructed his legend. (...) She, a switchboard operator, and he, a remarkably handsome man, the mayor of a city that smelled of spices. Then, wrapped in her white robe, every now and then (...) she sought me out with her gaze. And in that locking of eyes, I the daughter, she the mother, we thought of the refugee. Of the exile we had traversed together. That eye condition haunting Igiaba today, as she approaches menopause, having neither children nor a husband—does all of this stem, perhaps, from having somatized the rupture of her life, she an Italian in love with Rome, she the daughter of a ruined Somalia? Could the tragedy of colonized peoples, shattered and consigned to oblivion, the sufferings of the world's migrants, the wars, the massacres, the women and children raped and slaughtered—could all of this be a portent of a fate that awaits us too, the wealthy, comforted by our fine laws and air conditioning? A friend suggested Igiaba read Euripides' *The Trojan Women*. At its core is Cassandra, who says: > I hold aloft the torch, I celebrate, I flood the temple with light—behold—with this lamp of mine. Like Cassandra, we too (a torn humanity) carry the torch. (...) Bearing it is our burden. Scego's novels share a common thread: the intertwining of personal stories and overarching history, and the premise that one can only discover oneself, and others, through the unraveling of this entanglement within one's own consciousness. It is therefore indispensable for the author to craft complex narratives with numerous parallel plotlines in a strongly political, rather than psychological, context. In *Oltre Babilonia* (2008), the point of synthesis is language, set in that Arabic school where people of diverse backgrounds study this "Esperanto"; in "*Adua* > of 2015, the author speaks of a betrayal, of a beloved Italy that casts out the migrant, and finally, in that blend of reality and imagination that is *Una linea di colore* > of 2020, two women who actually lived are synthesized into an invented character who bears the wounds of emigration and slavery (see the reviews of these books on this site). In *Cassandra a Mogadiscio*", Scego shifts perspective; more than ever, she speaks of herself, confessing her own physical and psychological fragilities. The brilliant and personable writer, encountered at so many *Internazionale* festivals, reveals herself to be a tragic figure, evoking and internalizing existential and planetary grief: a contemporary Ungaretti. Is she speaking of Somalia? No, she is speaking of her beloved country, Italy, on the brink of fracturing; of her Rome, at the mercy of verbal and physical violence; of her cherished language, Italian, which now seems destined to regress into its ancient local dialects. In short, by narrating her family and her country of origin, Scego reflects upon herself as an Italian. Where is the Promised Land? Or was Ungaretti's merely a desperate utopia? Scego's strength remains her writing; even in simple, immediate Italian, the author evokes sensations that leave a mark on the reader: they are often short, unexpected sentences, not always woven into the narrative thread, as if Scego allowed herself to be carried away by emotion rather than plot. The latter is a weakness; the narrative's richness is not effectively distilled into a synthesis easily traceable by the reader. Contributing to this narrative confusion are the literary devices the author seems so fond of; here, it is the dialogues with her niece and the structuring of chapters around keywords, which often fail to encapsulate the chapters' actual contents. Moreover, in digging as never before into her innermost self and foundational relationships—particularly with her mother—the lack of psychological depth becomes apparent. Scego's works, like those of many non-Western writers, are choral stories, introjections of universal suffering rather than introspections into personal sentiment. Why read it? One discovers an unfamiliar Scego; the reading, however, is demanding.

A successful author decides to abandon her genre to venture into other narrative territory. As often happens, this attempt turns out to be a resounding failure. Critics, however, have judged it very favorably: in the magazine *Internazionale*, the novel was awarded top marks, five stars. Did I fail to understand the book’s merits, or are publishing houses’ profit expectations dictating critical judgment? The core premise of the story is intriguing. We are in a small English town, perceived by its inhabitants as a «safe haven», where the respectable bourgeoisie believes it can live comfortably and peacefully, insulated from the problems of the modern world. A pity that, in the recent past, a major landowner sold a parcel of land upon which a council estate was built, whose social problems now negatively impact the town’s presumed well-being. Furthermore, an addiction treatment center is run on municipal property, with all the attendant disruptions that ensue. Well, the sudden death of a councillor—a man of deep social conscience and thus in favor of keeping the center—presents an opportunity to shift the majority on the town council, shut down the center, and transfer the council estate to the neighboring town, which might in turn be keen to alter its own political balance. A race ensues to claim the seat left vacant on the local council. One would have expected a narrative with a strong socio-political edge, replete with intrigue and potential plot twists. This is not the case. The story plods wearily along through the accounts of the various families involved: marital relations, parent-child dynamics, the school environment, and so forth. In the first part of the novel, the reader gets lost among the characters, all of whom seem to carry the same weight in the narrative structure. Later, the book becomes less tedious and more sharply delineated, as certain characters—mostly the «children»—post defamatory emails on the council’s website, not out of political motives, but to vent grudges and a desire for rebellion. It would have been an interesting idea, but this, too, peters out into nothing. Ultimately, the reader is left with a novelized version of *Desperate Housewives*, which wraps up—because every novel must come to an end—in a maudlin fashion, just enough to coax out a few cheap tears. The author writes very well, in prose that is at once elegant and modern. Even if one accepts the novel's psychological approach to social issues, it is baffling how generically such complex themes are handled, such as intergenerational relationships and youth in severely disadvantaged families. The weakest point is the narrative structure. First of all, the plot is scattered, fragmented, and devoid of action. How is it possible that such an experienced author was unable to give unity and momentum to the narrative? Secondly, the writer fails to establish a hierarchy of characters—key figures around whom the story can turn and through whom deeper psychological, existential, and social explorations might be developed. All the characters remain on the same footing, staying superficial and losing the reader across multiple narrative threads. Why not read it? It is tedious, banal, and pointlessly long.

The underlying theme is mendacity; the author develops this subject within the context of the family—the very social sphere that, more than any other, ought to foster mutual trust. For years, the members of this family have acted in apparent harmony; when, however, it is revealed that Big Daddy, the family patriarch and “authoritarian master-father,” is suffering from cancer, the impending death overwhelms the protagonists: does truth emerge from this sort of catharsis, or a new lie? As Tennessee Williams explains in the “Notes for the Designer,” the setting is the bed-sitting-room of a great plantation house in the Mississippi Delta; two bachelors, the former owners of the plantation, once lived in this room, and therefore > the room must evoke some ghosts; it is gently and poetically haunted by a relationship that must have involved a tenderness which was not common . It is the appropriate setting for a play > that deals with the deepest extremities of human emotion, and needs that softness as a background . The theatrical work unfolds in three acts. The protagonists of the first act are Brick, a former football player now turned alcoholic, and his wife, Margaret. The man refuses to have any relations with his wife after she betrayed him with his best friend—who died, perhaps by suicide, in the wake of the adultery. The loss of the only person who truly mattered to Brick has driven him to seek solace in alcohol. While Brick pursues the victimhood of “the charm of the defeated,” Margaret refuses to surrender: she is keenly aware that the family is about to fall apart, and she does not want her husband to forfeit his social and economic standing to his brother. Brick, deeply beloved by his parents, faces severe disadvantages regarding any inheritance: he is an alcoholic and, moreover, has not yet fathered any children, whereas his brother has six. In her long conversation with her husband—in truth a soliloquy—Margaret wonders what the victory of “a cat on a hot tin roof” might be: “Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can...” but then adds that silence does not work, > locking the door and shutting oneself in a burning house in the hope of forgetting that the house is on fire . In the second act, we witness the confrontation between Big Daddy and Brick, between father and son. Here again, it is largely a soliloquy: Big Daddy does most of the talking, and we learn that this man—outwardly strong, resolute, and domineering—is consumed by disgust. > For all these goddam lies and liars that I’ve had to live with, and all this goddam hypocrisy I’ve lived with for all these forty years ; such is his disgust that at times he thinks it far better to have > a goddam blank (...) than all this crap that nature fills it with . Faced with this desperate confession, Brick replies that the conversation is > like all the others we’ve ever had together in our lives! It’s senseless, senseless, it’s, it’s painful (...) you don’t have a goddam thing to say to me! Brick’s passivity suddenly turns into fury when his father voices the suspicion that there was something more intimate than mere friendship between Brick and his friend; and then Brick, cowardly like all the weak, reveals to his father the truth that had hitherto been concealed from him: he has cancer and is dying. With Big Daddy’s desperate cry (“All liars, all liars... lying, dying, liars!”) the second act comes to an end. In the third act, the sons and daughters-in-law inform Big Daddy’s wife, who is also unaware, of her husband’s true condition; Brick’s brother attempts to persuade their mother to place all the estate in a trust, effectively cutting Brick out of the inheritance. Brick remains as detached as ever, while Margaret fights desperately, to the point of telling a blatant lie: she declares she is pregnant and can therefore give Big Daddy a grandchild. There are two versions of the third act. In the original draft, the author imagines the story concluding with Margaret’s declaration of love to Brick, to which he replies with elusive cruelty: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true!” In the second draft—the one staged, at the director’s behest—the author has Brick support his wife’s lie and accept Margaret’s unconditional love: “I admire you, Maggie” (says Brick), to which the woman replies: > what you need is someone to take care of you, gently, with love (...) and I can! I’m determined to do it, and nothing is more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof. Has death finally dispelled the veil of mendacity? In the first version, Tennessee Williams answers in the negative: not even the “black thing” that comes “uninvited” frees us from hypocrisy and mutual distrust; human relationships are burdened by an existential condition of emptiness, clogged with too many lies—we are doomed not to communicate. Certainly, this pessimistic vision cannot be dispelled by the conclusion proposed by the director, far too cloying and banal to ring true. Tennessee Williams offers an observation particularly useful for understanding the play: > some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself . And thus we must look at how the characters evolve throughout the story, bearing in mind that “the actors must be allowed freedom on the stage.” It is thus clear how Brick remains locked within his own world; Margaret’s personality, by contrast, emerges with increasing strength, as though she refuses to remain merely the wife of a broken man, standing ready instead to take the reins of the family. Death reveals the true character of the human being. The play is nearly flawless, which accounts for its great success. While the third act, in its final version, is bustling and populated by a large cast, the first two acts suffer from a certain static quality, barely mitigated by offstage background noises and the fleeting appearances of minor characters. On the page, the two acts come across as wordy and redundant; to be sure, that assessment might change under the light of theatrical performance. Why read it? It is a great theatrical work, and the figures of Brick and Margaret possess tremendous fascination; to truly appreciate it, one must experience it in the theatre.

This is likely not one of Simenon’s finest novels. The plot is exceedingly simple: the niece, who served as a maid, kills her sick aunt when the latter refuses to give her money for her brother. Rummaging through the drawers, she discovers old papers proving that the aunt, together with her lover, had murdered her husband fifteen years earlier. The aunt’s former lover, who remains her business partner and lives in an adjoining flat, in turn murders Cécile to prevent her from revealing the contents of the documents she uncovered. From the standpoint of the detective genre, the events of the novel feel predictable, and the pacing certainly fails to grip the reader. The atmosphere (the figure of Maigret, the petty-bourgeois life) is sketched in a hurried, almost superficial manner. The fundamental virtue of the novel lies in its style. Even if the French language is not simple (owing to the richness of its vocabulary), it becomes readily intelligible through the sequence of clauses and words, which, even phonetically, help convey the traits of the characters, Maigret’s demeanor, and the salient aspects of the setting. What is to be appreciated is not so much the novel as a whole, but rather certain glimpses, such as the following: > Il arrivait a Maigret de hausser les épaules quand on s’émerveillait devant lui de la résignation des humbles, des malades …..sans horizon…. ; il savait par expérience que la bete humaine s’accomode de n’importe quel nid, du moment qu’elle peut le remplir de sa chaleur, de son odeur, de ses habitudes .

The author imagines a retired opera impresario deciding to set pen to paper so that it might be known who he truly was: > curious about the travails of others... a marmoreal commendatore of an era now bygone . Before his passing, the *commendatore* supposedly managed to compose three stories, which recount actual episodes from his life. In *The Green Jacket*, the impresario has engaged a brilliant conductor for Verdi’s *Otello*. > a man of genius (but) so vain that he is constantly preoccupied with the impression, indeed the effect, he produces on anyone who approaches him . During rehearsals, everything went smoothly until the timpani entrance, when the conductor suddenly asked to halt the performance, pleading a sudden indisposition. The impresario nevertheless managed to draw from him a confession of the true reasons behind the interruption, as well as the musician's decision to break his contract. During the Second World War, the conductor—then young and not yet famous—had taken refuge in a mountain village in Central Italy, where he had befriended the orchestra's timpanist: “a modest, quiet, middle-aged little man with dull eyes,” who had, however, passed himself off as a renowned maestro, earning the esteem and admiration of the local villagers. Yet the young conductor, far more gifted and accomplished than the poor orchestral player, had not disclosed his true identity, presenting himself instead as a humble bank clerk. But why dissemble? > Lightheartedly, out of curiosity, out of habit, I had strayed down the hazy path of jesting.... and seeing that plump little man, with his comical green jacket and skipping gait, coming toward me in the refectory, I had looked above all at the jacket and not at the man . Yet it was not merely shallowness that led him to this futile deception; there was also “an exquisitely subtle, heightened pleasure in no longer being myself.” But in doing so, he had betrayed friendship—the sincere bond between two men brought together at a difficult juncture in their lives. And now the conductor, celebrated yet conceited, prefers flight to confronting the poor player, who remains, conversely, steadfast in his role and his dignity, a modest artisan of music. In the second story, *The Father of the Orphans*, the impresario pays a visit to a former colleague who had abruptly abandoned the business to run an orphanage. When asked the reasons for such a drastic decision, the colleague tells him a moving story: he had met a sick child on a train and had been deeply affected; yet, out of indolence or the press of work, he had delayed offering help, and by the time he finally resolved to do so, he discovered that the child had died because the family had been unable to afford the necessary medicine. A beautiful tale, were it not for the fact that the impresario accidentally uncovers the true story: the colleague had been involved in a homosexual relationship with a young man, who in turn had fathered a child with a ballerina. Though pleaded with for help, the colleague had refused and had, moreover, cast the young man aside out of fear that his irreproachable bourgeois life might be shattered by scandal. > He had repented of many sins, but not of the single mortal one he had committed. He had made a thousand sacrifices, but not that one without which all the others were worthless: the sacrifice of his own vanity to love . The impresario wishes to force him to acknowledge his abjection, but is ultimately overcome by distaste for a hysterical scene, by the weariness of stripping a man of his mask. In the third story, *The Window*, the impresario goes to visit an old English friend with whom he has long been in love. He hopes they might spend the years of their old age together, only to discover that the woman has always loved a scoundrel, a good-for-nothing who deserted her many years ago. The impresario manages to expose the true character of this dandy, but to no avail. Even when confronted with the most glaring evidence, the woman reaffirms her love. For the impresario, it marks the disillusionment of a myth, of a lifelong dream: > when I thought of Twinkle as I had left her twenty years before and as I had always remembered her—forthright, witty, and of tastes so simply noble.... looking around me, I could hardly believe my eyes. And yet, her long solitude, teeming with fantasies and remorse, explained even this corruption to me . With his simple, elegant, and witty style, Soldati confronts the complexities of the human soul, tracing them back to everything within us that is ambiguous and uncertain. The mask behind which we hide is not an artifice, but an intrinsic part of our consciousness. The stories are compact and lean, sustained by a deft, swift narrative structure. The protagonists and settings are sketched with a few vivid strokes, attentive to detail (the hands, the attire, the decor), so as to recall, with delightful surprise, the nineteenth-century novel. Why read it? These are magnificent stories, written with grace and fluidity.

The novel chronicles the exploits of Pepe Carvalho, a cross between Marlowe and Nero Wolfe, hired to protect a footballer from Barcelona’s leading club, who is thought to be under a death threat. In reality, the detective plot serves as a backdrop to the depiction of a Barcelona milieu in the midst of a construction boom and urban transformation: the characters navigate a landscape in which old Francoist values are dissolving and new ones tied to rampant capitalism are emerging. Counterbalancing the decay of society and the prevailing violence are the small daily pleasures (eating) and the values of friendship, which represent humanity’s final anchors. The book’s greatest strength lies precisely in its portrayal of Barcelona and the characterization of its figures, whereas occasionally certain digressions of an almost philosophical nature slow the narrative pace. The style is richly articulated, bearing the clear influence of the great masters of American crime fiction and Simenon.

Chernyshevsky was a nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary, a forerunner of the major ideologies and political currents that led to the October Revolution of 1917. An economist, philosopher, and writer, he was imprisoned at the age of thirty-four in 1862 and remained incarcerated until 1888. Written during his early years of imprisonment by a young idealist, the novel bears an overwhelming moral and political imprint, one that compromises its strictly narrative component. The theme remains strikingly timely: women’s freedom and equality. Vera (meaning "faith" in Russian) lives in a narrow-minded bourgeois family and is destined for a marriage of convenience with a wealthy, vulgar suitor. In a splendid depiction provided by one of Vera’s dreams at the end of the book (an extraordinary foreshadowing of Nietzsche’s oneiric style), Queen Astarte commands the young woman, portrayed as "a reclining woman," to submit to her lord. > Brighten his leisure hours. Love him, for he bought you; and if you love him not, he will kill you . But Vera replies that it is not she > depicted in this scene. Back then I did not exist. That woman was a slave. where equality is lacking, there is no place for me . And indeed, Vera rejects her destiny, rebels against her family, and marries a young doctor. It is no mere rebellion of a resolute adolescent. Vera knows full well that she has emerged from "a damp and dark cellar" to liberate other women, who "still lie captive and infirm." Now independent, Vera sets up a sewing workshop, where the seamstresses not only share profits and decide on business matters and organizational structure for themselves, but also dedicate themselves to their own education and the emancipation of women. The marital relationship between Vera and her husband is modeled on friendship, devoid of emotional and sexual ties. > Listen carefully now: this is how we shall live (...). First of all, we will have two rooms, yours and mine: in a third room we will dine, and receive our mutual friends. Secondly, I shall not enter your room (...) nor will you enter my room . Later in the final dream, Vera imagines this female figure being represented by another queen, Virginity. > Man’s primitive brutality was gradually tamed by womanly beauty.(...) Man loved the pure, inaccessible virgin. Yet woman did not yet possess a consciousness . It appears to be a tranquil situation, but a deep unease pervades Vera. It is a dream that reveals this. The young woman imagines that an artist forces her to read her diary. > It spoke of the two of us (Vera recounts to her husband) and how fond we are of each other, and then all of a sudden, at the touch of his hand, vile words appeared, saying that I did not love you . Vera certainly cannot follow the third queen, Aphrodite, who beckons toward an apparent freedom, pursued as it is by "trafficking in pleasure." She must experience true love, founded upon an equality of intellect, feeling, and sex between man and woman. She falls in love with a friend of her husband, Kirsanov: their affair is fraught, as both wish to disavow it and remain faithful—she to her bridegroom, he to his friend. The suicide of Vera’s husband enables their love story to materialize, bringing about "equality between the two beings who love each other." Thus speaks the fourth queen in Vera’s dream. > Once the equality of the sexes is recognized, man no longer regards woman as his property. They love each other because they wish to do so . (...) If you wish to express in a single word what I am, call me equality. The overriding reliance on dialogue between the characters, particularly between Vera, her husband, and Kirsanov, gives the impression of being faced with a Socratic dialogue, reinforcing the philosophical and moralizing character of the writing. It is always Vera who steers the reasoning, while the two men are stereotypes, figures flattened by the woman's personality. Vera is a complex character; at first, she is simply a young woman still uncertain and frightened; she pragmatically seizes the opportunity of a liberating marriage; with typical youthful confidence, she faces a relationship devoid of that gentle, assiduous caress, the need to cradle oneself voluptuously in a feeling of tenderness«. Then, she experiences »the imperiousness of that gentle feeling > , even if she cannot bring herself to call it love. Her husband’s suicide devastates her, but she overcomes it, defining the ensuing guilt as a pointless melodrama". A little selfishness does no harm! In the end, she becomes a woman thoroughly conscious of her own worth and aspirations. It may be that Chernyshevsky identified with Vera, and that the book is therefore a *Bildungsroman*, or the swan song of a lost youth. From a literary standpoint, it is a mediocre tale; the dialogue-driven narrative style and the glut of reflections, digressions, and declarations make it bombastic, repetitive, and prolix. Only the dreams carve out an innovative rupture within a traditional narrative structure that is ill-suited to plumbing the depths of its characters and situations. Why not read it? It is boring.

It is a book to be read in a single breath. The setting is 1960s Turin, during its phase of intense industrialization and the expansion of Fiat. Initially, the characters move independently of one another: a pencil vendor, who turns out to be an undercover *carabiniere* tracking down drug-refining laboratories; a young woman of the Turin bourgeoisie whose lover is a mysterious accountant, later revealed to be a bookkeeper for the Mafia; the editorial staff of a publishing house (the occasion for a parody of intellectuals), interested in publishing strange cassette recordings of dialogues by a parish priest who professes heretical ideas and has brainwashed a group of parishioners; a police precinct investigating an alleged assault on the priest; and a Fiat engineer concerned with inventory management. All these characters happen to cross paths at the heretical priest’s mass, during which the priest himself is killed in a bomb attack. A complex and arduous investigation ensues, marked by two further killings: those of the pencil vendor and the Fiat engineer. The story concludes with the uncovering of a fraud perpetrated against Fiat, masterminded by a senior corporate executive, with the priest, the engineer, and the parishioners serving as the material executors. The book is highly complex and multi-layered, yet possesses several remarkable facets: a compelling plot rich in twists and turns; a tight narrative pace that rarely lapses into the superfluous; and the overlapping of storylines and themes—the love affair between the young woman and the mob accountant, the world of Fiat with its corporate hierarchy and rituals, the police milieu and its frictions with the *carabinieri*, the religious realm with its age-old nightmares (the Gnostic sects), and the emotional solitude of Commissioner Santamaria and, more broadly, of all the "adult" characters in the book. In the background emerges an Italy in transition, where traditional values—and even petty thievery itself—are swept away by industrialization and the attendant urban sprawl: it is no coincidence that the novel is predominantly set on the periphery, within an urban and social fabric increasingly degraded and disrupted. Yet will this society be worse than the one that preceded it? The authors seem not to think so: Thea, this young bourgeois woman, prefers her liaison with a mafioso to the social circle of her own class, and her mother considers that this might well be better than marrying a corrupt, paranoid Fiat engineer. The rigid strictures of a hypocritical society are shattered, and only in this way do the characters find their destiny, and love, even if outside conventional bounds. There is, moreover, another theme that surfaces only at the novel’s conclusion. The senior Fiat executive is exposed because he forgets that he is constantly shadowed by two police bodyguards assigned to ensure his safety. The loneliness of power and its indifference toward the humble are also the undoing of those at the summit of society, who deem it thoroughly pointless even to notice others. Is democracy an inevitable process?

The novel is set in Scauri, a town in the province of Latina, where the author was born and raised. > Along the promenade, the beach resorts gleamed in the golden light of sunset. (...) Young couples walked linked together, two women, both wearing chenille tracksuits, walked briskly...(...) The plaster on the houses struggled against the sea salt, danceable music drifted from the Bussola, and men smoked and drank beer, cradling their bellies. (...) Affixed to the walls of the railway workers' club were a faded photograph of Gramsci, a reconstructed portrait of Berlinguer, the front page of the inaugural issue of *l'Unità*... It is in this insignificant and sleepy town on the Lazio coast that Vittoria takes up residence, living in a villa with a young woman. > Eyes not light in color but filled with light, she wore a straw hat that had seen better days, loose trousers, a white cable-knit sweater, (...) Vittoria looked as if she had stepped out of the pages of *Oggi*. (...) She looked like an Arab princess on a Tuscan country estate. Who was Vittoria? Lia seeks to answer this question when the woman's lifeless body is found in the house’s bathtub. In an indifferent and gossipy environment, Lia seems the only one concerned with the causes of death (suicide or murder?) and, above all, with who Vittoria truly was: why she had abandoned Rome and why she was cohabiting with a young woman who certainly could not have been her daughter. And Lia discovers that Vittoria is like > Greek; she had left few traces, and to arrive at a meaning—assuming there was one—one had to proceed by recombining the elements, conscious that a margin for interpretation would always remain or, in the worst-case scenario, that none of the combinations would make sense. It is clear that Chiara Valerio has deeply loved and endured ancient Greek! Beneath the veneer of a noir story, Lia ventures into the labyrinth of that mystery residing within us all—indecipherable, yet one we endeavor to bring order to. To this inner conflict that animates literature, as Ungaretti used to say, the author attempts to provide a resolution through an overly rational approach, turning it into a philosophical or mathematical puzzle that conceals the fear of straying from well-defined and reassuring prevailing values. And what if Lia had been romantically attracted to Vittoria? Along a promenade that is not that of Scauri, perhaps on the banks of the Nile or in a desert oasis, > I saw Vittoria. (...) I drew closer and asked her. Why? Vittoria smiled, (...) took my face in her hands, kissed me. I even closed my eyes. In the dream, I was happy. Another sound, a voice, two voices. I broke my lips away from Vittoria’s and looked around. My daughters were running toward me.... For me, it was an arduous read, abandoned and then taken up again out of a determination to see it through to the end and uncover the enigma and the myth of Vittoria. The two facets overlap: on the one hand, unveiling what lies behind this woman of the respectable Roman bourgeoisie; on the other, understanding why, in the small, provincial setting of Scauri, Vittoria turned into an idealized, mythologized reference point. These would have already been two complex themes to sustain in tandem, vacillating between noir and social novel; yet Valerio also wished to delve into Lia’s lived experience, without, however, fully laying bare her psychology, her frustrations, and her transgressive yearnings. Everything remained on the surface. The prose accentuates the reader's strain: the stark, apodictic sentences, the repeated use of full stops to conclude verbless clauses, the frequent shifts in narrative point of view—I, she, and you—the numerous digressions, the overcrowding of characters, and the sudden shifts in narrative trajectory are stylistic traits that heighten the narrative's fragmentation and disrupt the discursive flow. Chiara Valerio possesses an angular, essayistic style, whereas the strongest passages are precisely those where one glimpses oneiric elements and a subtle nostalgia for her Scauri. Why read it? The figure of Lia is interesting, but it is a taxing novel.

The book is a collection of stories of Egyptians working and studying in Chicago, at the medical school. In some cases, they are individuals getting on in years, who have established themselves and seemingly integrated into American society. In others, they are young researchers who have received a scholarship from the Egyptian government and whose career success, therefore, depends upon the authorities of their homeland. They must strive relentlessly to achieve outstanding academic results, but they must also be exceedingly careful not to adopt critical or merely irreverent attitudes toward the Egyptian regime—at that time, Mubarak's. The stories unfold autonomously, interweaving only intermittently. Shaima is a deeply devout young woman who, > despite her exceptional scientific gifts, possessed an abysmal ignorance regarding the tools required to seduce a man . Already in her thirties, she meets an Egyptian colleague, falls in love with him, and discovers the pleasures of sex by his side. This affair seems headed toward a happy ending until Shaima finds herself pregnant and, confronted with the young man's terrified refusal (a child would disrupt his academic career), is forced to have an abortion, squarely against her religious convictions. Prior to moving to America, Marwa married a young man who appeared brilliant and respectable. In truth, her husband turns out to be a sordid individual: greedy, authoritarian, treacherous, with perverse and violent sexual inclinations, and, to top it all, an informant for the Egyptian secret service. Marwa wishes to divorce him but faces her parents' opposition; shrewdly, she engineers a situation whereby separation becomes inevitable: the husband is willing to surrender her to a powerful intelligence figure simply to secure an academic career compromised by his utter incompetence as a researcher. If the young are forced to navigate—some naively, others cunningly—the narrow confines granted by a repressive and hypocritical society, the adults themselves do not escape this fate. Saleh chose to flee Egypt, abandoning the woman he loved, whose harsh reproach still haunts him after so many years: "It is truly a pity that you are a coward!" the young woman exclaimed as she bid him farewell. Saleh married an American woman, but it was a marriage of convenience; so much so that his longing for the motherland eventually becomes uncontrollable, even taking on fetishistic dimensions, such as donning his old Egyptian clothes. He wishes to redeem himself by proving to his beloved that he is a brave man who takes risks for his people's suffering. He fails, because deep down he remains a coward, and so he takes his own life. Rafat, too, married an American woman, with whom he had a daughter. In a dramatic confrontation between father and daughter (in a last-ditch effort to save her from drug addiction), the girl violently unmasks the sham upon which Rafat has rested his entire life: > you are a fraud (she shouts at him), a failed actor playing a moronic role that convinces no one. What are you? Egyptian or American? Naghi is an idealist, receptive to the new experiences afforded him by American society, convinced of the need to fight for his country's freedom and democracy. He refuses to conform, often exposing himself to danger in the treacherous milieu of Egyptians abroad. He meets a Jewish girl and begins a romantic relationship marked by passion, affection, and mutual discovery. He is visited by an agent of the Egyptian intelligence services, who warns him to abandon his revolutionary pretenses and lets him know that they possess video footage of his fiery trysts with the young Jewish woman. Who could have planted a hidden camera in his apartment? Paradoxically, Naghi accuses his lover—so entrenched are the mistrust and the barriers dividing the two peoples. > However strong your love may be (the girl says), you will never forget that I am Jewish. I can be as honest with you as I like; your trust in me will always remain fragile . Naghi, too, an aspiring poet, cannot escape the fate of pretense and suspicion bred by a repressive society. All these stories develop in parallel, generating a kaleidoscope of lives, voices, and imagery so dense that discerning a unified narrative thread proves arduous. The vignettes of Egyptian culture, crafted with subtle irony, the deft sketches of characters and their circumstances, along with the detailed depiction of the erotic inclinations of individuals and couples, form a trap that entraps the reader within minutiae, obscuring the overarching import of the novel. There is unquestionably a critique of Egyptian society. Yet the book’s true significance likely resides in the unhappiness engendered by society’s repressive structures. There exists an indissoluble link between the social and institutional order (the absence of democracy) and individual destiny, reaching even into the realm of intimate, familial emotions. That this is not merely a feature of the Egyptian world becomes apparent in the only storyline whose characters do not hail from the North African country. Graham is a sixty-year-old professor, libertarian and eccentric. He meets Carol, a Black woman, with whom he shares a wonderful romance. Yet Carol, because she is Black, cannot find work, ends up modeling, and is coerced into yielding herself to a prominent corporate executive. They love each other, yet social segregation tears their relationship apart—for there is no escaping the devastating fallout of an unequal society, however formally democratic it may be. Aswani is a skillful writer, yet a narrative structure premised on multiple, parallel plotlines cannot be sustained indefinitely without weighing down the prose and dissipating it into too many tributaries. Moreover, there is no overarching plot to draw together the threads of the novel, leaving the narrative ultimately verbose and underwhelming. Why read it? It remains an assemblage of pleasant, intriguing vignettes.

In *Age of Iron* (among the reviews), the mother abandoned by her daughter and condemned to solitude cries out in despair, “let me go to myself, (...) it is a hard task, but I am learning.” In *Disgrace* (also among the reviews), the protagonist, a pompous intellectual, moves toward death: > lying on a plastic chair amid the stench of chicken feathers and rotting apples, he feels his interest in the world drain away drop by drop . And what if, instead, we refused to accept death, even if it assumes the shape of Paradise? An adult and a child find themselves in an imaginary world where kindness and friendship prevail, in which everything flows ever identical to itself, where everyone has forgotten their past. > Nothing is missing. The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living in an illusion. For the protagonist > this life is too placid for his taste, it lacks too much in ups and downs, in drama and tension, it is too much, in fact, like music on the radio. *Anodina*, “is that the Spanish word?” The story itself is nothing but a narrative. Our history is not real. What, then, is our life? A tale? In short, accepting Paradise can only be done by losing oneself. As Dante says in Canto XXXIII of *Paradiso*, > As he who seeing in a dream,/that after the dream the passion impressed/remains, and the other returns not to the mind,/such am I, for almost wholly ceases/my vision, and yet still distills/within my heart the sweetness born of it (lines 58–62). That is to say, only if I surrender to a mystical intuition of God can I dissolve into Paradise and attain a peace, serene and eternal, even if monotonous. Had I continued reading, perhaps I would have understood the role of the child (Jesus accompanying the incredulous Joseph?); I must confess that I abandoned the book by virtue of every reader’s right to drop a story if it is not to their liking. What troubled me was the abstractness of the dialogues and the repetitiveness of the plot. It almost seems as though the author were conversing with Saint Thomas or some other theologian, using the characters not as living subjects rich in emotion, but as feeble stand-ins for concepts. Then again, we are in Paradise. Coetzee has convinced us: with death, it is better to vanish into nothingness. Why not read it? Abstract, boring, and inconclusive.

The novel is set in England between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the triumphant era of the bourgeoisie, which would come to a tragic end with the First World War. Technological and artistic innovation—including in the decorative arts and crafts—individual freedom and equality, the role of women and feminism, socialist and anarchist ideas: these are the defining hallmarks of this historical period, providing the backdrop to a profoundly contemporary theme: that of betrayed childhood. At the end of the nineteenth century, > children were different from children before and after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but were present at family dinners, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, during meals and on long country walks. And yet, at the same time, children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. Parents found it hard to do in practice what they believed in theory that they should do, which was to love all the children equally . One should not, however, expect a conventional historical and social novel; it is in fact an intricate narrative in which different planes of storytelling, internal and external, intersect through the fairy tales written by one of the mothers of these large bourgeois families: Olive. Her seven children (who, as will emerge, are not all born of the same mother and father) are each the subject of a story. Yet here lies the first betrayal: the stories are not truly for them, but for the reading public, as Olive confesses at one point: > I don’t really like making up imaginary children. I get frightfully bored with their little quarrels and their innocence. But the readers have an insatiable desire for these clever little people having comical adventures . On the parents' part, there is no genuine attention paid to the children: their utopian ideas about education, about their children’s free will, about an affectionate and stimulating environment in which to bring up the young, are mere words masking a real indifference. And the children grow up regardless of their parents, gradually discovering the lies of their fathers and mothers, their subterfuges, and in some cases even their violence. They adapt by keeping the truth concealed, by not disturbing the prevailing hypocrisy, and by guarding family secrets. Each reacts differently: one takes refuge in the woods, cutting himself off from everyone; another skillfully conceals his true political beliefs; another vents his rage upon his father’s cherished possessions; another remains suspended, waiting, letting life simply roll by. There are also those who flee their parents’ ideological vagueness by pursuing concrete professions, such as medicine or stockbroking. The First World War brings a tragic end to many of the young protagonists' lives and leaves the survivors profoundly altered. Yet the war is merely the epilogue to a tragedy that had already found voice in Olive’s fantastical, almost psychoanalytic tales, all centered on underworld realms, as if foreshadowing life in the trenches. It happens sometimes that writers, even accomplished ones, measure themselves against narratives that vastly exceed their strength and skill. Such is the case with this book, which not only takes on too many themes (children and adults, the interrelated histories of several families, works of art and the emergence of modern museums, feminism, and many others besides) and too many characters, but above all proves redundant due to a rich, overwrought, and baroque prose. Too many words, too many topics, but little capacity to convey tension or foster readerly engagement. The narrative plot, much like the characters, feels contrived, monotonous, and in many instances predictable. Why not read it? It is prolix, and the labor of getting to the very end goes unrewarded by moments of high expressive power.

> Before me, on my desk, as I write, lies a color photograph... The photograph of Antonia , or rather of one of the many Madonnas, all so alike, painted by an itinerant painter in the early years of the seventeenth century. > Those eyes, black as night and bright as day; that mole on her upper lip; those full, red lips, and then that rebellious curl escaping from the drapery onto her left cheek .... it was a faithful copy of the portrait of Antonia, the fifteen-year-old witch of Zardino. We may assume it was this photograph of an adolescent girl—«a state of grace, even before an age»—that prompted Vassalli to narrate > a grand tale, of a girl who lived between 1590 and 1610..., and of the people who were alive alongside her, during the very years she lived, and whom she knew; of that era and of those places . The places are Novara and a small village, now vanished. Zardino > was a village like those others visible down there, a little to the left and slightly beyond the second overpass; beneath the greatest and most imposing mountain in this part of Europe, Monte Rosa. (...) A chimera! From up there, from the summit of the chimera today one sees > a hazy plain with a few scattered trees and a highway emerging from the mist ; back then, in the seventeenth century, one gazed upon > a landscape of vineyards and woods stretching toward the marshes and the riverbanks; of meadows and *baragie* (wastelands, heaths) (...); of fields of maize, wheat, and rice paddies and a settlement which > between the houses was grey, cramped, primitive, and yet, in the fair season, all abloom with bindweed and climbing wild roses . In this era and in these places Antonia spent her brief life: abandoned at birth, having survived infancy, adopted by a peasant family of Zardino whose modest prosperity aroused envy and rancor, the girl was too beautiful, proud, and independent not to become the focus of gossip and spite among the village crones: she, «a foundling», what did she think she was, a fine little lady! Perhaps she might have grown into womanhood, married, and had children, had circumstances not dragged her toward a ruthless death. She becomes infatuated with a «camminante», that is, one of those «anarchists of the countryside» who wandered in hatred «of all servitude». Enamored precisely of his free spirit, of his tales of travel and cities, Antonia commits the imprudence of meeting him at night, at dusk, beneath an ancient oak tree that local lore held to be a haunt of evil spirits, the dwelling place of the Devil. A fanatical young priest denounces her to the Holy Office, accusing her of witchcraft. As chance would have it, a power struggle is underway between the Inquisitorial Court and the Bishop’s Curia, and poor Antonia becomes the unwitting victim of this political clash. A scorching heat, a prolonged drought, and the dread of epidemics fuel the search for a scapegoat: and who better than a wretched peasant girl, far too reckless and spirited? > The flames crackled high, night became bright as day, tongues of fire merged into a single blaze. (...) The witch’s hair could be seen vanishing into nothingness and her mouth opening in a soundless scream. (...) Antonia was no more. The crowd’s jubilation erupted. (...) Then, at last, the celebration began . In the preface, entitled «Nothingness», Vassalli offers us a metaphysical interpretation: > to search for the keys to the present, and to understand it, one must step out of the noise: go to the depths of night, or to the depths of nothingness . If one steps away from the clamor and passion of our time, one realizes that history, and our very existence, are nothing more than a purposeless, meaningless flux—nothingness, precisely. Why was Antonia sent to the stake? Why was she not granted the right to live? To prevent time from closing in upon us, to keep nothingness from reclaiming us, perhaps only a God could intervene, but > he is the echo of all our vain shouting. (...) He who knows the before and the after and the reasons for everything, and yet, alas, cannot tell them to us for this single, utterly futile reason: that he does not exist. With all due respect to the author, we must say that the novel’s enchantment does not reside in its philosophy of history; what captivates are the characters and the setting. To be sure, they have all vanished, yet to us readers they still appear so profoundly alive in their feelings, in the petty and momentous motives that stir them and drive them to love, to believe, to survive, even through suffering. And what of Antonia, a seventeenth-century figure yet so modern in her naive yearnings and wonder? Here she is arriving in Zardino, still a child. > The foundling, huddled between two sacks, watched it (the Novara countryside) flow past her wide-open eyes; and who knows what crossed her mind, seeing for the first time the mountains reflected and shattered in the mirrors of the rice paddies, and the long rows of pollarded willows, and all the rest. (...) Perhaps, indeed probably, she was thinking of nothing; letting herself be lulled by the swaying of the cart and distracted by the novelty and variety of the sights (...) a heron standing motionless in the midst of a paddy, a flight of ducks... Never mind metaphysics—this is true love for one’s protagonist! Vassalli is a great writer from a stylistic standpoint as well. The syntax is rich and articulate, marked by a masterful use of punctuation. The detailed descriptions of the landscape, the nuanced depiction of characters—even the most odious among them, such as the executioner or the grand inquisitor—and the deft deployment of adjectives are all elements that render the narrative fluid and engaging. Its only limitation, perhaps, is the excessive reliance on quotations from historical documents, almost as if striving to confer reliability upon the narrative. Why read it? Beautiful, enjoyable, compelling, and profound.

The book, set in a small Sicilian town, recounts a murder and the investigation undertaken by a provincial teacher, "out of curiosity and boredom," who discovers the true killer and is murdered as a result. Beyond the setting—characteristic of a society dominated by *omertà*, hypocrisy, and deceit in human relations—the most compelling aspect lies in the figure of the protagonist, Professor Laurana: simultaneously curious and naive, he inhabits a world of his own, outside the conventions of the small community. In reality, he harbors no intention of denouncing the killer; rather, what drives him, and ultimately seals his doom, is an "Enlightenment" faith in knowledge and the pursuit of new emotions. Essentially alienated from the society in which he lives, he fails to grasp its rules, making entirely fitting the book's closing words: "he was a fool." The spare, vigorous style, which leaves no room for rhetoric or baroque redundancies, makes the work an exemplar for all of Italian literature.

The book traces the history of China from 1909 to 1978: from feudal and imperial China to the end of the Cultural Revolution, through the Japanese invasion and the struggle for independence, the civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang, Mao's victory and the birth of the People's Republic, the long years of perpetual revolution waged by the Red Guards, and the ensuing social upheavals. These dramatic events are recounted from the perspective of three women: the grandmother, still a prisoner of traditional society; the mother, who embodies the figure of the emancipated Chinese woman; and finally the daughter, Jung Chang, protagonist and narrator, an expression of the new China. The narrative concludes with Chang’s departure for America. It is a vast historical fresco, so detailed as to become a sort of reportage (neither essay nor novel), with the consequence of flattening individual lives and fragmenting major political and social events, rendering them inexplicable. Summarizing the book is pointless; it is far more worthwhile to dwell on certain fundamental themes. What does it mean to live inside a grand myth that dissolves slowly yet inexorably? The young Chang grew up in the cult of Mao, and until the very end attempts to salvage his figure. > What had turned people into monsters? Why all that useless brutality? It was then that my devotion to Mao began to waver. (...) Doubts about Mao’s infallibility began to creep into my mind, but at that stage, like other people, I blamed mostly Mao’s wife and the Cultural Revolution Authority. Mao, the deified emperor, was still above suspicion . Then, she somehow justifies him. > Mao found the idea of peaceful progress suffocating: he was a restless military leader, a warrior-poet, and he needed action—violent action . And finally, she reaches a definitive turning point: her certainties collapse, shattering her very bond with China. > Now I asked myself: if this is paradise, what then is hell? (...) somewhere in the world there really did exist a place laden with even greater suffering. (...) It was in that frame of mind that I composed the poem. I spoke of the death of my indoctrinated and innocent past as dead leaves torn from a tree by a whirlwind and carried away into a world of no return. What also fractures her deep devotion to Mao is the conflict between familial bonds and communal values. Chang’s mother risked her life for the liberation of China and for the communist ideal, yet because of her independent nature and her regard for life’s authentic values, such as friendship, she is singled out for public disapproval. When she asks what matters she must seek instructions on from the Party, she is answered: “All of them.” There is no individual space. > My mother was eighteen, had just married, and was full of hopes for a new life, yet she felt miserable. (...) She found she could not blame the Party, which seemed to her to be in the right, so she blamed my father—first for getting her pregnant, and then for failing to support her when she was attacked and rejected . Chang’s decision to leave China is also an escape from the fate of her mother, who had so thoroughly internalized the Party’s authority that she failed to realize that the appeal to communal values was hypocritical and absurd, serving only to justify absolute power. In Chang’s detachment from her native country, in her rejection of her homeland and her idealization of the West, her father also plays a part—a man whose devotion to communism is absolute, a man “faithful above all to the revolution.” Yet when he was forced to burn his books, he broke down into a > heart-wrenching, faltering, and wild weeping, the crying of a man unaccustomed to shedding tears . The only response is affection—a “bourgeois” weakness condemned by the Party. > I was so terrified that at first I dared not do anything to comfort him. In the end, I put my arms around him from behind and held him tight, but I did not know what to say. (...) After the bonfire, I had a distinct feeling that something in his mind had changed : Madness is the only outcome of a life wholly consecrated to political faith. The long historical sweep has a happy ending for Chang (she wins a scholarship and is able to go to America), but ends poorly for China: a place no longer loved by the young woman. It would have been a compelling theme had it not been handled by a hybrid book: it is not a work of history because history, to be useful, can only be studied “from above,” so as to provide an overarching view; nor is it a novel, because that would have required a narrative style richer in language and imagery, demanding a deeper exploration of the characters’ feelings and interpersonal relationships, paring back the minutiae rather than merely describing, striving instead to convey and articulate the cultural and social climate. In short, one cannot speak of a place if one no longer loves it. One cannot write history from a microcosm. Why not read it? It is long, flat, prolix; it does nothing to help understand China’s recent history.

> I went on living and writing. Without enthusiasm, living and writing. (...) With supreme indifference, I watched my young female colleagues, laden with charm and sacred zeal, pass me by without even elbowing me. I myself stepped aside to make way for them . This opening of the novel leads the naive reader to believe they are facing the story of a girl, with “a face like so many others,” searching for herself in the Milan of the 1980s—an up-and-coming, aggressive city greedy for money. A suspicion should arise from the young woman’s improbable name: Arlette, the byline of an advice column in a periodical titled *Dialoghi dʼamore*. All the same, the novel’s clever literary construction would seem promising: the present is narrated by Arlette, while the events that led to today—the 1940s and 1950s—are written in the third person, thereby distinguishing Arlette’s discovery of her life as the fruit of the past from the objective narration of the facts and figures that shaped that past. As one reads on, one realizes that this initial impression is an illusion: we are faced with a missed opportunity. The plot is so far-fetched as to become banal. The setting is the Lombard upper-middle class, forever teetering between Milan and Switzerland. At the beginning of the 1940s, Edison is a shrewd, unscrupulous entrepreneur; with the money of his wife, whom he cheats on repeatedly and openly, he has built a publishing empire. He has an affair with a young female writer, who leaves him when Edison refuses to publish a novel of hers. The wife, instead of following the mistress’s example and leaving her husband, bears it patiently: for the love of her children, like any good mother? out of self-interest, like any good daughter of the bourgeoisie? We will never know, for the novel utterly lacks any character depth. Edison’s wife has a brief affair as well, though not with an ordinary person—none other than a monsignor. When we return to the present, we learn that Arlette is the daughter of Edison’s mistress and has had an affair with Edison’s son. Don’t panic! We are not dealing with incest, because Arlette was fathered by another man; even if Casati Modignani has a penchant for the sordid and the morbid (in one episode, children peek through a peephole at women urinating), there is a limit for a respectable bourgeois writer! From Arlette’s love affair a baby girl was born, heiress to the great publishing empire following her father’s suicide, committed, of course, in an exceptional setting: a suite at the Grand Hotel in Rimini. This brief synopsis offers a taste of a story fraught with intrigue—the kind that ought to surprise us, but instead falls completely flat, because after just a few pages the naive reader realizes that anything is possible. Boredom sets in; but what irks most is the worldview: the male figures are mature, wealthy, powerful men; the female figures are fragile women resigned to a subordinate role, constantly in search of a lover or husband who can provide security and, naturally, a comfortable life. Are there no young men to fall in love with? Marriage is a peaceful harbor, where one sees not > glittering rainbows, but (...) the sweet naturalness of two spouses tested by a life lived together . One dreams of an ordinary life, far from the intrigues of a bourgeoisie ravenous for power and money, while still enjoying its perks. There is nothing wrong with writing about the upper-middle class; what rankles, perhaps, is the shallowness with which the author handles dramatic and momentous events, such as the Second World War and the Resistance—the latter’s depiction steeped in platitudes. What cannot be excused, however, is the vacuity of the characters and the thinness of the settings (the descriptions of drawing rooms and gardens resemble those of interior decorators, cold and impersonal). Casati Modignani cites a nineteenth-century poet and educator: > so on the ocean of life we pass and speak to one another. A look and a voice. Then darkness once again . That may be true, but one must give voice to people, to characters; one must speak of their feelings and their stories, not merely ones fashioned out of intrigue, power, luxury, and money. Why avoid it? It is truly dreadful! Insignificant, tedious, and superficial.

The book comprises five novels (*La strada che va in città*, *È stato così*, *Valentino*, *Sagittario*, and *Le voci della sera*) and four short stories (*Unʼassenza*, *Casa al mare*, *Mio marito*, *La madre*). Written over a thirty-year span, from 1933 to 1961, they mirror the author’s literary and existential evolution, from youth to full maturity. As the writer herself remarks in the 1964 preface, one confronts a stylistic pursuit in which the effort “to no longer write by chance... pretending to know,” led to the discovery > that I still ran the risk of being haphazard. Because it was not a flaw of adolescence, but rather a flaw of my spirit.. I was adept at pretending to love what was in truth indifferent to me . Yet this 1964 note seems itself to be an artifice, for across all the writings in this collection there emerges such a *mal de vivre*, such an acute pessimism regarding the female condition, that it would be disquieting if these existential states were merely a simulation, a matter of “guesswork.” And indeed, the collection also bears witness to a life's trajectory, from the awareness of unhappiness to indifference. To consider solely the three principal novels: in the first (*La strada che va in città*, 1941), the protagonist is an adolescent girl living in the countryside alongside her siblings and her cousin Nini. The city is a place to escape a monotonous life and discover love. The girl is courted by Giulio, yet deep down she is in love with her cousin Nini. Adolescence comes to an abrupt end when the protagonist discovers she is pregnant with Giulio’s child and, though aware she does not love him, agrees to marry him. Yet she longs to return to the time before, when she could > run off to the city every day, and look for Nini and see if he was in love with me, and go to the pine grove with Giulio too, but without having to marry him. Yet all of this was over and could never begin again . With that same passive resignation, she receives the news of Nini’s suicide, and over time “it became harder and harder to think of him.” The second novel (*È stato così*, 1947) is the most unsettling. It opens with the protagonist shooting her husband dead. What follows is the account of how this murder came to pass. A young schoolteacher meets Alberto, an older man, unhandsome but intriguing. > I wondered if he was in love with me and if I was in love with him, and I no longer understood anything. He never spoke words of love to me, and I certainly never spoke to him of that either . Yet she marries him, only to discover that her husband has had a mistress for many years and frequently goes away with her for long periods. The protagonist accepts this life > because I had never been capable of living and now it was certainly too late to learn , but the death of the daughter born of the marriage and her husband’s cold reaction unleash a despair that had been repressed too many times. She can no longer live with this man, nor will she ever know other men, and so “I shot him in the eyes.” In her 1964 notes on this novel, dedicated to her husband, Ginzburg seems almost to downplay its dramatic impact, asserting that “the gunshot was born of chance”—it might just as well not have been there, even though it is precisely the murder that gives meaning to the tale. Does the writer wish to disown a deep and intimate unhappiness by pretending to write by chance? And why, moreover, dedicate to her husband a piece of writing in which resentment and disillusionment resonate so powerfully? In the third novel (*Le voci della sera*, 1961), the narrative moves away, at least ostensibly, from the themes of grief and sorrow, sliding toward the dilemmas of indifference and incommunicability. The protagonist chronicles the Balotta family saga and their gradual dissolution. The various members of a once-vigorous lineage wearily pursue entrepreneurial schemes that never materialize and contract drab, unhappy marriages. The protagonist, too, conducts a relationship with one of the scions, but in secret, like clandestine lovers. When they decide to come out into the open to marry, they stop speaking to and seeking out one another, because > everything has been spoiled... because we have begun to bury our thoughts, deep down, deep down inside us. Then, when we start talking again, we will say only useless things... it means being unhappy, but making sure not to say so to each other, in order to live . Nothing remains but incommunicability, aptly conveyed by the senseless dialogues—full of banal, trivial matters—of the protagonist’s mother, with which the novel concludes. From her earliest work, Ginzburg’s writing is spare, essential, and incisive, and thus strikingly innovative compared to the bombastic, redundant style of the early twentieth century. As one advances through the collection, certain attempts to make the narrative more airy and descriptive become apparent, but the author inevitably returns to concision: her sentences are no longer, however, “a whip-crack and a slap,” as in *La strada che va in città*, but turn into tightly wound dialogues with a distinct theatricality, almost Pirandellian. It is as though the author had attempted an opening, only to withdraw once more into a world where only vacuous communication is possible. Natalia Ginzburg’s narrative overpowers, invading with its “absolute, inexorable, and mortal awareness” of an inescapable unhappiness, of a life that must have endured a profound sorrow, well concealed beneath an intellectually and socially brilliant existence. It is an affliction marked by a deeply feminine character. The female protagonists, who are always the first-person narrators, are plain and ordinary; they cross paths with shallow, selfish men, and their very motherhood is experienced as an obligation, an accident, which often comes to an ill-fated end. The female condition appears as a prison and a foreordained fate within a petty-bourgeois milieu. Why read it? These are literary works of great beauty, bearing witness to a feminine dimension of grief.

For Moravia, *La Ciociara* > was his tribute as a novelist to the Resistance as a collective act . The setting is Ciociaria, southeast of Rome; the historical context is the period between October 1943 and June 1944, when this region was thrown into turmoil by the protracted stalemate in the Allied advance, caused by the Cassino defensive lines and the failure of the Anzio landings in January 1944. The narrator and protagonist of the novel is Cesira: raised in Ciociaria, she married a Roman shopkeeper, a man who despises her, calling her «la burina». And indeed, Cesira is coarse, plebeian, and rural, yet strong and pragmatic, a formidable, seasoned worker. Her life revolves around the home, the shop, and her daughter Rosetta. This is how her mother describes her at the beginning of the story: > she had a face like a little sheep, with large eyes, an expression sweet and almost poignant ; later she will have to admit > that this perfection was fragile and almost artificial, like that of a flower grown in a hot-house . For Cesira, the war is far away ( > those sons of whores, let them butcher each other all they want, what do we care about their war? ). And as another character will say, > war is only bad for fools. (...) Let the Germans come, let the English come, let the Russians come, what must matter above all to us shopkeepers is still the shop, and if the shop is doing well, all is well . Cesira thinks the same way; indeed, she enriches herself through the black market throughout the war years. After September 8th, Cesira finds herself flush with cash but devoid of provisions, forced to starve. She decides to leave Rome and head to Ciociaria, to stay with her parents. The train takes the two women as far as Fondi, where the railway line ends. They find lodging with a shady family, whom they quickly abandon after Rosetta is subjected to the indecent advances of a petty Fascist hierarch. They flee, then, into the mountains, to a wretched shepherd village where numerous families who fled Fondi have taken refuge. In the extensive pages dedicated to the shared life of the evacuees and peasants, Moravia draws on his personal experience, to the extent that events and figures mirror those in his diary from those terrible days, when he was forced, alongside Elsa Morante, to seek shelter in Ciociaria. The narrative, fluid yet prolix, is skillfully driven forward, thriving on the contrast between the harrowing realities of war (desolation, bombings, roundups, violence) and the splendid indifference of nature, which follows, immutable and cynical, the eternal cycle of the seasons. The tale seems suspended, awaiting the arrival of the Allies, who are expected to bring «abundance». Enter Michele. a young intellectual, steadfast in his ideas and courageous in his conduct. Unlike Rosetta, who owes her innocence to ignorance, Michele is keenly aware of what is transpiring, of the Nazi-Fascist oppression that affects not only the insular world of the evacuees, but all of Italy, driven toward general material and moral ruin. A positive figure, he is trapped, as it were, in the life of the displaced, in the wretched and indolent day-to-day existence of waiting, focused solely on surviving somehow. Finally, the Allies arrive; it ought to be liberation, but instead the situation deteriorates rapidly. Some German soldiers take Michele away and subsequently execute him when the young man stands up in defense of a peasant family: Michele dies a hero. The two women, alone and isolated, are caught off guard by a group of Allied soldiers, who rape Rosetta. The rape changes the girl; once so innocent, she declares to her astonished mother: > him or someone else, it makes no difference to me. (...) I want to make love because it's the only thing I like and feel like doing. And from now on, I will always be like this . The rape, Michele's death, and the war profoundly alter Cesira as well: once a confident woman, she becomes uncertain, tormented, so much so that her sleep is plagued by nightmares, as though only the oneiric world might allow her to regain her original solidity; in one of these dreams, she imagines that Rosetta has married and that «she unbuttoned her bodice and gave her breast to the baby», but was it Rosetta or that poor madwoman she had encountered wandering the countryside amid the desolation of war? Whatever his intentions, the author fails to convey the tragedy of war for civilians, and this for two reasons. First of all, a pervasive pessimism regarding human nature prevails, leading to the passive acceptance of events, to resignation rather than rebellion, to submission—an attitude certainly not redeemed by the final chapter, in which grief would seem to restore perspective to Rosetta and Cesira. It is a hypocritical and sickly-sweet appendix, calculated to avoid an ending too cynical to find favor with readers. Secondly, Rosetta's metamorphosis from a good girl into a «whore» is implausible (is a rape overcome so easily?), smacks of the morbid, and mirrors a typically male conception of female sensuality. In short, the gang rape is treated as an initiation, an abrupt way of discovering the «ugly things» of the world. On the other hand, > she had now developed a taste for what the Moroccans had forced upon her . From a cathartic turning point, rape becomes the inexorable fate of all women. One cannot be accused of being politically correct in stating that this Cesira-Moravia worldview is intolerable, in addition to draining all tension from the entire narrative. The plot is admirably constructed, the characters are well drawn, and the writing is fluid, effortless, and accomplished with its airy phrasing. The reader is led by the hand up to the rape, foreshadowed throughout the narrative by subtle hints and fleeting episodes; when it occurs, it seems inevitable. Moravia confirms his immense gifts as a writer. Why read it? Cesira is a victim, and her story is emblematic of what befalls civilians in all wars.

The novel recounts the history of Barcelona between 1888 and 1929: a span of time bounded by two world's fairs, which witnessed the urban and social transformation of the city. Mendoza—a Catalan journalist, though not an advocate of independence—narrates Barcelona’s changes through the eyes of a wretched country boy who comes to Barcelona to work on the construction of the facilities for the 1888 Exposition; a young man who, after a brief period in the service of the labor movement, becomes an unscrupulous and somewhat criminal businessman. This is how the author introduces Onofre Bouvila: > short in stature, with broad shoulders, (...) pale and coarse features, ruffled black hair. His clothes were patched, disheveled, and none too clean. (...) There is something in his gaze that makes one uneasy. Yet, there is nothing to fear, > another little sardine that the whale (Barcelona) will swallow without even noticing. It will not be so. Onofre will rise rapidly through the ranks of the anarchist union thanks to his dedication and leadership qualities. He could continue his political activism, likely ending up in prison, certainly remaining poor and exploited. Instead, without apparent regret, he becomes the bodyguard of a speculator who uses Onofre as an unscrupulous enforcer, useful in a city swept up in real estate speculation, corruption, and graft, with a burgeoning bourgeoisie ready to do anything to enrich itself. Like a sort of Catalan *Mastro-don Gesualdo* (see the review of Verga's novel on this site), Onofre climbs the social ladder, cultivates the right connections with the high bourgeoisie, marries a scion of a prominent Barcelona family, and becomes a powerful, immensely wealthy man, devoid of moral qualms, ever determined on his path to success. What drives him? One day, early in his social ascent, he visits a fortune-teller to learn his future. The cards' answer is vague, as always; but the woman sees that neither happiness nor wealth is in store for him: what Onofre pursues is revenge. His father, a businessman, a braggart and a bungler, was humiliated in life; Onofre wants to redeem him by proving that the son will not only become rich and powerful, but will bring to its knees the very bourgeoisie that had so despised and cast out his father. Is he like *The Count of Monte Cristo* or a banal representative of the corrupt system that shaped Barcelona? We will never know; the author does not delve into Onofre’s soul, a character who remains forever in the foggy shadows of a tumultuous city, the true protagonist: in effect, Barcelona has devoured the sardine, even though Onofre believes he commands it. And perhaps, precisely to desperately assert his supremacy, for the 1929 Exposition Onofre commissions the construction of a helicopter—a prodigious contrivance at the time—and in this craft disappears into the sky before a stunned crowd and under the incredulous gaze of Alfonso XIII and the dictator De Rivera. Is it an escape? Has he ascended to Heaven? Or did the helicopter simply explode, killing Onofre? The author does not say, leaving it to us to find the ending to an extraordinary life. What is certain is that by the end of 1929 De Rivera would be forced to resign, and the following year Alfonso XIII would abandon the throne, ushering in the Republic. An era has ended for Spain and Barcelona; another history begins. As often happens with modern novels, the book is lengthy and rambling. The finest section is the first, in which the author recounts Onofre’s arrival in Barcelona, his living conditions, the squalor, the toil, and the odd characters who frequent the boarding house where the boy finds lodging. Particularly intriguing is the figure of Dolfina, a comrade in struggle, always accompanied by a wild, aggressive black cat; a girl who becomes the naive Onofre's first love, in courting whom he already exhibits that cynicism and determination that will accompany him throughout his life: he kills the black cat, eliminating it because it is an obstacle, just as he will dispose of anyone who stands in the way of his goals, irrespective of emotional ties. In the atmospheric construction one senses Charles Dickens (see the reviews of *David Copperfield* and *Oliver Twist* on this site), even if Mendoza treats it all with an ironic and detached touch, free of moralizing. It is a pity that this narrative style dissolves over the course of the novel, along with the ability to construct characters—who grow increasingly banal—forfeiting the historical-sociological approach that had so sharply delineated the opening section. Why is Barcelona the city of marvels? Certainly not for its corrupt system, of which Onofre is merely an exponent; Barcelona is an astonishing city because it has continually reinvented itself in an endless process of creative destruction, fighting, however quixotically, against Madrid and circumstances that were often hostile to it. Mendoza seems to suggest that the total annihilation of the city in the early eighteenth century, at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, wiped the slate clean and helped foster a future-oriented cultural and social climate, ever poised to overhaul the city from an urban, architectural, and economic standpoint. Why read it? It is historically interesting, but too long.

Journey, flight, and the quest for change constitute the themes of this novel, set in the arid Sicilian landscape and amid a thousand cities—real in name, yet fantastical and imaginary in their depiction. Two shepherds, father and son; a girl on the run, who finds refuge with an aging itinerant prostitute; two young newlyweds, perpetually traveling for reasons impossible to know; a father seeking to abandon his son in a welcoming city. Contrasting these characters forever in transit is an apparently motionless setting, yet one in truth awaiting profound social and economic shifts: an old woman, awaiting a death long in coming, observes the countryside and neighboring towns through a telescope, hoping for a transformation that might upend society. The characters cross paths throughout the narrative, but there is effectively no unifying thread other than the journey across these many cities. This is a distinctive novel, one that leaves a longing for change and a sense of freshness, born precisely of the presence of the young who are, despite it all, searching for something in the future.

The novel is the first in a successful saga centered on a Sapiens woman in a Europe of millions of years ago, when our species coexisted for a long period with Neanderthal man. In the aftermath of an earthquake, young Ayla is left abandoned, indisputably doomed to die. She is taken in by a Neanderthal tribe. Custom would dictate that an individual of the “Others” be killed because > any deviation from usual behavior could unleash the wrath of the spirits. And the little girl is truly different: > she was barely four years old, (...) but walked upright on strong, muscular legs, (...) her low forehead sloped back into a long, wide head that rested on a short, thick neck , she could articulate sounds, she could even laugh. Those who save her are two prominent figures of the Clan: Iza, the medicine woman, and Creb, the shaman. They are moved by a mingled sense of curiosity and solidarity. They are fully aware that Ayla will grow up in a suspicious, if not openly hostile, environment, and will have to learn to behave like the Clan people: adopt the proper posture of a Neanderthal female, respect rigid social roles, master sign language, and suppress any urge toward spoken speech. > There will be time, Iza thought, to teach her manners. She was already beginning to think of the child as hers. (...) Creb was silent, full of thoughts. > Being accepted into the Clan does not change who she is. She was born of the Others, how can she learn all the knowledge you have? You know she has no memory . She lacks the Neanderthals' past, that body of knowledge and values accumulated over millennia that constitutes the backbone of their society. For instance, tradition dictates that females must not hunt, a social function reserved exclusively for males, upon which they have built their power. Restless, inquisitive, and undisciplined, Ayla secretly learns to hunt with a sling, and excels at it. It is the first, but certainly not the last, deviation from the rules. Each time, Ayla’s generosity, her evident desire to integrate into the Clan, and the widespread belief that she is protected by a superior Spirit lead the tribe to forgive her, eventually coming to see her as one of their own. Ayla experiences an inner conflict between integrating into the community and being free, being herself, no longer oppressed by a claustrophobic society. What holds her back is her affection for Iza and Creb, who took her in against everyone’s judgment. Despite her efforts, Ayla has an implacable enemy: Broud, the future leader of the Clan. He is antagonized by the falsely submissive demeanor of this woman of the “Others,” irritated by her growing popularity, and challenges her very inclusion in the Clan as contrary to tradition. He is driven by a mixture of power urges, obtuse adherence to tradition, and an unconfessable attraction to Ayla. As with all males driven into a corner, only rape remains. Broud violates Ayla, who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a boy bearing the traits of both *Homo sapiens* and Neanderthal man. He is a monster! shouts Broud; he must be put to death according to the rules. Yet this does not happen; on the contrary, the Clan females who have just given birth make themselves available to nurse Ayla’s son, after her own milk dries up. Female solidarity proves stronger than tradition! Nearing death, Iza reminds Ayla that one day Broud will be leader, and then > I don't think you should live with this Clan when Broud becomes leader. (...) I think it would be better if you left. Decreed dead while living by Broud, isolated and marginalized, Ayla has no choice but to take the path toward other lands, in search of the “Others.” The author skillfully draws upon anthropology to reconstruct the social mechanisms of the Clan, which are depicted in minute detail. One might easily object that Neanderthal society could have been profoundly different from the primitive societies of *Homo sapiens*. It is an accurate observation, yet irrelevant to the reading of the novel, whose central theme is the welcoming of the other. It must be said that integration fails: despite all efforts, Ayla remains one of the “Others,” yearning for freedom, an innovator and explorer (the pages depicting young Ayla discovering the forest are evocative); the Clan people attempt to include Ayla, but cannot bring themselves to rebel against Broud—they cannot break the rules or defy tradition. The message is pessimistic: in light of contemporary conflicts, will we ever be capable of welcoming those who are different from us? Perhaps, if we liberate ourselves from Memory. The novel is long and prolix, alternating moments of tension with lengthy stretches that add little to the narrative. Constructed around an intricate cast of characters, the storytelling scatters into a sea of names, losing focus on the protagonists and on the depiction of the setting, both social and natural. One reads on, constantly expecting something novel, such as the encounter with the “Others”; instead, nothing disruptive occurs, and the conclusion feels predictable. The prose is straightforward, elegant, and lexically rich: fine English. Why read it? It is very long, but worthwhile in the end.

In the Resistance (the war of liberation between 1943 and 1945), the decision to take up arms against Nazi-Fascism rarely arose from a deliberate, mature reflection; more often than not, it was an act of unconscious bravado, oblivious to the risks being run. As Luigi Meneghello wrote in *I piccoli maestri*, it was > a cry, (...) a collective (...) intoxicating feeling: one sensed the overwhelming power of things that rise from below, spontaneous things . Mario Tobino, too, explores the choice of the partisan struggle in depth, doing so in his signature style, that of one who "studies men and loves them." Anselmo is a young medical officer, recently returned from Libya. > He was still dazed by the war, the soldiers’ groans still in his ears, having been a spectator to cruel deeds. Like the protagonist of Cesare Pavese’s novel (*La casa in collina*), he yearns for "a lethargy, an anesthetic," in order to > rediscover the goodness, the tenderness that, beyond all ugly violence, must still exist in the world . One day, after September 8, a woman stops him in the street. > I was waiting for you, I wanted to ask you, since you fought in the war. (...) Who did this? Who are we with now? What did they make us believe? Whose fault is it? And all those who died, poor souls? (...) I saw them die, it was all for nothing... replies Anselmo, and "felt he was stupidly on the verge of tears." For the young man it is a jolt, an awakening; he must shake off his torpor, spring into action. In his hometown, Viareggio (called Medusa in the novel), a group of youths has established an underground organization: they style themselves Marxist-Leninists, profess to be communists, even though they have never read Marx or Lenin and have not yet had any contact with the resurrected Communist Party (though they yearn for it ardently). Then there is an old admiral who longs to act; he was retired by the Regia Marina for his anti-fascist stance. yet he is fueled by a boyish urge to fight, to show the Fascists and the Germans what he is made of. Anselmo soon becomes the liaison officer between "the clandestines" and the admiral; he is entrusted with delicate and difficult missions, which he always manages to carry out exceedingly well, thanks to his poise and his gift as a subtle weaver of human relationships. Tobino guides us through the early steps of the partisan struggle as though it were an escapist novel; perilous situations, recounted nonetheless in an exhilarating, ironic vein, intertwine with the depiction of the growing bond forged among the young conspirators—youths not yet adults, of profoundly different temperaments, varying social backgrounds, and unequal levels of education, yet forever animated by a zest for life and a mutual understanding that transcends their shortcomings and divergent dispositions: action leads to friendship, and friendship to unity. The clandestines, just like the admiral, live on the brink of the abyss as though it were a game—risky, certainly, but undoubtedly bound for a happy ending. The cruel face of war emerges, belying our wish for a serene adventure: this is not the cinema, as one of the book’s protagonists daydreams! Searches, roundups, and arrests begin. Anselmo takes part in the killing of a Fascist in La Spezia; he himself kills a squadrista who had brutally murdered the admiral. They must leave Viareggio and head into the mountains to fight the partisan war, where Anselmo will meet his death. > He closed his eyes (...) and at once dreamed he was in a wood dense with foliage; he lay stretched out, fledgling birds flew around him, brought their beaks close, opening them as if laughing, like children content after a meal . Anyone expecting Fenoglio’s *Il partigiano Johnny* cannot help but be disappointed: here there are no solitary heroes. The novel is constructed linearly, without bombast, an open chronicle rich in endless possibilities, capable of humor because it is lucid, transparent, and yet affectionate toward its characters—even toward the Fascists. > But why do the Fascists do this? Anselmo asked himself in a murmur . The resolve of the "clandestines" takes shape from events; it is events that make them adults, mature them politically, turn them into fighters, convinced all the same that, just as ships can sail through calm waters as well as rough seas, even among the trees, where > death whined, (...) there was nevertheless happiness, gladness, in the face of the present solitude . Why read it? A splendid book by a regrettably forgotten author.

When drawing near to the end of life, one feels the urge to retrace one's existence through memory. Great men may indulge the illusion of leaving behind a remembrance through a biography teeming with characters and events: a grand narrative, of sorts, of their role in history. But when one is an ordinary man leading a banal existence, what meaning is there in chronicling one’s life? Nothing remains but that remembrance which sees us "in the fixity of a portrait," the fruit of a mingling of real facts and imagination (see Salvatore Satta's *The Day of Judgment* on this site); or, to put it in the words of Italo Svevo, > the most intense life is summarized by the most rudimentary sound, that of the wave of the sea, which, from the moment it forms, changes at every instant until it dies (see *Zeno's Conscience* reviewed on this site). Christine Dwyer Hickey undertakes a venture even more daring than that of Zeno and Satta. On the surface, the author retraces Farley's existence as though it were a reverse chronicle of the most significant events of his life as an unassuming clerk: now in his seventies and alone, he anxiously waits to catch sight of his young neighbor who might "make him feel a little younger, just a little less old"; he frets over purchasing a suit suitable for his employer's funeral—a funeral to which, moreover, he has not been invited; we see him at his retirement reception wondering whether he will miss anything about office life, with > the stupid wisecracks and the arrogance of youth, the Monday morning trivialities and the smell of cheap aftershave, the too many annoyances and the senseless spites, the teachers' pets and those who couldn't care less about anything Moving back through time, we see Farley caring for his mother, who always favored his intellectual, selfish, and absent brother; then with his mistress (his employer's wife), making the reckless decision to finance the firm he works for without demanding any formal record of the loan; and further back still, the devastating grief over the loss of his wife, the choice to go to work in order to marry, abandoning dreams of travel, the news of his father’s death when he was just twelve, and finally, at five years old in a hospital, the futile wait for his parents to visit. To be sure, Farley is the quintessential petit bourgeois; if he has flattened into a routine devoid of ambition and dramatic turns, it is ultimately his own fault: he has always made the least demanding choices, placing himself almost willingly at the disposal of others—be it his employer, his wife, his mistress, or his mother, his brother, and even the girl next door, yearned for in the erotic remnants of a poor old man. Yet if we place Farley "comfortably reclining in a Club armchair," as Svevo would have said, we realize how Farley's life revolved around a single waiting: that for his father. Take, for instance, two passages from the novel. Farley is five years old; his mother and brother finally arrive at the hospital, and he asks where his father is. Is he out fishing? To the woman's reply that he is at work and could not come to see his son, Farley perceives > the sound of gently flowing water. He sees himself now on a riverbank. (...) He is wearing the waders that reach up to his thighs: boots he recognizes from a box on a shelf as belonging to his father. (...) He is alone. Alone on the bank. A man, a boy, a child, a baby, a man again, all of a sudden . Now he is old, at the end of the book. He watches his neighbor run to catch the bus, but cannot recognize the face. > Then his own father invades his mind. Face unfortunately clear. Died of a heart attack.. (...) In any case, certainly a bastard who never had the time or a word for anyone. A snarler. He snarled at the newspaper, snarled at the radio, snarled if you spoke to him while he was having lunch . And at the funeral, so many fine speeches about a man he and his brother had never known. > A great conversationalist. An intelligent man. (...) Passionate about fly-fishing . The novel is a masterpiece. It is not merely the clever device of a reverse narrative. In each of the events of his life, Farley moves like Bloom in Joyce's *Ulysses*: a rambling yet captivating journey through the streets and shops of Dublin, among minor characters who evoke the sense of a solitary yet superficially sociable life (Farley is always in control of himself), among lateral, seemingly marginal reflections. What emerges is a sprawling path of the protagonist's streams of consciousness and of how the arduous manifestation of the self is rooted in places and relationships, rather than abstractly on a psychoanalyst's couch. Moreover, the prose is magnificent and vibrant: a deluge of marvelous words, of untranslatable phonemes in which one takes pleasure through the ear rather than the eye, of a lexicon crossbred with everyday speech, set within an overwhelming syntactic architecture—even if not immediately transparent to the Italian reader, and undoubtedly difficult to render into our language. Why read it? It is splendid; the author is Joyce and Rushdie combined.

Is it possible to escape anguish merely by rummaging through one's own mind, pursuing a > lucid madness of constructing possibilities that are terrible because they are plausible, plausible because possible, possible because thought, thought because present somewhere, in the mind... (like) a Prometheus naked, flushed, dripping, bound by imagination with steel ties to the highest, most exposed peak overhanging the abyss ? Or is an event necessary—even a traumatic, violent one—that forces one out of their nightmares, to rediscover friendship, to reinvent “tenderness and assaults” from “drapes and gutted mattresses”? This novel recounts a rebirth into a new life. In a Marecchia described as a wild land, a “black and barren wasteland,” Estefan is an adrift, disoriented nineteen-year-old, like so many young people. He carries a deep sense of guilt. When he was still a child, his little brother died beside him during the night, without him noticing. Could he have saved him? Or was it he who killed him? From that moment on, Estefan became the > shittiest son, cat in the headlights, punchbag for boxers... better not to exist, sometimes, for others. Better, sometimes, not to exist at all . And ever since, a nightmare has haunted him: he imagines standing at the edge of a pit whose depth reveals no distinct contours and whose colors he cannot grasp, yet he glimpses “children, swings, slide, shrieks, tears” and, above all, > Cardboard-cutout killer Mom... Terrifying Mom, Mom with artery-colored lips, so very thin. Thin enough to cut. She is dressed in torn black poppies.. (and) she laughs, and it is an ugly laugh, a laugh that seems hauled up by powerful hooks that could tear Mom's whole face to shreds . One could easily, and superficially, say that Estefan needs the affection of his parents, and especially of his mother. Yet reality is not so simple, for the loss of the little brother shattered a once-peaceful family, destroyed their relationships, and burdened Estefan with the guilt of having survived. The narrative recounts Estefan’s disordered, aimless life amidst car races, joints and alcohol, nightclubs, constantly away from home and defiant toward school, locked in a perpetual, muted conflict with the adult world. There is, however, a deep friendship—the one with Martino, another troubled youth, who alternates between apparent docility and sudden outbursts of violence. He too carries a wound from childhood: he was raped by his uncle as a young boy (honestly, a useless redundancy for narrative purposes). One evening, wandering through the “wild” Marecchia, Estefan stumbles upon the isolated farmhouse of an old farmer who lives with his granddaughter, a girl orphaned since birth. Her mother was an addict who died giving birth to her. Estefan’s tribulations among the farm animals and his encounter with the little girl are among the story’s most successful passages. Yet the author fails to break free from her indulgence in introspective, hallucinatory references, falling once more into the trap of disturbing imagery without surrendering to the sweetness of the fable. The dung, the hay, the farmyard animals, the equipment become, for both protagonist and author, a > non-place. A place of thought where time is smashed to pieces. There’s the fossil combine harvester, the hay and the spiders, the chicken, and who knows what else. Microbes and bacteria raining down, cobwebs of embarrassing perfection, and a delirium of light play to be savored in silence. Here past and present interpenetrate... (but) the future is fucked . The story is, however, more tenacious than the penchant for self-destructive delirium. An affectionate and singular friendship develops between Estefan and the child: a bond that endures even when guilt resurfaces. Indeed, through a series of coincidences, the girl’s grandfather, having gone out into the night to search for her, kills himself with a gunshot. Estefan flees in desperation after making sure the girl is in good hands. During his flight, he suffers a very serious accident. We find him in the hospital, alone and with “pain occupying his mind,” but Martino and the little girl are there waiting for him. > The boy (Martino) takes his fingers in his own. Estefan opens his eyes, focuses. And it doesn’t seem real to him; for the first time, he does not miss the white . In the acknowledgments, the author observes how > writing this book meant giving meaning to many events for me; it was a painful and magnificent process . Undoubtedly, this internal journey came at the expense of overall lucidity, the plot, and character development. The reader appreciates the narrative premise and the contours—however sketchy—of the characters and setting, but cannot help lamenting the lost opportunity, what the novel could have been had the author refrained from chasing the nightmares and deliria of the mind. The writing is redundant with adjectives and imagery, almost baroque and often cryptic. It needs to be rewritten. Why not read it? Chasing the abysses of the mind is, in the end, boring.

This is a short story, set in Benin, describing several episodes of a coup d'état. The author finds himself in the African country and is captured, along with a Frenchman, by military forces whose allegiance—whether to the regular army or the putschists—remains unclear. Throughout the narrated events, a general confusion prevails regarding the origins of the coup, the roles played by the military forces, and the very figures encountered. A sense of frustration predominates in the author: he is interrogated, held in captivity without food or drink, struck, and then released with profuse apologies for the misunderstanding. It seems an unreal affair, as if fabricated, and precisely for this reason emblematic of a collective madness. It is Africa unraveling, and the author is its stunned, incredulous spectator. Why not read it? It is a story too slight to prove interesting and engaging.

A poor book, certainly not on the level of his previous ones. A group of friends live in the provinces, revolving around a young boy who inhabits a bleak and squalid environment. The characters and their stories are pushed to the point of absurdity. The boy's father is a Nazi fanatic, obsessed with brute strength yet fundamentally good-natured and deeply devoted to his son; another friend is an alcoholic, recently separated from his wife, who dies attempting a bank robbery; yet another is mentally disabled and, in a fit of madness, murders a girl before taking his own life. The underlying theme of the book is the strong bond between father and son: an affection that manages to survive and grow even in a squalid environment and among characters seemingly governed by absurd myths. Another positive character is a social worker who helps the boy and eventually finds love. As Francesco Troiano wrote > Ammaniti paints, beyond the plot, the portrait of a country devastated by vulgarity and consumerist flattening: the men have dyed hair and the women designer sunglasses, they vacation at Valtur holiday villages or at the Coral Bay in Sharm el-Sheikh, buy their mobile phones at "Cellulandia," and shop at the "Quattro camini" shopping center > . All around, the misery of those who did not make it, depicted nonetheless without indulging in facile sympathy: the ferocity, perhaps not entirely conscious, of the poor explodes—as it already did in *Io non ho paura* > —in devastating and unpredictable ways that leave no room for justifications of any kind . It is a treacle of episodes, sentiments, and social themes that lapses into the tedious and the predictable.

The book brings together Oscar Wilde’s major short stories, in which the style is above all remarkable, particularly the sentence structure. The phrasing is not overly elaborate, favouring short sentences, but the juxtaposition of words (simple and close to everyday language) succeeds in lending poetic, and in certain cases elegiac, qualities to the writing. The result is a splendid English that recovers the essential nature of words through conversational rhythm. The content of the stories is generally fantastical and in many cases paradoxical: it draws upon the world of nature and the supernatural, which provide the setting and often supply the protagonists. On a first reading, a broadly moralistic approach seems to predominate, accompanied by a pursuit of the improbable and a nostalgia for the “goodness” of nature in contrast to human selfishness and pettiness. In reality, what emerges is a pervasive melancholy, almost a search for something lost (a remembrance of things past?), and a celebration of beauty. All the protagonists (people, animals, natural environments) are characterized by sublime physical traits and remarkable intellectual attributes: ugliness does not exist. Aesthetics thus prevails over ethics: a sort of exaltation of aestheticism. In this way, the theme of melancholy is also clarified: it is a nostalgia for lost beauty. Of particular interest is the story *The Portrait of Mr W. H.*, in which the author puts forward several hypotheses concerning the addressee of some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. To appreciate it fully, one would need a deeper familiarity with Shakespeare’s poetry and drama, but it is evident that here, too, one of the central themes is the love of beauty, which emerges from the protagonist’s conviction that the person described in the sonnets was a young actor who played the female roles in the tragedies. Shakespeare did not seek to flatter an eminent figure, but was writing solely out of love for someone who worked alongside him (undoubtedly less “highborn”) and with whom he shared a kindred sensibility.

The plot of the novel is well known. Edmond Dantès is wrongfully imprisoned. He manages to escape, becomes immensely wealthy, and consequently devotes his life to vengeance through a series of deceptions and acts of cruelty. The novel appears to have been inspired by a true story. It unfolds across three distinct levels: adventure, sustained only at times by a gripping pace, as in the first part (the imprisonment, the acquaintance with Abbé Faria, and the escape) and at certain subsequent moments. All too often, the novel develops in a slow and tedious manner, even in the face of surprises and plot twists; the setting, which emerges from the description of Rome, of the island of Monte Cristo itself, and of Parisian society. In some instances, it is an effective, if somewhat mannered, fresco (as in the case of Rome); in others, one is confronted with a superficial and hurried description; the superhero, embodied in the figure of the Count of Monte Cristo—a hero who proves to be negative, insofar as he pursues his revenge with a sadism and a voluptuousness that cannot be justified solely by a desire for justice. From this perspective, the novel’s “villains” appear far more vivid and real; they are, in fact, the true characters, endowed with a depth of their own and driven by contradictions that make them human. The novel is repetitive and tedious, and it is truly difficult to make it all the way to the end.

This book collects four lectures delivered by Grossman between 2004 and 2006. Two of them concern the nature of writing, while the others address the "appalling, ambiguous, and complex" situation of Israel. What unites the reflection on literature with that on politics is the writer's mission: for Grossman, it consists of refusing the > surrender of the possibility of understanding what I truly think... So that, perhaps, it would be better not to think, not to know, to entrust the task of thinking, acting, and establishing moral norms to those who certainly know better than I do . Grossman shares the view expressed by Vargas Llosa in the preface to *Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter*: literature originates from the writer's dissent from the world, from > what he would like to suppress, add, or correct in life . The starting point is, however, an inward search that recalls Pamuk, for whom > being a writer means being aware of the secret wounds we carry within us (*My Father's Suitcase*). Indeed, for the Israeli author, > the primary impulse that triggers and drives writing is the desire to invent and tell a story, and to know oneself. Moreover, the more I write, the more I realize the power of a second impulse, which cooperates with and completes the first: the desire to know one's fellow man from the inside, from within... to feel what it means to be another person . And thus the fundamental motive > is the yearning to voluntarily remove what defends me from the other , in order to overcome > the effort we make not to expose ourselves completely to the other... to preserve... the framework in which our multiform and erratic psyche is contained, and at times imprisoned . The pivot of this transition from the self to others is constituted by characters. > Writing a novel means, to a large extent, being fully responsible for a few dozen characters . To explain this statement, especially pertinent in light of the descriptive and psychological poverty of so many modern novels, Grossman relies on an apt metaphor. The writer is like someone who keeps dozens of people imprisoned in a cellar. > Every now and then he would do well to have a chat with them... try to defuse tensions... listen to their stories and memories, remind them of everything that is still left to dream of, to mourn, so that for a moment they forget the suffocating pit in which they find themselves . From this focus on characters arise the tasks that Grossman assigns to politics. > If there is one thing I would hope politicians and leaders might sooner or later learn from literature, it is precisely this way of dedicating oneself to a situation, and to the people trapped within it , to no small degree because of the traps those very politicians and leaders helped create. The mention of political responsibility leads directly to the lectures addressing Israel's dramatic situation. One cannot help but admire Grossman’s courage, but also his dignity, in directly calling out the Israeli government's culpability in pursuing an aggressive policy that is distorting the very foundations of the State of Israel, its institutions, and the rule of law itself, setting in motion an apparently irreversible process of "disorientation and dismemberment... of the public, social body." Yet Grossman’s most compelling reflection concerns an aspect seldom emphasized: the gradual disappearance of the > model of the universal, cosmopolitan Jew, who aspires to fulfill an intellectual and moral mission , supplanted by utilitarianism, brute force, and aggressive competitiveness. If the land of Israel was meant, in the ideals of Zionism, to end the Diaspora and render the Jewish people finally "equal" to other nations, fear and hostility toward others (first and foremost toward the Palestinians) perpetuate the psychological and spiritual patterns of the Diaspora—this time in an aggressive key. From oppressed, the Jewish people become the oppressor. It is futile to look in Grossman's lectures for the lightness and subtle irony of Pamuk or Vargas Llosa. This is not merely the author's style, which is invariably solemn, intricate, and meditative. It is the tragedy of the man—as an individual (above all, as a father mourning the loss of his son), as an Israeli witnessing the unraveling of his own people, and as a Jew confronting the betrayal of millennial values—that prevents Grossman from casting aside dark and tragic undertones. The anguish oozing from every word, the philosophical edge of his considerations, and the sense of an inescapable fate that can be counterbalanced only by utopia make for a heavy and demanding, at times repetitive, read. Only at certain moments does one emotionally empathize with the writer. It occurs when, in his magnificent commemoration of Rabin, he asks with dignity not to be judged with pity and indulgence as though driven by a "feeling of anger and vengeance" over the terrible tragedy of his son's death. Even grief can be wielded by power to silence dissent and critique! Why read it? The reflections on the writer and on literature are particularly compelling.

The book is set within the affluent Roman bourgeoisie (*pariolina*) of the 1970s and 1980s. A Jewish family, the Sonninos, leads an extraordinarily luxurious and lavish life, even as they weather periods of great prosperity, bankruptcy, and eventual financial recovery. The patriarch, grandfather Bepy, lives in absolute dissoluteness, shaping—for better or worse—the fate of his entire family, his children and grandchildren alike. The Sonninos' story intersects with that of the Cittadinis, whose patriarch, Nanni, was once Bepy's business partner before steadily amassing an even greater fortune, ennobling himself through marriage to a princess. Nanni, too, has dictated the lives of his kin: a son who commits suicide, an alcoholic grandson, and a granddaughter, Gaia, with whom Bepy’s grandson, Daniel, is in love. A primary narrative thread running through the book is the saga of the two families, almost a Roman *Buddenbrooks*. Yet these family chronicles merely serve as an occasion to depict paradoxical characters and settings—in the vein of Jeffrey Eugenides’s *Middlesex*—and to stage Daniel’s personal search for lost time, vaguely reminiscent of Proust. The theme of Jewish identity is also present, with touches and echoes of Woody Allen. It is, therefore, a book heavily indebted to other literary influences, and the style itself calls to mind Saul Bellow or *Barney’s Version*. The pacing and structure are engaging at first, only to grow increasingly tedious, repetitive, and predictable. The excessive reliance on the interrogative form and the jumble of idioms and languages fracture the narrative, which is sustained neither by a thorough depiction of its context (the portrayal of the Roman bourgeoisie comes across as superficial and in some respects inauthentic, given the protagonist's cosmopolitan background) nor by an incisive analysis of the characters, their feelings, and their emotional and spiritual evolution. Perhaps the most genuine aspect of the novel is its portrait of youth: an intellectual, ironic take on the coming-of-age tropes of Moccia.

Carlino is the natural son of the young Countess of Fratta and grows up in the household of his aunt and uncle, left to the care of the servants and regarded as a «second-class relative». At the castle of Fratta also lives his cousin, a girl younger than Carlino, named Pisana. From his boyhood, Carlino falls in love with Pisana, an increasingly vivacious and unpredictable girl who shares a conflicted relationship with him: she seeks his protection and affection whenever she needs it, only to wound his feelings by keeping company with other boys and treating him poorly. The novel (late 18th to mid-19th century) is the chronicle of this love, accompanied by the nostalgia for a childhood that was poor and neglected, yet happy and carefree. The political events (the old provincial feudal society, the decline of Venice, the Napoleonic era, the Restoration, etc. ) are important, yet remain peripheral to this troubled but profound bond that unites Carlino and Pisana. The two come together and part ways, only to reunite in an ongoing struggle of emotions and reciprocal roles that transcends all the upheavals surrounding them, in which they are deeply immersed. Two themes emerge, typically Romantic yet remarkably relevant today: nostalgia for childhood: > we were happy without effort, happy without knowing it... for me, it is true, there was also the spit to turn; but I forgive even the spit, and would gladly turn it once more to regain the innocent bliss of one of those blessed evenings, at Martino’s knee, or beside Pisana’s cradle . Yet the memory of childhood and of loved ones slowly fades across a long life: > beloved and melancholic shadows of those I loved, you live on in me... youth remained alive in the man’s mind; and the old man gathered without a curse the experience of his manhood . A pervasive sadness therefore dominates, a resignation born of the realization that everything vanishes, just like great love: > forgive me for having loved you in my own way, Pisana says on her deathbed, for having sacrificed you to a strange and inconceivable whim of mine, for having sought in your life nothing but an opportunity to indulge my strange fantasies!... You were not supposed to understand me, you were supposed to hate me, and yet you endured me! . The incomprehensibility of love, of the affection that binds two people and compels them to care for one another despite everything. And the novel closes precisely with an ode to his love for Pisana: > I glimpse you, bluish and compassionate, in the dying ray of the moon (we are in the height of Romanticism)... we hoped and loved together... without you, what would I ever have been? . Another theme of the novel is the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois society, the hopes for a free Italy, and the mounting disillusionment with this design. Yet another theme is undoubtedly the pessimism regarding the Italian spirit, its structural inability to be a free and «ethical» people. These are, as noted, peripheral backdrops, contexts within which the true central threads of the novel unfold. If it is true, as Goffredo Bellonci observes, that this is not merely the novel of Pisana—in that the author intends to depict the journey toward a growing consciousness of the individual and of a people discovering within itself the strength for rebirth—it is equally true that the web of human feeling is what confers modernity and enduring relevance upon the novel. The novel is very long and prolix. The first two hundred pages (childhood at the castle of Fratta) are very fine: swift, fresh, spirited, and ironic. They are read in a single breath. Thereafter, the novel adopts an uneven pace, frequently slow and ponderous, at times superfluous. The reader gets lost and struggles to read on.

What mystery lies behind this novel that accompanied Thomas Mann throughout his entire life? Begun in 1910 and later abandoned, it was taken up again in 1954, a year before the author's death. Thomas Mann imagines a singular character—an enchanter or mere charlatan—recounting his life, and does so beginning with an emblematic episode of his youth. Still a boy, he is taken by his father to the circus, where he marvels at the performance of a renowned clown, whose demeanor, even through varied situations, whether scandalous or comic, > preserved a grace free from all vulgarity and neglect... free and witty, radiating the joy of life, if one can denote by this expression that exquisite and painful sense of envy, nostalgia, hope, and need for affection ignited in the human soul at the sight of what is beautiful and blithely perfect . At the end of the show, the father takes the child backstage to meet the famous clown, and before the boy appears a "revolting sight": a vulgar man, smothered in hideous little pustules, in an atmosphere heavy with ointments and stage paint. > But did the adults, the worldly people who surrendered so willingly, indeed so passionately, to his charms, not know they were being deceived, or, by tacit agreement, did they simply refuse to regard that deception as deceit? Perhaps that was it, when one thinks about it: at what moment does the firefly reveal its true nature—when it glides through the summer night as a poetic spark, or when it squirms in the palm of our hand, reduced to a wretched insect? The theme is thus that of man's dual personality, of his ambiguous and perpetual disguise, whereby one assumes the guise of whatever pleases: life is a deception practiced upon others and upon oneself. Felix Krull is the son of a petty German industrialist, a fraudulent producer of counterfeit sparkling wine. Graceful without being handsome, > fair and dark at once, with the light of blue eyes... the veiled charm of the voice, the silky sheen of the hair , Felix would gladly have prolonged the indolent rhythm of his adolescence, had he not been forced, at the age of nineteen, to seek employment following his father's bankruptcy and suicide. A family friend secures him a post at a grand hotel in Paris. Here the young man leads a dual existence: lift boy and apprentice waiter during working hours, an elegant and refined Parisian in his leisure time, living off the money of the hotel's wealthy female guests, upon whom he bestows his amorous favors. He had attained his deepest aspiration, "permutability": merely by changing his attire and his hair, he could be, at will, either servant or gentleman. It is a life that suits him, until a wealthy young man, infatuated with an operetta singer, proposes that Felix take his place on a voyage around the world, forced upon him by his parents in the hope that he might forget his scandalous mistress. It is the great leap: > I was seized with a thrill of joy at the thought of the reconciliation between being and semblance that life was willing to grant me, of the appearance that it wished to add to being . One might expect a Pirandellian situation; instead, Thomas Mann leads us through philosophical and sociological digressions that overlay the narration of the principal stages of Felix's social conquest. The first leg of the journey is Lisbon, where the protagonist is readily embraced by high society. What attracts him in particular are the wife and daughter of the Director of the Science Museum: the former a buxom and rigid noblewoman ("not pretty, but handsome"), the latter a young maiden, "with lips proudly compressed," possessing the typical austerity of the South. It is the "double image" of feminine allure: haughty nobility alongside graceful, callow youth. Felix would like to savor both; he even dreams of marriage, but it is the noblewoman who urges him not to "seek fortune in childish fancies" and instead allow himself to be swept away by the "whirlwind of primeval forces" unleashed by a regal, mature bosom. And here the first part of Felix Krull's memoirs breaks off, leaving us to assume that the young man abandons any pretensions to a solid bourgeois horizon—which is, in any case, precluded by living under an assumed identity—to press on with his life as an adventurer and a swindler. Yet we shall never know, for the account of Felix's life remains unfinished. The novel is divided into two parts. Up until the substitution between Felix and the wealthy youth, we recognize the style of the great Thomas Mann: the narrative unfolds linearly, the treatment of episodes and characters is brilliant, even mildly ironic, and the "caprices" (the digressions, the chronological disruptions, the analytical elaborations) are functional to an overall understanding. In the second part, the structure of the narrative becomes rambling and disordered. It is unquestionably clever to relate and gloss the events through the letters of the putative son, Felix, to the putative parents—who are, moreover, bewildered by what is recounted, suspecting, quite rightly, that it is a figment of the imagination. This literary device demonstrates Mann's mastery, yet it fails to restore the novel to even a minimum of compactness and lucidity. It seems as though the author is chasing, with the last vestiges of his strength, the completion of a work very dear to him. Yet his momentum gets the better of him, and an excess of themes and reflections crowd together without order. Why not read it? It is simply not worth the trouble.

The novel is set in England, where a secret agent must negotiate the purchase of coal for his country at war. The book is dull, perhaps because it is not so different from Greene’s other adventure novels, and in any case it lacks the irony and narrative pace of *Our Man in Havana*.

The book takes as its subject the Spanish conquest of Central America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a conquest narrated through the trajectories of five figures: Columbus, Cortés, Las Casas, Durán, and Sahagún. To each of these figures, the author matches a distinct stance toward the conquest: in Columbus, the prevailing approach is that of discovery, which leads him to pay close attention to nature and the environment, alongside a fundamental indifference toward the indigenous population, who are essentially assimilated into nature; in Cortés, the spirit of conquest prevails, and with it, knowledge of the language and mentality of the indigenous population in service of military objectives. Cortés quickly grasps the symbolic world of the Aztecs and the Maya, deploying it to great effect to reinforce and project the Spaniards’ invincibility. Indeed, the author argues that one of the reasons for the rapid unraveling of the Aztec empire lies precisely in a belief system rooted in the inevitability of the future—a destiny that could not be altered and could only be deciphered through a series of “signs.” Cortés therefore investigates the indigenous population precisely to comprehend their spiritual world and its corresponding “signs,” thereby turning them to his advantage through a shrewd politics of communication. From this perspective, Cortés emerges as a precursor of semiotics; in Las Casas, a Dominican friar, the guiding thread is love for the indigenous population, grounded in an egalitarian conception and the conviction that the Amerindian people already embodied Christian values and were therefore “good,” in stark contrast to the cruelty of the Spaniards. As the author notes, the Dominican friar’s approach relies on evaluative categories rather than on an understanding of Aztec customs and culture. > If the prejudice of superiority is unquestionably an obstacle on the path to knowledge, one must recognize that the prejudice of equality represents an even greater obstacle, for it leads to identifying the other purely and simply with one’s own ideal of oneself (or with one’s own ego) ; in Durán, a Dominican friar raised in America, the spirit of inquiry emerges, albeit within a mestizo vision of relations with the indigenous population. The later Las Casas, following the famous Valladolid debate against another priest who argued for the inferiority of the indigenous peoples and the right to enslave them, had already discovered the relativity of various ideal positions and the disappearance of any privileged vantage point, thereby renouncing the right to assimilate the Indians. Durán believes that knowledge of the language and culture of the indigenous peoples is the essential instrument for converting them to Christianity. This study leads him toward a kind of cultural hybridization that manifests itself in various, sometimes singular ways: the conviction that the indigenous peoples had already been the recipients of Christian preaching, making their deities akin to the Christian God; the belief that he is fulfilling the role of a historian chronicling a history of heroes (that of the Aztecs); and a narration of the conquest that mirrors bewilderment at the collapse of such a well-organized empire; in Sahagún, a Franciscan friar who wrote no fewer than twelve books in Nahuatl and Spanish detailing the civilization of this people. The author is the forerunner of modern scholars, managing to describe without imposing any interpretation. Of great interest is the comparison between the description of a human sacrifice by Durán and that by Sahagún, which distinctly highlights the latter’s cold, detached account. Sahagún employs questionnaires whose structure reflects his conception of what a civilization can be. In his work, too, knowledge reflects value judgments. The book is deeply complex and multifaceted, yet ultimately seeks to address several fundamental questions: Is it possible to know the other? Is it possible to safeguard difference within equality? Is it possible to avert massacre—both cultural and physical—at the hands of the conqueror? To these questions, the author cannot provide an exhaustive answer; yet the book traces a plausible trajectory, from discovery through massacre to cultural hybridization and relativism, asserting that one must begin from mutual knowledge, which in turn is mediated by communication (the knowledge of language and of “signs”).

Written in the days immediately following April 25, 1945, this book is an autobiographical novel, a recollection of > things experienced, and still alive within, before time has calmed the turmoil of emotions ( Giorgio Amendola, introductory note to the 1975 edition). Lajolo, *nom de guerre* Ulisse, took part—out of genuine conviction—in all the Fascist wars. July 25, 1943, the day of Mussolini's resignation, catches him stunned. > It is the end... people shout with joy... a cold sweat is on my brow, the regulation shirt chokes my throat like a noose.... now begin the long days of sadness . What is to be done? On the one hand, his personal history impels him to commit to the Salò Republic; on the other, he feels inside > something irreconcilable (that) told me not to accept. I did not yet quite know how to discern what it was.... but I understood, however vaguely, that in that place I would be on the wrong path, I would do no good for the country... (and) I would walk out into the countryside. The crusted, parched earth seemed to have retreated into itself, jealous and fearful of being laid bare . For a man of action like Lajolo, spiritual torment cannot last long, nor is it resolved through meditation. It will be the youths of his village (Vinchio d’Asti) and his homeland (the Langhe) that guide his choice of path. > Those boys of mine, who in the dark had all risen at the call, ready to lay down their lives, had told me that this was the true patriotic spirit... (they are) the very same boys who had set off so many times to wage war . > My land! I could not betray it, for I felt it deep within my flesh. My land, with its villages and low, multicoloured houses, with weathered and gleaming roofs, and farmsteads whose vegetable patches are enclosed by slender cane thickets... perhaps never so much as in these times had I known my land so intimately . And it is precisely this solidarity among combatants, punctuated by a meticulous roster of partisan comrades' names, along with the imagery of the “dear Asti land,” that constitute the novel’s distinctive virtues. The author cannot dwell on them for long, as the action unfolds in a crescendo of intensity and drama leading up to the terrible winter of 1944–45. In those months, the Nazi-Fascists mount their fiercest effort to crush the partisan forces, who had succeeded in establishing what came to be known as the Republic of Monferrato in the areas surrounding Asti. It is a manhunt, partisan by partisan, which also unleashes brutal reprisals against the civilian population. Lajolo, by then one of the leaders of the Resistance, hides with a few comrades in burrows and farmhouses concealed in the scrub. The narrative calls to mind the pages of *Partigiano Johnny*, likewise set in the Langhe during the same period. Yet Lajolo’s account is cool, spare, meticulous, and for that very reason moving and compelling. Fraternity with his comrades always prevails in Lajolo—a bond steeped in admiration, affection, and understanding, even toward those who, at a certain point, take flight At times rhetoric surfaces, only to be decisively driven back by a dry style, almost akin to a military report. Lajolo, moreover, is acutely aware that he is fighting a civil war. > Such are the mournful thoughts that the cruelty of civil war unlocks in the heart, when you are forced to wage war among your own homes . And then harrowing questions arise. > Why, I ask myself, have they learned to suffer, why after so many years of war did they feel the need to fight once more? During the partisan war, Lajolo becomes a communist. Fortunately for us, the author devotes little space to political debate, just as he rarely dwells on his ideological maturation. When he does, the narrative swiftly slides into platitudes, read and heard countless times before. To us, disillusioned and pessimistic, what strikes is the immense hope animating the protagonists’ ideal world. The certainty with which they envision the future gives pause: a profound transformation in culture, ethics, and social structure. What are we to make of this steadfast assertion: > no one will daze us with words ever again. We have learned to judge by facts, dispassionately, sifting everyone and everything through the sieve of our conscience . Why read it? A recollection of the Resistance written “in the heat of the moment,” devoid of rhetoric.

The book recounts the story of Inspector Rogas, who is called upon to investigate the murders of a series of magistrates. The inspector identifies a lead (a wrongly convicted man exacting revenge), but is diverted by his superiors toward a politically motivated track. Pursuing this line, he discovers a plot to assassinate an opposition politician in order to thwart a potential alliance between ruling and opposition forces. Shadowed, a staged crime scene is orchestrated in which the inspector has supposedly killed the opposition leader, only to be slain himself. A friend of the inspector approaches the new head of the opposition to disclose the truth, but is persuaded to back down for the sake of “social peace”. Written in 1971, the book bears the heavy imprint of the era of the Historic Compromise and terrorism; it reflects all too heavily the political dilemmas of that historical juncture, rendering the narrative sluggish, prolix, and largely unengaging. The author’s fundamentally pessimistic outlook regarding any genuine prospect of change in our country is reaffirmed, yet the narrative drive of his other novels is absent, and the underlying irony drowns in tedious philosophizing.

A young worker experiences a feeling of profound dissatisfaction with his life: > the quiet of non-hope. To believe mankind lost and to have no desire to do anything to the contrary, no desire to lose myself, for instance, along with it . This dissatisfaction («these abstract furies») is an intimate matter, but also an awareness of cosmic grief. The young man seeks to escape it through a journey that might constitute both a return to his childhood and, at the same time, an exploration of self, a reflection upon the prevailing values and ideas in society. The journey is structured around several key moments: the acquaintances made on the train, where people are archetypes of social roles; the arrival in the village; the conversation with his mother; the rounds made with his mother among the village houses to administer injections; the encounter with the knife-grinder and the drunken bout in the tavern; the brother killed in the war; and finally «the synthesis» of the entire novel by the village's bronze monument. The development of the themes, the frequent shifts in style and narrative rhythm (at times cinematic, at others lyrical and evocative, rich in symbolism and allegory) make it extremely difficult to provide a single, definitive interpretation, as demonstrated by the critical reception, where each commentator seems to be discussing a novel entirely different from the one read by the others. There are undoubtedly several interpretive keys: the relationship with parents and the native land, the depiction of a crisis of values that finds no answer in political and social forces (personified in the knife-grinder, the upholsterer, and the innkeeper), existential despair, which is not resolved by a return to the maternal womb, and a stylistic search for a cinematic approach to writing. It is probable that the novel is a bit of all of this, so much so that it takes the shape of an open and dynamic system that cannot be enclosed within a single interpretation. I like to think that the true interpretive key to the novel is the context, that Sicily, > a small, huddled Sicily, of medlars and roof tiles, of holes in the rock, of black earth, of goats, with a music of reproaches, receding behind us, and turning into cloud and snow, high above . That setting which frames the continuous rhythm of life («the round of injections»), of illness and death, which make all men alike and equal before suffering and a common destiny. > It was night over Sicily and the calm earth: the outraged world was covered in darkness, men had lamps beside them shut up with them in the rooms, and the dead, all the slain, had sat up in their graves, meditating. I thought, and the great night within me was night upon night. Those lamps below, above, and that cold in the darkness, that ice of star in the sky, were not a single night, they were infinite; and I thought of my grandfather’s nights, my father’s nights, and the nights of Noah; the nights of man, naked in wine and defenseless, humiliated, less a man than a child or a dead man . And so the true theme is, perhaps, identification and the sense of belonging to a collective dimension, constituted by humankind. The central character is that of the Great Lombard, who feels and expresses a yearning for great duties, to do something for humanity. Yet no one knows what to do, and so the worker concludes: > I do not weep within myself. I do not weep in this world... And he walked out of the house, on tiptoe . The novel features deeply evocative pages and reaches its stylistic and narrative peak in «the round of injections» and more generally in the first part: the train journey and the arrival at the village. At other times an intellectualistic approach prevails, which also leads to a fragmentation of the narrative, rendering it at times redundant and prolix.

The novel is the concluding chapter of a trilogy: *The Road of the Donbas* (2009), *Mesopotamia* (2014), and *The Orphanage* (2017). Just as in Cesare Pavese's novel *The House on the Hill* (see the review on this site) Corrado sought "a stupor, an anesthetic, a certainty of being well hidden" so as not to become embroiled in the Resistance, so Pasha, the protagonist of *The Orphanage*, responds to those advising him to flee that "he was just a teacher, a simple teacher (...) nothing more than a teacher, the rest mattered little to him. Where was he supposed to go, who would be waiting for him, what was there to fear, everything would be fine, he was just a teacher > . And he remained with his elderly father without even following the news on television while war flared in the Donbas between Ukrainians and Russians. No one knows how it happened that the bowels of the earth burst open, spitting out that black grime, (...) everything will catch fire like in a medieval city: house by house, street by street, a matter of a few days, and then there will be nothing left > . What shakes him from his torpor is the remorse over having allowed his sister's son to be shut away in a boarding school; he wants to go and retrieve him, even if he must cross the front line, amidst the fighting. He sets out on a journey, a peregrination that continually brings him back to the very same places, as though he were not advancing in any particular direction, but pacing in circles like a circus bear. (...) For three days I have been walking alongside people I do not even know. As if a spring were pushing me from behind, preventing me from stopping. And the spring pushes them too, in the same way, far from home. Even though at least half of them no longer have either a home or a family. They wander along the ring road without any chance of escaping it. They go round in circles around their own city. And I, too, circle with them, I do not know why > . In a landscape devastated by bombs and violence, where there is mercy for no one, Pasha's wandering becomes a pilgrimage outside of time and space (the 2014 Donbas war): it is like journeying through a nightmare, woven from a medley of characters, destruction, death, and memories of the past. Is it a dream or reality? Why did that soldier, a former pupil of his, spare him? Why did they kill the boarding school’s caretaker, the only teacher who had not fled, staying behind to protect the institution’s young residents? Why will he, so timid and clumsy, be saved? The illustrious doctor asked him to attend to a wounded man, an adolescent of twenty. > Soon he will be gone; now he will close his eyes and it will all be over. (...) Suddenly Pasha senses another presence beside him, unfamiliar, standing there waiting, pertinacious. (...) Who is it waiting for? Whom has it come for? Surely for me, Pasha imagines. It is this presence that hasn't let me out of its sight for three days, it is what gives off this heavy smell of wet dog, it is hunting me, it is taking aim at me. (...) At that moment the wounded man squeezes his hand. (...) He senses that death is bypassing him, moving away and drawing near the other. (...) Don't look, he tells himself, you must not look, just run, run as fast as you can, while you still have the strength and the time, run and do not look back... Giovanna Brogi, the fine translator from Ukrainian, interprets the novel in her afterword as a coming-of-age journey for Pasha, who reflects on his own identity—linguistic included—becomes conscious of his own pusillanimity, and realizes he must choose where to stand. This interpretation clashes with the metaphysical darkening that shrouds the entire narrative, where there is no prospect of salvation or rebirth. Consider a passage near the end, rich in symbolism that contrasts with the tale's apparent hyperrealism. We left Pasha in his flight from death. > There is such an abundance of white that it seems as though all colors have been exhausted. (...) White fields and the black asphalt of the road along which he tries to flee, which ought to save him. (...) And he clearly discerns the dark dogs against the white background. (...) They are drawing closer and closer, fierce and fearless; they know the victim cannot escape, has no way out—there it is, just a few leaps ahead, one more moment, a few more seconds, and you will be able to pounce, sink your teeth into its throat as it tries to break free, to cheat fate . All that remains for Pasha is compassion, the Latin *pietas*, expressed in the final pages by his no longer adolescent nephew: the boy's recognition of his uncle's fragility, perhaps, saves Pasha. The essentiality of the prose, the sparse diction, the driving rhythm accompanied by prolonged suspensions, the narrative ability to shift from an intense realism to an oneiric symbolism are the hallmarks of this masterpiece, a welcome surprise in an often banal literary landscape. Could it be that the stark, essential conditions of existence forge works of true value—something impossible when a soft, parlor-room everyday life prevails? Might European literature need war in order to be reborn? Why read it? It is compelling from a historical perspective, but above all, its literary style is captivating: a masterpiece.

> There is no naivety in those who think that a people can truly exist only if there is something, such as a book, to recount them to others . So explains the typesetter Ruben to the young Saverio, urging him to chronicle Carlomagno and its people. We do not know where this village was; perhaps it lay in the Apuan Alps, but it was certainly a community of quarrymen—hard, wild, stubbornly attached to their own brand of Christianity, woven of legends, communal values, and freedom of conscience. And this is what the novel is about: *The Courage of the Robin*. > I would like permission, Your Lordship, to go wherever I please, for I would bother no one, small as I am . Thus the robin asked the king of the woodland birds; and in reply the kestrel broke one of his legs, forcing him to fly with only one wing. Yet the little robin did not surrender, and > flew higher and higher, and a little beyond the place they had assigned to him , until > from above, he began to bombard the head of the king of birds with droppings . To tell of this imaginary village, and of the freedom professed there, the author takes the long way round—perhaps overly so. Saverio lives in Alexandria, Egypt, and is the son of an anarchist baker who, like all his friends, considers Ungaretti to have been an arch-fascist. Upon his father's death, Saverio discovers a collection of poems, *Il porto sepolto*, and is particularly struck by these verses of Ungaretti: > The poet arrives there/And then returns to the light with his songs/And scatters them/Of this poetry/I am left with/That nothing/Of inexhaustible secret . What did the poet wish to express? And why was his father reading this book? A shallow youth and an idler, from that moment on he is seized by a mounting restlessness that not even a journey into the desert can quell. He wants to know his father's village, Carlomagno itself. He travels to Italy and visits Rome, "in the grip of a sensation of fairytale overabundance." He crosses paths with Ungaretti. > The old man, but how old he was! Looking at him so close, he seemed older than a stone. (...) the blazing eyes of a Zulu idol, (...) he seemed unreal to me, made of air like the jinn . The great poet seems to recognize him and slips him a scrap of paper, written in archaic and garbled Italian, stating that a certain Pascal, a "perfidious Lutheran," was burned at the stake. Pascal was his surname; could it refer to an ancestor of his? Saverio fails to reach Carlomagno because the police expel him from the country. He returns to Alexandria and undertakes ever deeper and more perilous dives; perhaps he imagines he will find the buried port of which Ungaretti speaks. Struck by an embolism, he is admitted to a clinic, where he lies for months in an abulic state, stripped of strength and will. To provoke a reaction, he is coaxed into recounting his life, as well as the dreams of his restless nights. And thus, everything we come to know is a story within a story, > a dreamt story, fabricated out of whole cloth, a story from five centuries ago in a place lost to the world . In a Europe devastated by the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants, Pascal, an aging soldier of fortune, finds himself in Carlomagno, where he is chosen as a husband by Sua (a strange custom, yet the world was turned upside down in that remote and singular village). Sua intends to write the history of Carlomagno; she wishes to be its poetess. She urges her husband, ordinarily cautious and shrewd, to undertake a journey to procure the means to print a book. They secure a Bible in Italian, translated by a Calvinist, read it in secret, and eventually arrive in Val Pellice, the valley of the Waldensian heretics. Yet when they return to Carlomagno, the Inquisition has arrived, determined to normalize the village and its people. Pascal is accused of heresy and dragged to the stake; Sua, pregnant, escapes on her mother's back, "on the back of a demon, make of it what you will." And Sua was able to print her book, and Saverio dreamt it and recounted it, so that it might serve as a "combat robin." Everything was set in motion by a poem, and an obscure one at that. A few words brought to the surface an awareness, a breath of freedom, an irresistible urge to discover one's roots, however tragic. Among the many themes it addresses, the countless evocations, the excessive digressions, the novel speaks of the power of storytelling, of the book written and recounted; and in doing so, it transports us into a free world, into that Protestant Italy that could have been an opportunity for our country, had it not been smothered, condemning us to a destiny of indolence, ignorance, and hypocrisy. It is, therefore, a political book nestled within the shell of a fable. The dream is the finest part of the novel, perhaps also because the author treads on familiar ground. The prose is consistently refined and effective; nevertheless, the narrative is rambling, all too often a bloated potboiler. Maggiani tried to say too much, and in doing so spoiled the core essence, formed by the dream and the imaginary village of Carlomagno. Why read it? It enlivens us with a Protestant spirit.

The book belongs to the Bermuda cycle. The context is the American War of Independence (thus the mid-eighteenth century) and the protagonist is Sir William, an English nobleman of French descent who has become a privateer to fight his half-brother, the cruel Marquis Halifax, who seeks to take his beloved from him. Unhappy love and the grand poetry of the sea seem to be the novel’s points of reference: > ah! that night! embraced on the sand dunes, we listened to the sonorous rhythm of the waves. It is a divine music, a music worth all those created by instruments of brass, of copper, of bronze . And at the beginning, one witnesses a naval battle, just as in Salgariʼs finest novels. Subsequently, the plot takes another direction. The beloved is held prisoner in Boston, a city in British hands and under siege by the Americans. Sir William, together with his stalwarts, Testa di Pietra and Piccolo Fiocco, infiltrates the besieged city, and they attempt to free the woman. A series of adventures follows, but in the end, the cruel Marquis of Halifax manages to escape with Sir Williamʼs beloved. The narrative pace is sluggish, weighed down by the constant exchange of jokes and banter between Testa di Pietra and Piccolo Fiocco: dialogues dominate, relegating the action to the background. On the other hand, the novel’s true protagonist is Testa di Pietra, his cunning, his peasant wisdom, his nostalgia for his native land. Brittany. Yet Salgari fails to depict sentiment. Deprived of action and of characters who are both brooding and heroic, the narrative loses its allure and turns tedious. Why not read it? The sea, love, and tragic destiny are nowhere to be found: the true Salgari, then, is absent.

We are in the seventeenth century, the age of pirates, > folk made up mostly of misfits, soldiers, and sailors greedy for plunder , roaming the Caribbean Sea > to lay their hands on the rich mines from which Spain drew rivers of gold . Among these “sea robbers” was also an Italian nobleman, the Count of Ventimiglia, the Black Corsair: > he was dressed entirely in black.... even that man’s appearance held, like his attire, something funereal, with that pale, almost marmoreal face . The story begins with the news of the hanging of the Red Corsair, the Black Corsair’s brother, who met the same fate as the other two brothers, all treacherously murdered at the hands of Duke Wan Guld. The Black Corsair resolves to retrieve his brother’s body to give it a proper burial. The expedition to Maracaibo, where the Red Corsair was hanged, serves as a preamble to the book’s central themes: plot twists, duels, cunning, and heroic deeds, framed by a lush and wondrous nature, with vignettes of a typical colonial town inhabited by Spanish merchants and cavaliers. Men fight and kill, yet there is no hatred between pirates and Spaniards: there is only one true enemy, Duke Wan Guld: the treacherous Fleming. We arrive at a turning point in the novel. Having recovered his brother’s body, the funeral takes place aboard the *Folgore*, the Black Corsair’s ship: > the sea still flared around the ship, murmuring dully.... those swells held strange whispers at that moment. Now they seemed the moans of souls, now hoarse sighs, now faint laments . Before a crew moved yet terrified by the ghosts of the dead brothers, the Black Corsair breaks the funereal silence with a terrible oath: > may my soul be damned for eternity, if I do not slay Wan Guld and exterminate his entire family as he has destroyed mine! . Destiny is sealed: there is no longer room for other choices, for an alternative will. The Black Corsair’s life can follow only the path carved out by this oath. The Black Corsair seeks vengeance, yet instead—and unpredictably—encounters love. The *Folgore* comes across a Spanish ship, captured after a bloody battle, where the pirates take a young woman captive, > a beautiful figure of a maiden, tall, slender, supple, with delicate skin of a faintly rosy white . What a contrast between the lugubrious appearance of the Black Corsair and the fair radiance of the maiden! From the outset, one understands that love has blossomed, but this love carries tragedy in its wake. Salgari leaves us in suspense; he does not immediately reveal who the maiden is, yet it is clear that the Black Corsair knows that > the dead can leave the deep chasms where they rest and rise to the surface to shatter any hopes of happiness. For her part, the young woman senses that the traitor upon whom that “funereal gentleman from overseas” seeks vengeance might well be her father. The reader must wait a little longer. The pirates set out to conquer Maracaibo, and then the Black Corsair pursues Wan Guld through the forests and swamps of Central America. Nature, splendid yet merciless, becomes the novel’s protagonist for numerous pages. The adventurous, exotic Salgari writes here some of his finest pages. Wan Guld manages to flee, but unfortunately a Spaniard reveals to the Black Corsair that the maiden is the daughter of the treacherous Fleming. The Black Corsair does not abide by the maxim observed by the pirates, who never demand that their women account for what they have done in the past, but only for what they will do in the future. For the Black Corsair, the past is locked within his inhuman oath: the maiden is cast adrift in a longboat: "the wind blew hard then, and vivid lightning flashed in the depths of the sky, while the roar of thunder joined the crashing of the waves... as the longboat drifted ever farther away... amid the moans of the wind and the roar of the waves, dull sobs could be heard at intervals... Look up there! (says faithful Carmaux) the Black Corsair is weeping! *The Black Corsair* is Salgari’s masterpiece and, without doubt, one of the finest books in Italian literature, not merely of adventure fiction. Only an elitist critical tradition, such as the Italian one, could fail to grasp the novel’s complexity. It is an adventure book, and something more besides. First and foremost, it is an explosion of fantasy, a relish for the marvelous and the gruesome that only the imagination can achieve. One need only consider the rich, meticulous description of the natural setting, the attention to garments—all embroidered, laden with lace, and overflowing with color—and the gruesome, brutal battle scenes. Fantasy also constitutes an escape from an existential anguish, which lies at the foundation of the Black Corsair’s persona. Life’s vicissitudes bring only grief, affections are a source of suffering, and one must flee a reality that yields neither happiness nor peace. In some way, a demon drags man toward his sorrowful fate, and so it is better, while there is still time, to take refuge in the imagination. Why read it? It is an adventure book, Romantic yet also modern in its message of sorrow and anguish.

The book consists of a series of short stories dealing with foreign migrants in Italy. In the first, *The Turban*, a Sikh arrives in our country fleeing poverty and finds work on a farm in Tuscany. A process of rapprochement begins, both cultural and personal, between the landlady and the immigrant, leading the former to the discovery of a world and the latter to gradually assimilate into the customs of our country: discarding the turban and shaving his beard represent the visible manifestation of the rupture with his country of origin. In the second story, *Short Circuit*, a power outage in a Roman neighborhood allows the protagonist to discover a camp of Romanian migrants in an abandoned field adjacent to the apartment building. They are the cause of the short circuit, having illegally tapped into the electrical grid; the repairs will also entail the destruction of the squalid dwelling (a hovel without running water or sanitation) in which these poor people lived. The third story, *School Bus*, is undoubtedly the finest, as it joins the theme of immigration with that of childhood. A young girl has a Filipino girl as her babysitter. Usually, it is her mother who walks her to the school bus, a yellow bus. One day, however, the mother falls ill, and it is the Filipino babysitter who takes the girl to the stop and, despite her protests, puts her onto another bus, a blue one. The child thus ends up spending several days at a different nursery school, with different teachers and classmates. She desperately tries to tell her mother about the mistake, but she is not believed; on the contrary, she stokes growing concern in her parents over these fantasies and alleged lies. Eventually, the mother realizes the mistake, but the Filipino girl's blunder has allowed the child to discover a new world. The fourth story, *Suspicions*, centers on two migrant women, a Ukrainian and a Filipina, who care for two elderly women, both in wheelchairs. Due to a momentary lapse of attention by the two young women, a fatal accident occurs: both elderly women die, triggering a police investigation that will ultimately exonerate the caregivers. Finally, the last story, *The Seagull*, takes its title from Chekhov's work of the same name. The narrative is profoundly bleak: a Ukrainian woman, involved with an Italian man, longs to be reunited with her son, who stayed behind in her country of origin. She receives a marriage proposal from an elderly man for whom she works as a caregiver. His children object and cast her out, leaving her without a job. Furthermore, her Italian partner reacts violently, and she decides to leave him, finding herself alone once more. The stories trace a progression both stylistic and thematic. In terms of narrative rhythm and linguistic structure, the author gains ever greater confidence, moving from a style still hesitant and reliant on reflections to increasingly effective narrative modes that allow the meaning of events to emerge from the storytelling rather than from commentary. Likewise, the author moves from discovery to a growing awareness of a desolation and loneliness that is no longer sociological, but existential. In the first story, the cultural and social question still prevails, albeit informed by a writerly sensibility. > The reason I hold back the questions on the tip of my tongue is not merely the difficulty of communicating, but rather the conviction of intruding, with an overly casual and blatantly Western indiscretion, upon his private world, light-years removed from our own, and therefore virtually ungraspable . By the end of the book, the answer to this search for communication is loneliness, which nonetheless envelops both migrant and Italian alike. > You remember words Chekhov? Trigorin says he feels like fox that dogs run after, so feel I. I run, run, run, and dogs run even inside legs. And Masha says that when love enters inside heart, better no, better chase away, better forget. I better without, I better alone . Yet perhaps the answer is to be sought in the openness to discovery that animates the child in *School Bus*: the Filipino girl's mistake allows her to discover two profoundly different nursery schools, one modern and one of a traditional-religious cast, yet the girl likes them both, and her true concern remains her mother's affection. Why read it? It is an ostensibly slender book, yet genuinely profound. It is a pleasure to read and holds within it a veritable minor masterpiece: the story of the little girl with the *School Bus*.

We are in Trieste between the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. The author imagines that a psychoanalyst publishes "out of revenge" the memoirs of one of his patients, who broke off treatment and told a pack of lies. The novel thus adopts the narrative form of an autobiography. "Lying comfortably in a club armchair," Zeno attempts to recall the most significant events of his existence, mindful that > the most intense life is recounted in synthesis by the most rudimentary sound, that of the sea wave, which, from the moment it forms, changes at every instant until it dies . The effort to return to the past is not a chronological journey, but rather a lingering over the crucial moments of life. Indeed, the narrative structure follows the shifting viewpoints from which Zeno observes his own biography. The first chapter centers on smoking—or rather, the last cigarette, that perpetually broken resolution to abandon the habit. The reader immediately encounters the subtle, paradoxical irony that permeates the entire book, but also confronts the novel's central theme: the dread that > finding myself racing through time, I could no longer be reached by love and, more broadly, by what one would wish to be. Returning to the past resurrects the chasm between one's aspirations and what has been attained. A persistent sense of guilt emerges, for which a plausible justification must be found. The awareness of having "lived in vain," as Leopardi put it, "shall embitter me," feeding a mixture of melancholy and anguish. Remembrance is > sweet in itself; but painfully the thought of the present intrudes, an idle yearning for the past, sorrowful though it was, and the saying: I was (*Le ricordanze*). The subsequent chapters develop the same theme within an increasingly complex and articulated narrative framework. Zeno investigates his own psyche in relation to the primary figures of his life. In the second chapter, "death of the father," Zeno is unable to offer the filial affection he desires because his father’s disappointment over his son’s blatant ineptitude as a businessman is too profound. In the third chapter, "marriage," the protagonist fails to attain love, embodied by the beautiful Ada, and marries—without knowing why—Augusta, the plain sister. In the fourth chapter, "wife and mistress," Zeno is neither a good husband nor a good lover, while in the fifth chapter, "partnership," it is friendship that is lost. Zeno, who nevertheless tried in every way to help Guido, Ada’s husband, proves incapable of averting his financial ruin and suicide, to the extent of being accused by Ada, his eternal love, of having betrayed his friend. The autobiography could well conclude at this point. Instead, the doctor’s assertion that Zeno is cured—because he has realized that in his unconscious he loved his mother and hated his father (the famous Oedipal dynamic)—triggers a rationalistic reaction from Zeno, who candidly confesses that he has lied all along, readily offering a justification: > (the doctor) studied nothing but medicine and therefore does not know what it means to write in Italian for those of us who speak, but do not know how to write in, dialect.... if he only knew how we favor recounting all those things for which we have a phrase at hand, and how we shun those that would force us to consult a dictionary . In truth, if we adopt an outside perspective rather than Zeno’s, events could be interpreted quite differently from the protagonist’s view. Zeno is a good son who strives to remain close to his father; he is a good husband despite a few dalliances; he cares for his children; he is generous, ready to help his mistress and a friend in distress; he even reveals himself to be an astute businessman when forced to be one. All his existential dilemmas arise from how he experiences life within his consciousness rather than from actual lived reality. It will take the war to tear away the veil of ignorance Zeno harbors about his own life and to reveal that the protagonist can face adversity and even turn it to financial advantage. Is the book, then, merely facile irony directed at psychoanalysis, and more broadly at psychology?—disciplines that seem intent on contriving problems where a rationalistic approach to life would offer a workable, serene solution. In reality, the novel can be read in concentric circles, moving from external reality to the unconscious and vice versa: the depiction of the deep self’s impact on human consciousness, a true exception to the prose of existence. There exists an interpretive key to every consciousness, which the author must concede, his rationalistic approach notwithstanding. For Zeno, this interpretive key seems to reside in the good–bad dichotomy, nurtured by an episode from his childhood. > I watched without great pain the torture inflicted upon Guido by the balance sheet I had drawn up with such care, and a curious doubt came over me, followed immediately by a most curious memory. the doubt: was I good or bad?... I saw myself as a child, dressed (I am certain of it) still in short skirts, looking up to ask my smiling mother: am I good or bad?.... Oh, incomparable originality of life! How wondrous that the doubt it had once inflicted on the child in so childish a form had not been resolved by the adult who had already marked the midpoint of his life . Why read it? It is a remarkably dense, complex book, brimming with insights. It must be read, though not before falling asleep.

Eric Packer is a brilliant young financier who loses and makes millions of dollars in a matter of seconds, speculating on currencies and the stock market. The novel chronicles a single day in which Eric travels across the city in his limousine, alternating between fleeting sexual encounters, hurried breakfasts, traffic jams caused by violent protests and the funeral of a music idol, a doctor's examination, and the constant monitoring of the yen's performance—a currency against which he is losing millions of dollars. If at first the narrative seems surreal and ironic in its aim to depict the absurd life of a young man of finance, at a certain point in the novel one realizes it is heading toward tragedy. In reality, Eric's own life, well shielded by bodyguards and his limousine, is threatened by a wave of attacks—some far-off—targeting figures in the financial world. As the day unfolds, the barriers—both psychological and physical—that separate the young millionaire from the violent world surrounding him begin to fall. Eric moves toward death (he will be killed), yet he almost seems to crave and seek it out to escape a life that might become burdensome and unbearable if he can no longer relish the thrill born from the pursuit of money. > He understood what he was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of great excitement that guided him through his days, the pure and intense need to live . The novel's premise is undeniably brilliant and unfolds on multiple levels: the protagonist’s existential crisis (he wakes up longing to go to the barber like an ordinary man), the depiction of a chaotic and absurd city, the hurried human interactions typical of the business and information age, and ultimately death as an inescapable denouement. The plot as a whole, replete with baffling episodes and characters, along with an exceptionally demanding linguistic structure in terms of both vocabulary and syntax, conspires to make the reading experience cryptic and ponderous. The book is fittingly dedicated to Paul Auster, as the intellectual imprint of this author—a hallmark of many New York writers—predominates.

The quince is > the only fruit that with time can make its fragrance grow stronger rather than languish. It is ugly, full of bumps, but with time it grows rounder, softer, more beautiful and feminine . The tale is the chronicle of a tenacious love, for a land and for a woman. The land is Bosnia, “the land of long loves and long grudges.” The woman is Masa, “a Tatar face, eyes like black grape berries.” Fate has it that the woman’s fiancé is arrested just days before the wedding. Masa, > flowing dark copper hair, stubborn as a partizanka and strong-willed as a Bosniak woman , waits for her man for ten years (in fact, in the meantime she marries and has two daughters, but it is an interlude of no consequence in the tale, whose purpose remains baffling). When the man returns, after a few days he is killed by a grenade, and then > for Masa the beautiful... an affair ended that had lasted ten years of waiting—if you catch my drift—and ten days of leave . It is at this point in the story that Max steps in, an Austrian engineer who falls in love with Masa and through her with Bosnia and Sarajevo, because > nowhere can you better understand the destiny of Europe... where the last illusion (of great universal brotherhood) had died, toward the houses around the airport riddled with the marks of Armageddon . Yet Max’s great love for Masa is also destroyed, this time by the tumor that will lead to her death. At the news of Masa’s loss. Max becomes convinced that > only one thing could have halted that cursed fate: it was the fruit he was supposed to fetch, and perhaps had not fetched in time, the mysterious zuta dunja, the yellow wonder of the imperial city. And instead Masa, the belle of Bosnia, with eyes like black grape berries, had died aman aman without ever receiving that quince awaited from Istanbul . And so Max sets off on foot in search of the quince. At this point, the story becomes so muddled that all we can say is that Max dies mysteriously in an Istanbul hotel. It often happens that a writer who is very accomplished in one literary genre seeks to test himself against domains, narrative structures, and modes of writing that are not congenial to him, with failure as the result. Consider Ken Follett, who with *Eye of the Needle* had written a fine thriller, only to then devote himself to massive historical novels, through which it became abundantly clear that he was neither Tolstoy nor Victor Hugo. Such is the case with Rumiz, an excellent journalist who set out to tell a story, already muddled in its own right, in the form of a long ballad. What came out of it is a verbose, fragmented, tedious, irritating singer-songwriter ballad. Relying on suggestive impressions and evocative effects may work well for a song consisting of a few stanzas, but enduring all this for some two hundred pages is truly too much. The truth is that not everyone knows how to craft an epic poem! Why skip it? It is irritating, superficial, and dull.

The book traces the development of ideas from 1680 to 1715, a period in which, as the author states > a crisis occurred in the European mind: between the Renaissance, from which it directly derived, and the French Revolution, which it prepared, there was none more important in the history of ideas. Man, and man alone, was becoming the measure of all things . The first part of the book deals with the dismantling of the past, in particular the development of opinions directed against religion. The chapter titles are emblematic of the object of this destructive fury: major psychological shifts, and against rational beliefs. The author dwells both on the great figures (such as Pierre Bayle, Leibniz, Bossuet) and on the cultural currents underlying the major philosophies, such as the denial of miracles, oracles, and witchcraft. What emerges is an incredible fresco of personal histories, of interrelations among figures, of an extraordinary dissemination of books and journals, of a cosmopolitan world whose origins lie in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, through which the Protestants were expelled from France. In truth, the Reformation lies at the foundation of the new thought, and heretical philosophers, particularly Spinoza, are its inspirers. Of particular interest is the figure of Richard Simon, who seeks to read sacred texts literally and grasps all their contradictions. As Simon says, > I am convinced that one cannot read the Bible fruitfully without first knowing what pertains to textual criticism. As Hazard puts it, they were born rebels…. curt, presumptuous, they likened all of history to a sheet of paper full of bad creases: those creases had to be smoothed away, and a return made to the blank page, that was all!... the world was full of errors, generated by the deceptive faculties of the soul, warranted by unchecked authorities, spread under favor of credulity and indolence…(they) had first and foremost to make an immense clean sweep > . The second part of the book concerns the construction of the future, and specifically the path that will lead to the predominance of Reason, that is, of the scientific method. Here too, the author dwells on the contribution of great men—first and foremost Locke, Newton, once again Leibniz, and Vico—but above all he explores the subterranean changes, what Hazard calls imaginative and sensory values: the picturesque, the psychology of uneasiness, and so forth. What emerges is a fresco rich in suggestiveness, succeeding admirably in depicting the contemporaneity between high thought > , which seeks to trace reality back to a rational approach, and subterranean currents that preserve magical elements within society. Modernity is thus born two-faced, but its engine is fueled by uneasiness, by the desire for exploration, by the pursuit of a happiness that can no longer be deferred to the hereafter. A philosophy that renounces metaphysics and deliberately restricts itself to what it can immediately grasp within the human soul. A morality that fractures into multiple moralities: the recourse to social utility, just to choose one. The right to happiness, to happiness on earth…. Science, which will ensure the indefinite progress of man and therefore his happiness > . Tolerance as a virtue (one need only think of Locke’s *Epistola de Tolerantia*) and then the first traits of Romanticism found in Locke’s concept of uneasiness: and it will not perhaps be useless to observe that uneasiness is the chief spur exciting men's industry and activity > . Uneasiness consists in the longing for what we lack, but also in the hope and confidence of being able to obtain it. What remains of this bubbling of ideas today? The critical spirit has been extinguished in a flood of empty words, the scientific method has shattered into methodologies and techniques; man has consequently lost faith in the future, and the magical > , irrational beliefs have regained vigor. Uneasiness has turned back upon itself. What must be done? Cast books to the nettles (as Olmi’s film *Cento Chiodi* seems to suggest) and plunge into empathy with others and with nature? Or calmly pick up the threads of an interrupted discourse, restoring faith in the scientific method? As Vico said, yet in such a dense night of darkness…. there appears this eternal light, which never sets, of this truth…: that this civil world has been made by men, whence its principles can, because they must, be refound within the modifications of our very own human mind".

The novel opens with a mystery (the suicide of the presumed first wife of the father of Juan, the protagonist and first-person narrator) and closes with the resolution of the enigma, which I shall not disclose so as not to deprive the reader of the surprise. Between these two poles of the narrative, the secret unfolds slowly, for deep down it is always known, or suspected: like Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Juan would like to remain innocent, not to know, even though he is ashamed of having “a heart so white.” Indeed, the episodes resurfacing in the protagonist’s mind seem to prophesy the unraveling of the mystery. It is a succession of events, real or imagined; an increasingly tangled sequence as it churns within the consciousness: during the honeymoon in Cuba, the mulatto woman glimpsed through the hotel window (while the young bride lies ill in bed) mistakes him for the lover who never arrives and screams at him > I'll kill you ; the grandmother recounting to Juan, while still a child, the legend of a snake said to swallow young brides; the long account of his friend Berta, who seeks casual encounters and forces him to watch videotapes of a certain Bill, who does not reveal his face and makes obscene requests, readily accepted because > the ideal condition is that of waiting and ignorance ; even the girl at the stationery shop who captivated the adolescent Juan, because it made him > happy to contemplate the abstract future, everything was postponed, she was there afternoon after afternoon, always locatable, and there was no reason to materialize the future and make it cease being the future. Were the theme that of how we refuse to acknowledge the “truth,” the novel would oscillate between Teju Cole’s refined *Open City*, in which the protagonist analyzes his own life while failing to remember an ignoble episode from his youth because he does not want to know, and Salvatore Satta’s fascinating narrative, *The Day of Judgment*, where the only hope is “to create ghosts for oneself, to cling to” (see the reviews on this site). In reality, there is more. In one of the most intriguing chapters, Juan, in his work as an interpreter, must translate the conversation between two statesmen: one Spanish, the other British. Weary of the dialogue's laborious progress, he decides to invent what the two are saying to each other, leading them to speak of their feelings, even their most intimate ones. > Telling deforms, telling facts deforms facts and alters and almost negates them, everything that is told becomes unreal and approximate, albeit truthful. (...) The only truth is that which is unknown and untransmitted, concealed and uncontrolled; perhaps that is why people tell so much and tell everything, so that nothing ever actually happened, once it has been told. And so, when at the end of the novel Juan sees and overhears the conversation that reveals the secret—and does so only through the crack of a door—the revelation drives him to recount, desperately hiding the truth in a din of words and images, so that the mystery may be “as pictures and nothing more,” as Shakespeare puts it. In the novel's appendix, Marías emphasizes that only literature and the arts can narrate the vast shadowland of our existence. Yet, while in *Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me* this approach had cast a kind of spell within which the characters moved along a structured plot, here Marías has surrendered to a muddled stream of memories, to the allure of perpetual return, to the passage of time in which not even words offer so much as a tenuous anchor (see the reviews of the aforementioned book and of *The Man of Feeling* on this site). Quoting Ungaretti, one might say that the mystery within us is unspeakable, but it is literature's task to give order to its expression, lest we lose ourselves in a multitude of vowels and consonants, of syllables and elegant syntactic structures. Why read it? It is prolix, but interesting.

The novel is set in the early twentieth century, at the close of the Meiji Restoration or Renovation: the prolonged era between 1867 and 1912 that began with the reassertion of imperial power over the Tokugawa Shogunate. This historical anchor serves not only to contextualize the narrative—centered on the ambiguous and complex relationship between two generations—but also to underscore its contemporary relevance; much like today, we find ourselves in a period of transition in political and social structures, as well as in consciousness and sensibilities. A young student meets an older man, identified only by the appellation of "master." He is captivated by him—drawn to his taciturn, gruff demeanor, his solitary lifestyle detached from society and fellow human beings, and his ever-cryptic musings on love, honor, and money. In an ambiguous fashion, the master exerts a kind of blackmail over the young man: the foreboding expectation of betrayal. > I am a lonely man, but in a sense, aren't you as well? (...) In meeting me, you probably feel a certain loneliness. But because I lack the strength to help you break free from it, you will now turn elsewhere and no longer come to see me. (...) "You may think I might drift away," (the young man replies). (...) The master seemed not to be listening to me. "Yet you must be careful, for there is guilt in love. If you stay with me, you will find no satisfaction, but neither will you run any danger." Few clues offer a glimpse into what lies behind the master’s misanthropy: he regularly visits the grave of a friend whose death reportedly transformed the man’s character, without the reasons or background of this change being disclosed. Following his graduation, the young man returns to his parents’ home while waiting to find employment. His father is gravely ill, already nearing the end. > My melancholy tended to shift alongside the shifting shrill of the cicadas, as though the destiny enveloping me were moving by degrees through a vast cycle of different existences. The young man is torn between filial affection and duty, which urge him to remain at his father's bedside, and the longing not to sever ties with the master. > To me, the master was a shadowed figure, and I would not have been satisfied until he revealed himself entirely. A lengthy letter, preceded by urgent telegrams, drives the young man to commit an unforgivable act: he abandons his dying father to rush to Tokyo to the master. What does the master write in this sort of ethical testament? It is as though the young man had fulfilled a hermeneutic function. > I would rather see my past erased along with my life than offer it to someone who does not desire it. In truth, had it not been for someone like you, my past would never have been known to anyone, even indirectly. To you alone, then, among millions of Japanese, do I intend to recount my past, because you are sincere. There is no need to delve into the master's expansive confession, which unburdens his guilt onto the young man’s fragile shoulders. Suffice it to say that he acted dishonorably—he who considered himself steeped in virtue. He drove a friend to suicide by laying bare the contradictions between the friend's spiritual aspirations for an ascetic life and his romantic longing for a young woman, who was also loved by the master. > And so, despite my earnest desire to pursue an honest life, I strayed from it. I was a fool, if you will, a cunning and arrogant man. (...) Inside me arose, like a vortex, the feeling that I had won by cheating, and that I had been defeated as a human being. In the fine preface, expressively titled "Soseki: Solitude as Art," Gian Carlo Calza retraces the author's personal and literary biography, defining *Kokoro* (*Il cuore delle cose*) as "a faithful account of the author's own life or destiny." When one considers that none of the novel's protagonists bears a name, and that already in a 1905 work (*I Am a Cat*, see review on this site) Sōseki had played upon two characters (the feline narrator and the tedious English teacher) to depict the different facets of a single personality, one might suggest that the young student, the master, and the friend represent distinct vantage points for probing the author’s character: the youth embodies the fragility of a hope-filled youth; the suicidal friend signifies the search for spiritual anchors in an era of transition; and finally, the master is Sōseki himself, now disillusioned, locked in individualism and a pessimistic vision of life and Japan. If we step away from the author's biography and make a bold leap into contemporary Italy, the relationship between the young man and the master seems to keenly capture the intergenerational crisis afflicting our country. We, the "baby boomers," are the bad mentors who dispense nuggets of wisdom and fine rhetorical phrases, yet like Sōseki's master, we are dishonest because we are manipulative—shielded by our pensions, our conduct far removed from our pompous pronouncements. The young are the student: naive, filled with aspirations, fleeing from the false guides in whom they no longer believe! This modern transposition is also hinted at by the theatrical adaptation of *Kokoro* (*Il cuore delle cose*) in Kenzaburō Ōe's work (see the review of *The Changeling* [*La foresta d'acqua*]), where the master is viewed as a "false educator" by the high school students attending the performance. In an elegant and lucid manner, the author investigates the psychological and moral entanglement between the master and the young man, as well as between the former and his suicidal friend. The narrative unfolds slowly, at times repetitively; the extended letter bears too heavily the hallmarks of a soliloquy to escape being prolix. Why read it? It prompts numerous reflections on the present.

The novel opens with a historical premise: a ship with a mysterious cargo sinks off the coast of Cuba. Immediately thereafter, the scene shifts to a Florida beach in the 1980s. A blimp, > motionless in the tropical air, poised and tranquil, like a fish suspended in an aquarium , awaits an American tycoon to embark on a search for the alleged treasure that sank to the ocean floor with the shipwreck. > What no one knew, or could possibly suspect, was that Raymond LeBaron and his friends aboard the *Prosperteer* had vanished into a mystery that went far beyond any search for treasure. From this moment onward, an incredible and convoluted series of events begins to unfold. After five hundred pages, unraveling the narrative threads is no easy task; let us attempt it. LeBaron is part of a secret circle of capitalists that has established a base on the Moon, where the Soviets have also landed; the latter will attempt to storm the American outpost, only to be wiped out by the valiant defenders in a battle fought on the surface of our satellite—and all this unbeknownst to the President of the United States! LeBaron and his men were not killed in the blimp's crash, but were taken prisoner by the treacherous communists at a secret base in Cuba; what is more, the Soviets intend to eliminate Fidel Castro, who wishes to break free from the Soviet Union. Such a tangle of events already demands a hero to unravel it, and that hero is Dirk Pitt, a sort of Sandokan at the very center of Cussler's literary output. In this novel, we first meet him in a gripping scene on a Florida beach, where our hero prevents the wind-tossed blimp from wreaking havoc among the poor holidaymakers, caught between fascination and terror: > the multicolored sails of the "windsurfer" fleet flashed across the blue-green water like a crazed prism. We then find Pitt, presumably weary after this heroic escapade, > among three dozen gleaming vintage cars, an antique airplane, and a late-nineteenth-century railway carriage. Pitt barely has time to gaze fondly upon a fabulous sports coupé, destroyed by an explosion and which he intends to restore to its former elegance and beauty, when he receives a phone call from LeBaron's wife asking him to help her find the hidden treasure. And yet more adventures follow until our American Sandokan leads "the good guys" to foil the plots of the villainous and bumbling Soviets, even uncovering the mysterious cargo. Overwhelmed, yet glad for such superficiality after having read László Krasznahorkai's *The Melancholy of Resistance* (see the review on this site), I set the book aside, certain that I will not read another by this author. There are thrillers, and then there are thrillers. To judge the novel, however, we must look to the myriad American films that pack cinema halls and flicker across our television screens. The sheer crowding of characters and subplots masks the thriller writer's struggle to lend depth to stories and protagonists. In this novel, Pitt seems indifferent to the charms of the sole female figure, the beautiful widow; there is only a brief and chaste love scene, while he displays empathy and solidarity toward his fellow adventurers in a distinctly camaraderie-driven style. He is not, therefore, a true Sandokan—dark and melancholy because his beloved is his enemy's daughter. To the author's credit, it must be said that the violence is restrained, perhaps because the novel was written in the 1980s. From a stylistic point of view, the novel is well written. The descriptions are particularly striking in their precision and detail. The finest scenes are those on the water, confirming the author's love for this environment. Why read it? It can provide a moment of diversion if one is weary of dense reading. But only once!

The novel is set in Chile, ten years after the coup d'état that brought Pinochet and the military junta to power, establishing a brutal dictatorship: Chile, > a spot on the map, immersed in a vast and prodigious continent where progress arrives centuries late, (...) a territory in whose eternal humus mythological animals drag themselves along and human beings live unchanged since the dawn of the world , where a gilded, powerful elite coexists with a marginalized, silent mass. Francisco belongs to a family that fled Spain following the rise of Francoism; he works as a photographer, commits himself to social causes, and covertly assists the flight into exile of the many persecuted by the military regime. And it is precisely while looking for work that he meets Irene: > with her strange mane of hair tousled over her shoulders, (...) she wore an overly long skirt of homespun fabric, an unbleached blouse, (...) with rings on every finger and a rattle of bronze and silver bracelets on her wrist, (...) with a coquettish smile, the final touch needed to conclude that this young woman could steal every thought of his, for he had seen her just as she was in his childhood readings and adolescent dreams. The young woman, however, belongs to that elite living sheltered behind "doors guarded until the curfew signal." Francisco senses that many things separate them, from social standing to family ties and culture; unwilling to jeopardize their friendship by confessing his feelings, he prefers that love "fill her gently, just as it had happened to him." An extraordinary event brings about a radical shift in their lives, especially Irene's. Word spreads that a girl possesses miraculous powers while in a trance, and crowds flock to seek miracles and help from her; the throng and curiosity provoke the military to intervene, but the young woman, endowed with prodigious strength in her state of ecstasy, hurls the officer—the arrogant and criminal Ramirez—into a pigsty, where he sinks into the filth before the stunned eyes of his soldiers, the onlookers, and a pig. It is an affront that cannot go unavenged; a few days later, the girl is taken away and vanishes into thin air. Irene refuses to accept the official accounts; she begins to investigate, thereby awakening to the reality in which she lives, and, at the same time, to her love for Francisco. Confronted with the bloated, unrecognizable corpses, in the horrifying discovery of a mine where the butchered bodies of the victims of military violence lie hidden, Irene does not resign herself; slowly yet inexorably, she reveals a character resolved to uncover and denounce the unspeakable horror of violence. Irene is no longer the eccentric, colorful scion of the haute bourgeoisie; the chrysalis has transformed into a pained, conscious fighter. The main narrative thread, the story of love and shadows between Francisco and Irene, is embedded within the choral tale of a people, an intricate weave of events, characters, situations, and contexts told in a fantastical, almost surreal atmosphere—both when capturing microcosms and when delving into violence, without coyness or subterfuge, but with stark clarity, compelling the reader to blanch just as Irene did. A muted sense of resignation pervades the work, as if Latin America could never be liberated from abuse and violence, leaving no alternative but flight, or losing oneself in the splendid landscapes, among the great peaks of the cordillera, or more simply in the explosion of clamor and color of the markets: > piles of seasonal fruit, peaches, melons, watermelons, (...) stalls of spurs, stirrups, saddles, and straw hats, rows of red and black crockery, cages of chickens and rabbits, amidst a hullabaloo of shouts and haggling . The prose flows smoothly, with that narrative rhythm rich in asides and digressions so characteristic of South American literature; at times one loses one's way, and it perhaps becomes somewhat trite in the second half, lingering too long, yet it remains consistently engaging and evocative. Why read it? It confronts violence through the lens of love.

The novel is set in France and recounts the search for the Holy Grail—which purportedly points to the existence of a female apostle—and for a sect that has concealed and guarded this secret across the centuries, one of which Leonardo da Vinci was allegedly a member. Following the murder of the Louvre curator who was the custodian of the secret, his granddaughter and a scholar of medieval symbology set out in pursuit of the Holy Grail, while a high-ranking Opus Dei prelate is, in turn, hunting for the hidden secret. The novel enjoyed immense success, but it is, quite frankly, thoroughly dreadful from every perspective: the plot is tedious and implausible, narrative rhythm is nonexistent, and the prose is flat—opaque without being rich or complex. Why it could have achieved such widespread success remains a mystery. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to finish it.

The book is a collection of short stories published by a very young Matilde Serao at the age of twenty-two. In 1883, the twenty-six-year-old author, after "four years of militant artistic life," wished she could "change everything," finding these juvenile writings flawed in form, lacking "depth of impressions," and muddled by an "encumbrance of ideas." Reading them more than a century later, this judgment appears overly harsh: Serao approaches the world with surprising lucidity and a disruptive, mocking zest for life. In the story entitled *Per i bagni*, the author imagines a friend writing to Lulù, voicing a suspicion: > your bathing suit is too elegant. Of dark blue linen, embroidered with red thread, (...) the large straw hat with its cluster of poppies; the little straw-cloth shoes, tied with criss-cross ribbons—too much elegance to remain idle and ineffective. (...) Your bathing suit is too pretty for you not to want to show it to someone with your little figure inside it. Is it not so? (...) Do not smile, wretched creature, do not lose yourself in your dream: the cruelest disillusionment awaits you, the most horrible reality. (...) If you see a man in a bathing suit in the water, stripped of his unpleasant garments, he seems to you the most pitiable, the most lamentable thing on the face of the earth. (...) Oh Lulù, you who are neither an American, an emancipated woman, an old maid, a supervised wife nor a supervising one, but simply a fair, adorable creature, (...) Oh fair-haired, blue-eyed, gentle Lulù, oh my little woman, do not go swimming with those gentlemen and those ladies! Far removed from mere appearances, averse to the bourgeois destiny of woman, the young Matilde does not want a > fine, light, scented, subtle love, abandoned, resumed; (...) but nothing more than a shadow, a pale sort of love . Nor, however, does she intend to be swept away by passion, to become subservient to a man’s will; and she wonders, alongside the protagonist of her story *Fulvia*, whether she will be able and will know how to love. In truth, the writer wishes to experience social and cultural events intensely, rather than shutting herself away in a confined domestic sphere. Even when she sketches the "fleeting and sweet impressions" of the Campanian countryside and comfortable bourgeois settings, even before the sunset over Pompeii, the writer acknowledges that > we enter into life, pale and feverish pilgrims, with an ardent desire for great deeds, great passions, great horizons. (...) And tossed about, shaken, driven forward, jolted in the perennial struggle between idea and word, dismantling old ideals to forge new ones, (...) we are intimately happy . Where to stand? Serao asks herself in the story *Alla decima Musa*. > Above: a quiet, silent little room, with a softly warm atmosphere. A lamp sheds its steady, peaceful light over the pages of an engaging book; here and there a smile of friendship or love, the hours slipping by slow and placid, like beautiful, languishing figures. Below: the street, wet, muddy, slippery with mire, trampled by thousands of feet; (...) the coming, the going, the encounter, the jostling of a dense, continuous, ever-renewing crowd, speaking, laughing, shouting, clamoring, singing, yelling. (...) Then the reader is seized by a nostalgia for the street, for the fog, for the agitation; he feels a sharp desire to plunge into that tumult, to enjoy that spectacle, to contribute his share, to feel small, obliterated, absorbed: he fights no longer, he yields: and with a gigantic gust, the street vanquishes the little room . Perhaps, as Serao herself noted, there is too much of an "encumbrance of ideas," as is natural in an adolescent; yet the stories remain delightful because they exude, through the characters, the descriptions of settings, and the very words themselves, an irrepressible sensuality, a desire for fresh transgression. The narrative style is varied, shifting from tight dialogue to meticulous description, sustained throughout by a rich and elegant lexicon. The syntax is not always assured, the punctuation is at times rough, but the prose is effective, striking straight to the mark. Why read it? It is a wonderful discovery.

> Behind the wall supporting one another, huddling together, forming a clot of suffering and waiting. (...) I heard them moaning, pleading, unheard: because a woman's voice is merely poor breath; and the wall is stone, cement, bricks . This novel speaks of the separateness between man and woman, of two distinct worlds whose boundary is impossible to cross. This theme is "decked out in a rag of a plot," as Melania Mazzucco writes, and unfolds between two inevitable endings: suicide or the murder of the beloved man. The first chapter is set in Rome in the 1930s; in an impoverished and cramped family setting, young Alessandra watches her mother wear away, torn between the longing for love and a > petty-bourgeois husband, (...) even his physical appearance was devoid of any spirituality . Even then, Alessandra grasps the distance between the world of women and that of men. She perceives the "affectionate indulgence" that binds women, > all, resigned, accepted, with the dawn of a new day, the burden of new toils . On the other side, men > told nothing, disliked conversation, jokes, smiled little, (...) lumping her together with the children, the mother-in-law, the maid: lazy, wasteful, ungrateful people. (...) Gradually, beneath a semblance of resignation, there had arisen in the women a livid resentment for the deception into which they had been drawn . Alessandra experiences female friendship, welcoming and complicit; towards men she is shielded by her lean, angular body, even though she is the object of the possessive yet respectful attentions of Claudio, a decent young man whom she nevertheless does not love. After her mother's suicide, Alessandra is sent to her paternal relatives in Abruzzo, where the second chapter is set—undoubtedly the best of the entire novel. Here she comes into contact with the resigned steadfastness of the Grandmother (with a capital G): > why shouldn't a woman wish to die? Up there, there is a sweet scent of lilies, (...) down here, working, bringing children into the world. (...) And always being afraid of men because they are in a bad mood, because they have a mistress and spend money on the mistress. For the Grandmother there are only two alternatives: either yield to man, accepting his whims, his selfishness, and his betrayals, or else retreat imperiously into one's own world, "always saying yes, yes, and then doing the exact opposite." This could be Alessandra's future if she were to accept a decent local youth, but as the Grandmother observes, Alessandra too is enchanted by men—not driven by sex, but convinced that it is possible to speak the language of women to men, and be happy. When she returns to Rome to care for her now-blind father, she meets Francesco, a university professor. The third chapter is set in Rome during the war and the German occupation. Prior to marriage, her relationship with Francesco consists of long walks, close and intense conversations, love letters: Francesco is serious, devoted, cultured, and handsome; with him, perhaps, it is possible to live on feelings, small kindnesses, affectionate gestures. But the idea men have of marriage (the woman as the "angel in the house"), alongside political and intellectual commitments deemed too significant to be within a woman's grasp, estranges Francesco; not because he betrays her or lacks respect and affection, but because the bond has become a routine that shuts Alessandra out. > "Why don't you write me love letters anymore?" I would say to him. He remained pained, perplexed. "It is true," , he would reply, "perhaps because now I can speak to you whenever I want." "But you no longer speak of love to me." (...) "Many significant things are happening, and it is difficult for me to think of anything else. Perhaps you cannot understand because you are a woman" > . With a long narrative, which wears the reader out to the point of exhaustion, the author leads us to the only possible ending for a woman who asked to be loved as women would wish to be loved, affectionately listened to in every gesture. "Francesco," I burst out in despair, "help me, Francesco." He barely stirred; "sleep," he murmured, (...) In me the rabid dog leapt up, lunged forward. I hurled myself at Francesco and emptied the pistol into his back. The interpretive key proposed by the author herself in the 1994 preface, and which Melania Mazzucco seems to embrace in her introduction, is that of a novel straddling gender narrative and a metaphor for the disillusionment of an Italy starkly different from the one envisioned through the Resistance, in which Alba de Céspedes took part. There is said to be a break with her previous novel, which recounts the lives of boarders living in suspension, protected by the convent school walls, and able to say "it is lovely to sit and talk among ourselves, all women: if there were a man, we would not have dared speak" (see the review of *Nessuno torna indietro* > on this site). If we do not allow ourselves to be swayed by the noble gloss the author sought to bestow on it many years later, we realize there is a common thread running between the two novels: women's search for their own distinctive female happiness, regardless of men, and of sex. Yet while the schoolgirls pursue their own individual paths, not always fortunate, but nonetheless full of hope, here instead there is no horizon for the desire for love. One cannot deny the echoes of *Madame Bovary* and even *Anna Karenina*, especially in the words that conclude the preface: *Dalla parte di lei*, despite its tragic conclusion, sought to resist the notion that love was an illusion > (see the reviews of these two books on this site). I like to compare Alessandra to the figure of Murasaki, who understands that life is not like literature (the Grandmother too urges her granddaughter not to read books), Genji is not a figure, male and female combined, in whom one can place one's trust, and the great Japanese poet has the protagonist die. (see the review on this site of *The Tale of Murasaki* > ). Alba de Céspedes is an elegant author whose writing evokes Alberto Moravia. The novel’s seemingly nineteenth-century profile, suspended between fairy tale and chronicle, recalls *Menzogna e Sortilegio* by Elsa Morante (see the review on this site). The circular structure, constantly turning back upon itself without any real development, compromises the narrative's effectiveness, making it verbose, almost as if the author reached the end through sheer exhaustion, without an overarching design. Why read it? The theme remains relevant, but the narrative is too long.

The novel recounts the life of David Copperfield, who, after a happy childhood with his mother and a nurse, is persecuted by his stepfather. He is sent to a harsh, authoritarian school and, upon the death of his mother, is forced to work in a factory while still a child. He is subsequently taken in by an aunt, who provides him with comfort, an education, and the means for an apprenticeship at a law office. Over time, the young David grows into manhood, working hard, marrying, and gradually establishing himself as a writer. Upon his wife’s death, he embarks on a long journey, which allows him to realize his love for a childhood friend (Agnes), whom he marries upon his return to England. The novel is rich in characters and situations (grotesque, melodramatic, emblematic of contemporary society and widespread social injustice, representative of a harsh and hypocritical morality), such that David’s fortunes intertwine with other subplots, all culminating in happy endings, yet often encumbering the narrative and rendering it prolix, rambling, and fragmentary. Individual episodes stand out more vividly than the overarching plot, while the heightened exaggeration of the characters, for good or ill, comes at the expense of substance and depth in the portrayal of the figures' emotions and distinct idiosyncrasies. In truth, everything revolves around David and his representation of reality; the throng of other characters and the settings themselves constitute «background noise» or a frame within which the imagination of both author and protagonist unfolds. *David Copperfield* has been defined as an autobiographical novel, but this is only partially true. In fact, it is a novel of nostalgia for childhood and of return to a paradise, constituted precisely by the serene maternal sphere and by the figure of Agnes, ever cherished and sought after for her very tranquility and steadfastness. What prevails is a reality interpreted through a melancholic imagination: all events are seen through the eyes of a child, who narrates an unreal England, embellished (even amid its suffering and injustice) by the trusting, idealized vision typical of childhood. From this perspective, it is emblematic, and particularly evocative, how the author conceptualizes the ideal place of refuge: it is a boat, inside which one feels safe even as the waves swell and the wind rises outside, in that it ensures an emotional equilibrium and a peace that are ultimately destroyed by the arrival of adult betrayal and passion, and, metaphorically, by a storm that claims both the betrayer and the betrayed. The style features an exceptionally rich vocabulary and is characterized by a sentence structure that is often difficult to follow. The frequent use of dialectal forms further increases the difficulty of the reading experience.

The book brings together fifteen stories, the last four of which > form a separate unit, autobiographical in feeling, sometimes even in fact . To make overall sense of stories that might otherwise be viewed as episodes of a female condition devoid of evolution and without outlets ( > too late to do anything else. When it could be worse, much worse ), one should perhaps start from the final story, *Dear Life*, which also lends its title to the entire collection. > I lived when I was young at the end of a long road, or a road that seemed long to me. Behind me, as I walked home from primary school, (...) lay the real town with its businesses and sidewalks and streetlights for when it got dark. (...) Marking the end of town were two bridges..... the road divided, one part of it heading south toward a hill (...) to become a proper highway, and the other running around old abandoned fields to turn west. This western road was my road . Reading this effective depiction of a childhood suspended between town and countryside, in that urban and social void that now characterizes our spaces, one's mind inevitably turns to a poem by Pasolini: > poor as a Colosseum cat, I lived in a borgata all lime and dust, far from city and countryside... that borough bare to the wind, not Roman, not Southern, not working-class, was life in its most current light.... bone of daily existence, pure, for being all too proximate, absolute for being all too miserably human (Pier Paolo Pasolini, *Il pianto della scavatrice*). Munro draws a clear and vivid portrait of how strange, perilous, and important our life can be, so dear to us; all this, however, not in the abstract, nor within a prevailing gender dimension (female sensibility contrasted with male indifference), but within the specific social and almost anthropological context in which we all live. Let us take, for example, a few stories. In *Amundsen*, the protagonist arrives in a small town to teach in a sanatorium for children and adolescents suffering from tuberculosis. “The world beyond the lake and the forest had vanished”; life is lived in isolation from external reality; small things prevail: the chill of the houses, the narrow road running through the woods and near the sawmill, the bar frequented by lumberjacks waiting to be called up for service. The relationship between the protagonist and the sanatorium’s director is predictable and prosaic, unfolding without clamor or enthusiasm in flat, modest, squalidly petty-bourgeois settings, ending in an obvious way, without any real reason. Yet it is precisely the banality of the affair and the cramped context of the small town that lead the protagonist to say: “nothing really changes when it comes to love.” In *Corrie*, into the routine of an apparently solid marriage bursts an old flame of the husband. The protagonist reacts by fleeing, takes the car and seeks refuge in the anonymity of the big city, in a squalid motel, eating and drinking in a restaurant where she wonders whether “any man, any old man, would think of hitting on her.” She returns home only to be told by her husband: > it’s not so much the person. It’s like a kind of atmosphere. It’s a scent , a desire for transgression. > What a mix of rage and admiration I could feel, facing his will to do it. All our life together came to an end . Here too, one would fail to grasp the entire affair if the story did not proceed from > a non-life, but survival (...) in whose arcane orgasm there is no other passion than for daily labor (Pasolini, *Ceneri di Gramsci*). In the story *In Sight of the Lake*, a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s goes in search of a specialist. She has been given an address in a small town; hesitant, frail, the woman wanders through the town, getting lost and asking passers-by—themselves uncertain—where the doctor's office might be. She arrives at a clinic, deserted and isolated: she tries to leave, to escape, but the door has become immensely heavy. > She opens her mouth to call for help but it seems no cry will come . Suddenly she is safe. It is the story of a woman who feels she is losing her memory, but why does this vanishing of consciousness take place in a squalid urban landscape, and not among glittering skyscrapers bursting with life, or in a gentle, wondrous meadow filled with flowers? A refined and elegant writer, Munro unfortunately loses herself in slight, inconclusive stories. The characters are ostensibly delineated, yet it is sheer literary technique; there is no real psychological depth: everything remains suspended. An overarching impression of fatigue prevails, of stories already written, rewritten in a masterful style, yet devoid of passion. Only in the final stories does narrative power resurface, but it is too late. Why not read it? It is slight, inconclusive, and dull.

The book is set in Venice and is a detective novel. A renowned conductor dies in his dressing room during an opera performance. A police inspector investigates, naturally suspecting homicide. In the end, it turns out to be suicide. The conductor had abused his wife’s daughter, who, by administering antibiotic injections, renders him progressively deaf. Driven by despair, the conductor killed himself. As a mystery, it unfolds slowly and even tediously. The author attempts to depict life in Venice and the dynamics within the inspector’s family: yet it all unfolds superficially and laden with stereotypes, ultimately ringing false.

If we consult the Zingarelli dictionary, we find the following definition of the adjective "boccaccesco": "affected, salacious as in certain tales of Boccaccio." And the dictionary adds: "identifies situations, descriptions, writings of a sexual nature, to which a vein of lightness, amusement, and even mordancy is nonetheless not foreign > . This definition reflects common perception, which stems from many novellas of the *Decameron* (one need only think of the fourth novella of the first day, where a monk and his abbot take a young peasant girl to bed), and resonates with its language: vernacular, rich in double entendres, and often coarse. On the other hand, for Giosuè Carducci the *Decameron* is the reverse of Dante's divine comedy," and Boccaccio a "cynic, (...) in whom there is naught but paganism and decrepit corruption" (quotations from "Life and Works of Giovanni Boccaccio" > in Vittore Branca's introduction to the *Decameron*). Poor Boccaccio, who loved Dante so dearly! The critical debate is vast and complex; as a mere reader, I shall outline a few general traits before proposing possible groupings for the hundred novellas. In the proem, the author writes that women are restricted by the wills, the pleasures, the commands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, spending most of their time enclosed within the narrow circuit of their bedchambers... (...) Wherefore, so that through me fortune's fault may be in part amended > . Woman stands at the center of the novellas; she is neither Dante's Beatrice (the personification of Love for the Good) nor Petrarch's Laura, simultaneously object of desire and mother figure; we are speaking of real woman, made of flesh, (...) "full of concupiscible desire," who proudly considers herself equal to men, as Ghismunda says to her father Tancredi (Novella I of the Fourth Day): > look somewhat to the beginnings of things, and thou shalt see that we all have our flesh from one same mass of flesh, and that all souls were created by one same Creator with equal forces, with equal powers, with equal virtues . The writing of the novellas takes its cue from an extraordinary and tragic event: the plague of 1348. And it is precisely from the description of this terrible epidemic that we can glean two other essential traits of the work. With the brushstrokes of a great sociologist, Boccaccio analyzes the social mechanisms triggered by the pestilence, lucidly capturing how it devastated above all the most destitute classes of society, who were unable to protect themselves from contagion by fleeing the city. It is an acute, cold analysis, free of that compassionate and tiresome moralism found in Manzoni's description of the plague. The poor folk wished to bury their dead with dignity; and so > countless times it happened that, as two priests were walking with a cross for someone, three or four biers, borne by bearers, fell in behind it: and where the priests believed they had one dead body to bury, they had six or eight and sometimes more . Certainly, to an obtusely conventional mindset, such as that of Carducci and indeed Benedetto Croce, this hilarious scene might seem a biting act of cynicism by an urchin laughing at the world. And yet it reveals the empathetic and pessimistic attitude that pervades Boccaccio's entire work: a realism that shares in the suffering of the human being. A living woman, the portrayal of society as it is, sympathy toward the destiny of humanity—these are the hallmarks of the hundred novellas. It is precisely in light of these interpretive keys that they can be grouped into four fundamental strands, for each of which I indicate the most representative novella. The first strand is the fairy-tale one, for which Boccaccio draws upon Arab-Muslim and chivalric literature: I single out Novella VII of the Second Day. The second group of tales is the picturesque, and here one cannot fail to cite a masterpiece: the celebrated Novella V of the Second Day. Then there are the masks of the *Commedia dell'Arte*, drawn from popular, urban, and rustic culture: to laugh bitterly at our own gullibility, I recommend Novella X of the Sixth Day. Finally, for the moralizing strand—Boccaccio's weary and pessimistic reflection on life and its misfortunes—I invite you to read the final novella of the *Canzoniere*, which so pleased Petrarch and his contemporaries (Novella X of the Tenth Day). The *Decameron* is a magnificent masterpiece of prose-poetry, a masterly synthesis of the Dantean hendecasyllable and Padan and Mediterranean narrative. Critics have spoken of plurilingualism to denote Boccaccio's lexical richness, which draws upon so many tongues of our country to reflect the social and cultural differentiation of our land. As has been written (see Vittore Branca, "A Key to Reading the *Decameron*," in the introduction to the Einaudi edition), this linguistic expressionism is programmatic because > it aims to create, at the phonetic, lexical, and grammatical level, an ambient atmosphere of spirits rather than things, even through phonic, not to say musical, suggestions . In short, the *Decameron* is a testament to what the Italian language could have been and was not: the rejection of homogenization by a ruling class that was distant and frightened of the people. We had to wait until the second half of the twentieth century! Why read it? Entertaining, fascinating, splendid.

The novel is set in Milan at the end of the nineteenth century: a city with its > broad straight avenues and luxury shops, (...) the movement of the trams and the bustle of busy people, intent on making money, working, producing, paying little heed to idle chatter, enjoying life without fuss or fancy ; in the background of human affairs a great clamor prevails, and yet not so far away lies the serene countryside, even the sight of Monte Rosa. What can a poor devil do in a city > more good than bad, which willingly feeds those who work, but where (...) he who knows not how to dissemble knows not how to rule ? Demetrio Pianelli is a petty clerk, with “a low forehead covered with hair,” who leads a life paced by ironclad habits and modest joys. Here is how De Marchi describes Pianelli’s arrival at his workplace. > He opened the drawer and checked the two rolls in their paper wrapper. He gave a quick inspection to his round hat, (...) and placed it inside its little dust cover on the hanger. Then he opened another drawer and drew out the two oversleeves of glazed cloth that he wore for writing. He slipped them on: gave his hands a nervous, brisk rub, closing his eyes, crumpling every wrinkle on his face . The three small rooms where he lives have a little terrace, from which Pianelli can admire the flowers, and even more “the grasses, the simple weeds, clad only in green”; and when he wishes to take a breath of fresh air, it suffices for him to go for a stroll, > a few miles outside Porta Romana, (...) the classic land of greenery, of water meadows, of emerald pastures, long, wide, stretching as far as the eye can see, nestled deep among the rows of gray willows and trembling poplars . This man’s life is overturned by the suicide of his younger brother, Cesarino, known as Lord Cosmetico: handsome and elegant, he enjoyed life, and his young wife (nicknamed “the Beautiful Bigot”), lived beyond his means, ran into heavy debt, and, unable to face dishonor and imprisonment, chose to take his own life, entrusting Demetrio with his wife and three children—two young boys and a girl. At first, Demetrio refuses to shoulder the burden of his brother’s family and settle his debts; later, under the pleading of his niece, he agrees to rush to their aid. > Demetrio (...) felt beneath the hardened rock, flowing like a river, a deep emotion seeking a way out. (...) Demetrio curled up in his sullenness like a dry leaf. The nerves of his face twitched beneath the hard bark. (...) Why should I not have the will to help you? Ah, well then, (...) I too have known poverty and know what it tastes like: but against poverty there is only one remedy: the will to work and thrift, thrift and the will to work . Poor Demetrio! He thinks it is that simple, that it is enough to be a hard worker and an earnest man to be appreciated and to win—why not?—even the affection of his beautiful sister-in-law, thus building the family he never had. It takes far more than that! A solid financial standing is required, like that of the landowner cousin—he, indeed, can aspire to the “Beautiful Bigot.” Is Demetrio, then, one of the defeated? When he learns that his head of office, the powerful Cavalier Balzalotti, has attempted to seduce his sister-in-law, Demetrio rebels against hierarchy, against the secure job, against his fate as a wretched petty clerk, and shouts his utter contempt at the scoundrel before his flabbergasted colleagues. > People who judge in broad strokes might believe that the others had won, that is, the powerful and the scoundrels , yet even against the author’s intentions, we believe that an honest gentleman has won. For most critics, the novel’s theme is resignation, reminiscent of Manzoni. In a petty-bourgeois, hypocritical context, watchful of pennies and property, steeped in a bigoted and superstitious religiosity, those at the bottom of the social ladder have no choice but to surrender, scraping by in their own quiet corner. Outside the “shell,” out in the world, there is room only for those who know the art of living, which > consists, it seems, in taking things as God sends them and letting them go as the Devil takes them (according to the wisdom of Cavalier Balzalotti). And so it is that the novel’s various characters move, to the point of appearing as stereotypes, even caricatures, varnished with subtle irony. Yet this is not the case for Demetrio: true, he is a curmudgeon, “an object out of use,” yet for that very reason he embodies a stubborn and indomitable courage, a detachment from the noisy, futile clamor; in this way, he conveys to us a message of “resistance,” despite it all. The distinctive feature of De Marchi’s narrative style is irony, nurtured by idioms and turns of phrase drawn from the Lombard tongue. In this way, the writer breaks radically with Manzoni; he contaminates standard Italian and brings us back down to earth, into the spoken language. It is, unfortunately, a folkloric use of dialect, one that foreshadows what would come much later, in the second half of the twentieth century; one need only think of Camilleri and De Cataldo. De Marchi, however, is timid; he lacks the courage to go all the way, and dialect remains an affected device, an end in itself. Why read it? A delightfully depicted petty-bourgeois Milan, a humble and unwitting hero.

Questo romanzo è un vortice dʼacqua, che risucchia lʼintero racconto in un unico incomparabile episodio, tragico ed intenso, dopo il quale niente è come prima. Il problema è che questo mulinello è una «sabbia mobile», così lento e vischioso da sfinire il lettore. Ma andiamo con ordine. Bob è un giovane di trentʼanni, padre di due bambini, sposato con una donna che lo ama; ha un posto fisso e unʼamante. Non cʼè nulla di apparentemente sbagliato nella sua vita, eppure Bob la odia: in parte per il solito sogno americano (la vecchia metafora dellʼAmerica alla quale tutti sembrano crederci), ed in parte perché Bob > ha lasciato nel mondo reale un uomo irreale, inventato, che fa il suo dovere, prudente, responsabile, fedele ed equilibrato, mentre nel mondo invisibile (...) Bob è inconcludente, avventato, irresponsabile, infedele, irrazionale, (...) lʼuomo che è un bambino . Questo lato invisibile prende il sopravvento e lo spinge ad abbandonare una vita prosaica ma sicura, per cercare qualcosa che lui stesso non sa cosa sia. Lascia la casa di proprietà e il posto fisso, e trascina la famiglia in Florida a vivere in un caravan, a lavorare prima con il fratello (uno smargiasso truffatore) e poi con un amico (un altro mascalzone). È una deriva inesorabile: non solo è un fallimento economico, è pure una discesa psicologica e morale. Bob uccide un uomo, anche se per difendersi, si disinteressa della famiglia, è coinvolto nel suicidio del fratello, fa finta di non accorgersi dei loschi affari dellʼamico, finisce a fare traffico illegale di clandestini. Accanto al racconto di Bob si sviluppa la storia degli immigrati haitiani, in particolare di una donna con il suo bambino. È inutile soffermarsi su questo filone narrativo, che avrebbe potuto dare molto se non fosse stato infarcito di riti vudu, del fascino dellʼesoterico, di visioni stucchevoli del «buon selvaggio». Caro Banks le sofferenze dellʼimmigrazione sono troppo gravi e serie per essere lʼoccasione di artefatti e folcloristici racconti! I due filoni narrativi (le vicende di Bob e quelle degli haitiani) convergono in un evento drammatico ed ad un tempo emblematico di una condizione universale. Bob trasporta con la sua barca un gruppo di haitiani, determinati ad arrivare in tutti i modi in America. Lo fa per soldi, ma il suo atteggiamento è di empatia per questa povera gente: li porta dellʼacqua, offre delle sigarette, sembra volersi far coinvolgere. Quando però vengono avvistati dalla guardia costiera e dunque cʼè il rischio di essere arrestati, Bob non esita a buttare a mare gli haitiani (uomini, donne e bambini), condannandoli ad una morte certa per annegamento. > È caduto in un luogo oscuro e freddo, dove le pareti sono perpendicolari e scivolose e tutte le uscite sono state sigillate. È solo. (...) Ecco come un uomo perde la sua bontà. (...) Dalla bocca allʼinguine, Bob percepisce il proprio corpo come una fredda barra dʼacciaio, braccia e gambe si induriscono come ghisa, la testa, occhi bocca naso orecchie, sembra chiudersi al mondo a poco a poco . Il capitolo «Per mare» narra la terribile vicenda dellʼassassinio dei clandestini, lasciati annegare per un pugno di soldi: è di una potenza evocativa straordinaria, anche alla luce di ciò che avviene giornalmente nel nostro mediterraneo. Lʼautore mostra una grande abilità stilistica, nella costruzione della trama e nellʼuso delle parole. Sino allʼultimo il lettore spera che ci sia un diverso finale, nel quale Bob palesi la sua bontà, una effettiva compassione verso gli haitiani, «così fragili, delicati e sensibili». Ed invece, lui, «un tipo gentile e socievole», commette un delitto orrendo, una strage. E ci fanno ancora più ribrezzo le sue banali giustificazioni, come «nulla gratis nella terra della libertà», o la sua auto commiserazione: «e infatti eccomi qui. Peccato che non sono più io». È facile, tuttavia, scandalizzarci per il comportamento di Bob; in realtà le sue azioni e i suoi pensieri esprimono molto bene la distanza tra ciò che proclamiamo e ciò che facciamo, quellʼipocrita perbenismo, la nostra falsa coscienza. Ed allora perché rovinare tanta bravura stilistica in banali disgressioni di carattere filosofico e perché tante lungaggini sulla cultura haitiana? Non era forse meglio focalizzarsi sui personaggi, o lavorare sulle reali condizioni degli immigrati, in viaggio verso il sogno americano? È un libro rovinato dalla presunzione dellʼautore di essere in grado di trattare troppi temi, invece di concentrarsi su limitate ma efficaci chiavi di lettura. Perché leggerlo? Vale la pena leggerlo solo per il capitolo «Per mare».

This is a book that develops along two narrative paths that are seemingly distinct, yet bound together by an ideal thread. On the one hand, it narrates the story of a desert people, followers of a sheikh revered as a saint, who intend to resist the French conquest of Saharan Africa. The desperate march of these people is seen through the eyes of a boy, who may well be the grandfather of Lalla, the novel’s protagonist. On the other hand, the novel chronicles the story of Lalla, born amid the scrub and taken in by her aunt in a small seaside village. Lalla lives a wild existence, in the wind and among the dunes, a lover of solitude and of the desert. During her long, solitary walks, she is accompanied by a shepherd, Hartani, a boy who does not speak her language but who possesses a profound understanding of nature, of birds, of flora, of the sea and the desert. Hartani belongs to the "blue men," the men of the desert, the very same people who took part in the grand and disastrous march recounted in the novel’s other thread. Lalla is meant to be wed to a wealthy merchant, and so she flees with Hartani toward the desert. The story then picks up with Lalla arriving aboard a small vessel in Marseille, seeking shelter with her aunt, who has relocated there. Lalla is pregnant, but hides her condition and leads a life just as wild in the great French city: yet what in the village had been light and symbiosis with all living beings turns, in Marseille, into darkness and loneliness. Lalla lives in a tenement hotel that houses scores of immigrants who come, out of desperation, to work in France. There she also meets a boy who survives by stealing and begging. Lalla has descended into the underworld, yet among the desperate she discovers a profound solidarity and support. By chance, she meets a photographer who turns her into a famous model; in the end, however, Lalla resolves to return to Africa and give birth to her child amid the dunes, in the coolness and sweetness of a tree’s shade. The true subject is the contrast between Western and North African civilization. This contrast is crystallized not so much in the characters—too stereotypical, devoid of depth and complexity—nor in the plot, virtually non-existent and in certain respects implausible (such as the episode of the photographer who makes Lalla famous), but rather in the landscapes and in the author’s ability to impart density and chromatic richness to the descriptions. Upon the sand dunes, "Lalla opens her eyes wide, lets the sky enter into her," and senses the presence of God: > where is the road? Lalla does not know where she is going, adrift, swept along by the desert wind that blows, vengeful and cruel, the wind that sweeps men away and brings down the rocks at the foot of the mountains. It is the wind that moves toward infinity, beyond the horizon, beyond the sky all the way to the cold constellations, the Milky Way, to the sun . If the desert is light, infinity, and bliss, the city is death. > Lalla watches those who depart for other cities, toward hunger, cold, misfortune, those who are going to be humiliated, who are going to live in solitude. They move toward dark cities, toward low skies, toward steam, toward the diseases that ravage the chest . Yet Lalla harbors a dream: it is the desert people’s dream of freedom, of living free in the sun and the wind. It is written in magnificent French, with a powerfully lyrical style, brimming with evocative resonance and musical cadence, succeeding in rendering through words the sensory impressions of a natural world and an environment. Beyond individual pages, however, this vision of a "virtuous" society set in opposition to Western civilization feels somewhat disingenuous—more an intellectual, aestheticizing posture than a genuine impulse to chronicle the true complexity and suffering of an oppressed, shattered, and migrant society. It is, in a sense, the Westerner’s quintessential search for the presumed purity of the Other.

Imagine a *Promessi Sposi* where Renzo and Lucia are two lunatics—or presumed to be such—the setting is a late-nineteenth-century Lecco teetering between superstition, charlatanry, and positivism, the center of the narrative is an insane asylum, and the author is not Manzoni, but a debut writer. Antonio Ghislanzoni, the only historical figure among them, tells his friend Baldo Bandini, a penniless theater man: > we are not Manzoni or Stoppani; we are weary old *scapigliati*, good only for playing pranks and taking the petty bourgeoisie for a ride. (...) We may well die before the twentieth century begins, and we shall endure even less in memory and history. Ranocchio, on the other hand—I believe Ranocchio will endure. Not him personally, of course, you understand. But his breed cannot be extinguished. It is the dynasty of the mad and the misfits, of those whose only home is the street and the leper hospital, the plague-ridden wretches who make you hear the bell of the *monatti* at the mere sight of them . Ranocchio, or rather Ranocchia, is the nickname of a boy—a stuttering, odd fellow abandoned by his parents, to whom Bandini acts as a father, because “fools go to the next world in pairs.” Found half-drowned and stark naked, brought home by a desperate Bandini, the boy went on for days producing > greenish drool, (...) singing (...) songs in a dialect he didn't even remember, clicks of suspended consonants, vague and indistinct howls hanging in mid-air . It is decided to commit him to the asylum. But what had happened? > Good Friend (Ghislanzoni wrote to Bandini), the solution is simple. As is often the case, our Ranocchio’s madness is of the worst kind. Its name is love, and the contagion comes from a woman . And it is one of the worst contagions, because the beloved woman is Bianca, the schoolmistress: frigid, as though she were always clad in armor, she had allowed him, poor and ignorant Ranocchio, “to breach her fortress.” > When he watched her walk from afar, during those long evening strolls with her handsome blond Kraut (Bianca’s lover is an Austrian officer), Ranocchia could have sworn he saw her in armor. The shield and helmet gleamed, the spear was leveled: not even in the company of that beardless macaque face could she rid herself of the burden she carried within. And yet she took his arm, her gaze veiled beneath half-closed lids . What blossomed could only be an infatuation so intense that it drove the boy to feign madness in order to be committed to the asylum, where the schoolmistress had been sent following a nervous breakdown after her lover’s departure, or perhaps to conceal a scandalous pregnancy. Up to this point the novel runs smoothly, intriguing in its eccentric characters and its depiction of a Lecco and a lake belonging, to be sure, to another century, yet both so vivid with color and light as to seem living portraits: the author's love of the setting guides his pen, working a minor miracle of writing. Then, the story gets tangled and descends into banality. The many pages devoted to the asylum are cold, predictable, false; the place resembles a Nazi camp more than “a great resonance chamber” where “delirium becomes an echo / anonymity a measure,” where one spends a > time lost in whirling thoughts / crowded behind the bars / like naked swallows (Alda Merini). The plot frays further when the author turns to Ranocchia’s escape, the desperate search for Bianca just to know whether she is still alive after fleeing the asylum, and ultimately the unraveling of Bianca’s mystery, aided along the way by a witch and a parish priest who bears a damned close resemblance to Don Abbondio. Without spoiling the ending, one can say that the schoolmistress is strange, introverted, and self-absorbed, but certainly not mad; on the contrary, she is sensible enough to stage her own disappearance to escape a bigoted, obtuse Lecco. And since nothing is spared us, the final section even serves up a touch of esoteric mystery—a matter of incomprehensible numbers whose code only a child, himself a bit simple, manages to crack. One must accept that > in reality the world is uncertain and vague, like the sky clouding over in August when you cannot tell whether it will rain or the wind will turn : a conclusion worthy of Manzoni, for whom the common folk must not raise their heads, but place their trust in Divine Providence. Why ruin a fine idea—the portrayal of the world of the *Scemerelli*—with so many useless words? Perhaps that is the real mystery of the book. Yet we need not despair: in this debut novel, the author displays clean, elegant prose. The sentences unfold linearly, punctuation is handled masterfully—certainly better than Manzoni’s—the use of adjectives is sparing yet effective, and unusual words and idioms embellish the narrative. Not to mention the descriptions of Lecco and the lake, evocative and naturalistically vivid. In short, the author needs to place greater faith in his writing and streamline his plots, rather than overcrowding them with situations and characters. Why read it? It is intriguing in its first part; on the whole, it is well written.

The bottom line is very simple: a wasted talent. Remarkable stylistic skill is placed at the service of tedious stories devoid of narrative development, inconclusive and cynical relationship dramas: in short, an unbearable book. In *Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed*, Mark has discovered that his wife, Laura, is cheating on him: he knows because he hired a detective to tail her and has proof on a video, which he watches obsessively. He is a successful project manager and thus wants to approach the problem according to the rational tenets of project management. > No, the project of saving his marriage appears to have failed, and he is faced with a new objective. This is not unusual. Some projects collapse for various reasons. (...) In this case, there was simply a change of heart. Or, more accurately, a shift from concealing love’s troubles to displaying them, though Mark was forced to acknowledge them, wasn’t he? (...) There was the cold politeness toward his mother. (...) There was Laura’s habit of getting the detailed grocery instructions Mark gave her wrong, (...) to the point that he had to drop everything and go to the supermarket himself. (...) There was Laura’s habit of watching banal detective shows late at night, her eyes glued to the screen, vacant like a child’s. There was her mediocre cooking, her preference for frozen, heavily salted foods, and unremarkable dishes she was not ashamed to serve with ketchup. And now she was deceiving him, making a fool of him, and betraying him. Uprooting their home from its foundations and hurling shards of boiling glass into Mark’s blood, his brain, and his heart: and all this intense pain for what? For her? Look at her; what was he losing anyway? But that was a question that died before it was even fully thought, because he loved her . Mark fails to understand the reasons behind the failure of his marriage, even when numerous signs should tell him that it is his very own cold, rational approach that has driven Laura away. His habit of judging, evaluating, and treating the people around him as though they worked for him. He does not understand, but he is a stubborn man: > he would not throw his wife out of his house. (...) He would step back, take no action, and let things run their course. He would let his wife’s mistake resolve itself . Hypocritical forbearance is the sole means to make a relationship survive. This is also the outcome of another story: *Marla*. She is a woman no longer young, very fat, a drab bank clerk destined to remain an old maid. It seems an inescapable fate, until she meets Dennis, an equally obese man, affectionate and kind. It is unexpected love. The two move in together, and cohabitation reveals traits in the man that Marla dislikes: an obsessive fixation with order, a preference for a repetitive and mundane life, the risk of slipping into a tedious routine. What is more, the man does not want children. Leave him? But that’s marriage, my dear, her friends tell her; children will come later, even if the husband doesn’t want them (just deceive him about your fertile days so he won’t wear a condom!). Now well on his way toward squalor, Dubus tackles the third story (*The Bartender*): two young people marry full of enthusiasm, she gets pregnant, and he cannot resist sleeping with a curvaceous coworker—quite a bitch, truth be told. In the seventh month, the wife discovers the affair and risks miscarrying; miraculously, both she and the baby girl survive. > He walked over beside her bed and stood still. (...) Soon she would open her eyes, (...) eyes he did not deserve but hoped to earn, eyes of dark hope . At this point, I should have tackled *Dirty Love*. I confess: I could not bring myself to do it, so grating did the reading promise to be. From the story, it is useful to quote a sentence to convey Dubus’s remarkable ability to sustain long periods through a masterful use of words—a succession of impressions not underpinned by punctuation or the unfolding of content (events, character descriptions, feelings), but anchored in a carefully and skillfully calibrated syntax. In Italian, much of this writing is undoubtedly lost, and a great translator would be required; nonetheless, I shall try. > Now everything is lined up, her feelings and the music in her head, and all of it keeps making her feel as if she were moving forward, gliding silently on an airport moving walkway, that time she was on one, back in the past when she was little and her mother and father seemed happy, or at least laughed together a lot, her mother still pretty or at least looking it because she took care of herself, heavy but still sexy, though Devon never thought about these things, she only sensed them, as if she were lying in a soft bed surrounded by cool, deep pillows and the scent of something sweet was in the air, and that day the three of them were boarding a plane to Disney World where everything was realer than real could ever be . Why not read it? Monotonous, ponderous, even superficial at times.

It is a great anti-war novel; it recalls two other books on the subject, both reviewed on this site: Karl Marlantes's *Matterhorn*, set in the Vietnam War, and Erich Remarque's *All Quiet on the Western Front*. While the former is an epic tale, a sort of modern *Iliad* demonstrating the futility of war as an occasion for social change (dispelling a great myth!), and the latter is a descent into the underworld where "living dead" survive in the trenches, *The Turncoat* tells the story of a German soldier who becomes conscious of the absurdity of nationalism, of the tragedy engulfing him, and believes he can find a solution by crossing over to the other side to fight among the partisans. The setting is World War II in Poland; a small German outpost must guard a railway line in territory now held by the enemy. Isolated, abandoned, and demoralized, > the wilderness gazed with innocent voluptuousness upon those soldiers who, viewed from a fair distance, hardly seemed seized by gasping, moaning, or nearing despair; from afar, they appeared more like figures one sometimes finds depicted at the market of old engravings, moving merrily, aimlessly, free from all gravity . Proska finds himself in this detachment by chance; he was traveling on a train toward the Eastern Front when a bomb wrecked the convoy; having miraculously survived, he falls into rank, naturally like a good soldier, in a small squad under the orders of a clumsy, authoritarian, and violent non-commissioned officer; the military command is far away. It is a motley assortment of humanity, ranging from a somewhat dim-witted beanpole to a former fire-eater whose companion is a hen, through to a young student, the butt of the commander's sadistic jokes. As in *Matterhorn* and *All Quiet on the Western Front*, it is brotherhood that cements the group, while patriotism is by now seen as a swindle. > They call it a sense of duty, Milkbun said contemptuously (a nickname for Wolfgang, the young student), they injected it into our blood. And with that, they unhinged us, stripped away our independence. (...) Nationalist resentment is contagious. A resentment that is the root of presumed German superiority and the wellspring of this goddamned sense of predestination . A few words, and above all the deadly consequences of a delusion of omnipotence, dismantle that universal mission of which Thomas Mann spoke, and which infected German society. It is for this reason, and because of the story it tells, that the novel had to wait a long time before being published. In war, a soldier's primary task is to save himself, and that cannot be done without dealing death. > Quick, the trigger is impatient; it has a great thirst for death. (...) Another burst. All twenty-eight. What else are you waiting for? And the rounds left the muzzle and shaved the reeds. (...) The river, brazen-faced, silently pushed its waters to the sea, sweeping past meadows and soaring woods, sweeping past the granite vaults of the bridges, past towns great and small, sweeping, sweeping past. A man dreamed of his wife. Water under the bridge. He dreamed of a son. (...) All water under the bridge: the fire leaping from lips, the longings welling in eyes; the tenderness, the steadfast loyalty, and the anguish in the chest. Only the conscience does not run dry, this proud, harsh landscape of justice, this fortress against remorse . Proska watches a young partisan walking as though taking "a sentimental stroll." He does not want to shoot him, yet "we are forced to obey war even if we hate it like the plague." There is no alternative to war, and it is this feeling, together with disillusionment and the opportunistic instinct for survival, that drives Proska to defect and fight with the partisans. On the other side of the barricade, life is "just as gray, not a bit better." Proska does his duty nonetheless, just as he had as a German soldier. And he shoots, dealing death without even knowing who faces him. With the great westward advance of the Red Army, Proska reaches his sister's house and, unintentionally, on instinct, kills his brother-in-law, who—failing to recognize him, and likewise driven by instinct—was leveling the barrel of a rifle at him. When Proska realizes what he has done, he hides the corpse: for years, his sister believes her husband to be missing in action. > Maria wants certainty. Only you can give it to her, Proska. You must give it to her. (...) Once you know where to sleep, once you have found where you can be alone with yourself and your long days, once you know that all roads wish to be traveled to the very end: then, Proska, you must write to her. You will do so. You must . A wretched man, a decent man yet too small to make the right choice, finds himself caught up in the war against his will. He reacts as best he can and becomes a deserter not out of choice, but out of necessity, because in war one must deal death regardless. This is the book's profound message: violence can only be answered with nonviolence if one wishes to save one's conscience. It is an illusion, a poignant yearning, to hope that one might sink "into the remote swamps of oblivion," or that evil can be remedied with more evil. Only a choice for peace can truly bring serenity. It is a virtually flawless novel: masterfully constructed with an exact balance of plot, characters, and landscape; traversed by an intense pacifist spirit, never declamatory, but voiced through the lives of ordinary people, soldiers despite themselves: > the clock that every war/clasps within its bloody claws/drips down along its hands/the minutes of its soldiers/and the pride of life/falls silent, without an echo,/and the wind sweeps away names/upon the swing of oblivion . Why read it? A masterpiece.

A literature professor is expelled from the university following a relationship—essentially sexual—with a female student. The man is over fifty and twice divorced. Accustomed to being courted by women, he now finds himself alone, reduced to seeking sex with prostitutes, and thus lets himself be drawn into the affair, in pursuit of his own vanity and his own eros. He moves to the countryside to stay with his daughter, who runs a smallholding and a dog shelter. He helps his daughter take her produce to market, meets a woman his own age who runs an animal clinic and puts surplus dogs to death, and works alongside Petrus, a Black man who helps his daughter run the farm. The man’s attitude, however, has not changed; his vanity continues to dominate even his relationship with his daughter, with whom he cannot achieve any genuine dialogue: neither recounting the events that led him to leave the university, nor understanding his daughter’s reasons for living in the country, so utterly isolated. An incident radically alters their lives: three Black men break into the house, ransack it, attempt to set the professor on fire, and rape his daughter. Even more shattering is the fact that the daughter does not report the crime and chooses, instead, to keep the child conceived through the assault and to marry Petrus to secure her existence in the countryside. The professor’s world dissolves—a world that had found its precise coordinates in the realm of imagination, poetry, and bourgeois conventions: as he had said at the beginning of the book when glossing a stanza by Wordsworth (the poet’s disappointment at the sight of Mont Blanc): > the great archetypes of the mind, the pure ideas, find themselves usurped by mere images that derive from the senses. Yet we cannot live every day in the world of pure ideas, sheltered from sense-experience... The question must be: How do we find a way for the two (imagination and reality) to coexist? Ideas of a narcissistic intellectual, to which his daughter replies that life is a concrete, simple matter. The man attempts to return to the city, but his former life has by now vanished. He therefore takes a room in the village near his daughter’s farm, works on a musical piece destined to center on the affair between Byron and his Ravenna mistress, Teresa, and helps run the animal clinic. The book draws to a close, bleakly, with the man’s decision to have a dog put down—a dog to which he had grown attached—because we must all make our way toward our end, toward death. It is a highly complex novel, one in which it is difficult to isolate a single narrative thread. Among the possible readings (the social fabric of South Africa, the clash between bourgeois European culture and the emerging values of the Black population, father-daughter relations, the acceptance of the codes of violence, animals and dogs in particular), the most compelling seems to me to be the theme of death and the awaiting of death. The former is addressed through the ordeal of the protagonist, who comes to terms with the passage of time: > he wanders aimlessly in the garden, a dreary feeling coming over him. It is not merely that he does not know what to do with himself. The events of the day before have shaken him to the core. The tremors, the weakness are merely the first, most superficial symptoms of shock. He has the sense that within him a vital organ has been bruised and abused, perhaps even his heart. For the first time he feels what it means to be an old man, tired in the bones, devoid of hope, devoid of desire, indifferent to the future. Sprawled on a plastic chair amid the stench of chicken feathers and rotting apples, he feels his interest in the world ebbing away from him drop by drop. It will take weeks, perhaps months before he is bled dry, but he is bleeding out. When all this is over, he will be like a fly enfolding itself in a web, brittle to the touch, lighter than a grain of rice, ready to drift away. The theme of waiting is embodied by Teresa, who spends her entire life waiting for the return of Byron, who has gone to Greece to die: > my Byron, she sings for the third time; and from somewhere within the caverns of the other world, a voice answers in song, wavering, disembodied, the voice of a ghost, the voice of Byron. Where are you? he sings, and then a word the woman did not want to hear: dry. It has dried up, the wellspring of all things. And finally, the harrowing conclusion of the novel, which epitomizes the protagonist’s despair, the end of life, of waiting: > bearing it (the dog) in his arms like a side of meat, he walks back into the surgery. I thought you wanted to save him for another week, Bev Shaw says: Are you giving him up? Yes, I am giving him up—or does the author, with the phrase *give up*, mean: "I surrender, I yield!"?

*Disguises*—in Italian, *travestimenti*—is a short story centered on the theme of disguise as an ambiguous game leading to the distortion of reality and of the self. Henry, a ten-year-old boy, is orphaned and goes to live with his aunt, a former actress. The boy is made to undergo an evening ritual in which the two dress up and perform the roles inherent to their assumed appearances. It is a game that turns unsettling when the aunt forces the boy to dress as a girl and, met with her nephew's resistance, displays an authoritarian and aggressive temperament. As was to be expected, the boy makes friends and meets a girl his own age who invites him to her house. Henry is no longer a child; he is becoming an adolescent, and his aunt's inclinations grow increasingly intolerable. The aunt throws a costume party, and the story culminates in a crescendo of illusions, masquerades, and scenes either real or merely imagined, at a gathering where it is difficult to tell who is doing what: > now it came back to him, if you are dressed as someone else pretending to be them, you take the blame for what they have done, or for what you do being them... or that you did? It is a muddled story, tangling together several themes: disguise as play, the forging of identity in adolescence, and a conception of reality as illusion—an impression created by one's own senses rather than an objectively existing world. There are too many psychological and philosophical motifs for the story to remain intelligible; it seems merely an occasion to experiment with new subjects and cement stylistic virtuosity. Why not read it? It is difficult to read, inconclusive, and weighed down with literary preciousness.

The decommissioning with which the book deals is that of the Bagnoli steelworks in Naples. Through the literary device of a technician, Vincenzo Buonocore, recounting his story directly to the writer, the history of the factory’s closure and its impact on the social fabric of this town in Campania is interwoven with a personal tale. > If I am to be completely in this book, and Rosaria must be in it, Marcella must be in it, Martinez must be in it, the disappearing factory must be in it, Bagnoli changing its face; if you yourself must also be in it, with your pretension of telling all this using me, and my mediocre human story must be in it, with all its weaknesses, grudges, and regrets, what sense would there be in keeping silent about what happened that evening between my wife and me? The story is very simple. Buonocore is a technician who entered the factory at a very young age as a laborer; over time, however, his skill, dedication to work, and above all his passion for the plant—for the continuous casting machine—led him to devote himself to maintenance. When the decision is made to sell the plant to the Chinese, Buonocore is entrusted with managing relations with the Chinese technicians and overseeing the dismantling of the facility. Meanwhile, Buonocore finds himself involved in a relationship—one that remains purely platonic—with the daughter of a colleague, Marcella: an adrift young woman yearning to lean on a more mature figure. The two narrative threads, the relationship with Marcella and the shutdown of the plant, reach a grim conclusion with the girl's death and the definitive demolition, by dynamite, of the factory's remains, whose finest components, such as the casting plant, have been dismantled and sold off. Moreover, his wife Rosaria's discovery of her husband's relationship with Marcella compromises Buonocore's marriage as well. From the reading, an impression of contrivance emerges. The relationship between Buonocore and Marcella is a succession of episodes whose premises and emotional implications remain obscure; its repercussions for Rosaria are likewise investigated only superficially. At times, the depiction of the demolition takes on melodramatic overtones, traits of a social inquiry and political protest, yet fails to convince or truly convey the sense of what occurred. The most compelling aspect is, in truth, the relationship between Buonocore and the industrial plant. At the beginning of the novel, Buonocore enters the facility by night and climbs onto the casting floor to look down from above. > There it is, my plant, immense as a cathedral with a single grey-blue nave, its high ribbed vault and flanks arabesqued by geometric structural ironwork, traversed by bundles of pipes like venous networks, stairs, tracks, aerial walkways The improvements he managed to introduce to the plant convince him that > the machine does not yield to any bullying, it rewards solely and exclusively your intelligence . Yet once the plant is demolished, Buonocore realizes that a bond of friendship has been severed. > And now here we are, facing one another. There is only us: me, the crane, and this vast wreckage that I no longer recognize and that in turn no longer recognizes me; perhaps because it no longer possesses cognitive faculties, having lost its soul, its speech, its feeling . The most interesting aspect of the book is the grand theme of the relationship between man and machine, of a sort of infatuation that has characterized and continues to characterize technical culture, and which has steadily dissipated with the deindustrialization of the 1980s and 1990s. Why not read it? Whatever perspective one might adopt in approaching the book (a personal story, the depiction of a society in transition, political denunciation, an analysis of technical culture), the treatment remains superficial, the style unappealing, and in certain respects prosaic and tedious.

The book is an investigative narrative, presented through a series of interviews with immigrants. It spans from the Eastern European prostitute to individuals who have achieved success in the economic, social, and political spheres. What emerges is a highly variegated picture, revealing that, paradoxically, integrating and climbing the social ladder was easier for immigrants who arrived in 1970s Italy than for those who have come more recently. In truth, immigration mirrors the deterioration of Italian society: a growing inward turn, indifference toward novelty, and thus a tendency toward an "ostrich" policy—refusing to see that Italy is changing. There are two aspects of the book of considerable interest: the first is encapsulated in the quote cited in the book itself: "We wanted workers, but people arrived" (Max Frisch). As the author notes, it is the cultural and ideological framework underpinning Italian legislation that is flawed: > it is still the economic utility of the migrant's labor that validates their right to live in our country . Or, as a Somali domestic worker puts it in other words: I am treated > essentially well, even though when I told my story I sensed a general indifference. It is a business relationship: I provide a service and they pay me . In political terms, Jean-Léonard Touadi, a commissioner for the Municipality of Rome: > move beyond the logic of social assistance, stop approaching the category of immigrants, however fragile, through the lens of emergency welfare interventions. Instead, each of us needs equal opportunities, access to culture, access to housing, easier access to credit . Yet aren't these the problems of Italians as well? The second aspect concerns how Italians are viewed by immigrants. It is an intriguing perspective, revealing a somber world in which, for example, the elderly have lost much of their authority while spoiling children has become the norm, a division of roles persists between men and women, emotional life is bleak, and indifference prevails. "There is great individual care and little, or rather none, for the collective space." > I happened to share what we eat in my country, and most of the time they looked at me with disgust . The art of getting by prevails, as workers are selected based on referrals from relatives and friends, and consequently > the worker is not chosen based on qualifications and professional training, but as a member of a category of peers sharing the same origin . The book is engaging, yet it relies too heavily on interviews with successful figures and official representatives of the immigrant community, neglecting the essential labor of digging on the ground—that is, among ordinary people. Beneath a clean prose style and a well-constructed narrative, a journalistic weakness and an investigative fragility emerge, lending an impression of artificiality to what is recounted.

Issa is actually an Italian young man named Christian. He has a perfect command of Arabic. Consequently, the secret services decide to recruit him and dispatch him to Viale Marconi in Rome under the guise of a Tunisian immigrant. His mission is to gather intelligence on a suspected terrorist cell, allegedly operating out of a call center. Sofia—or rather Safia—is an Egyptian woman who married a compatriot through an arranged marriage. Her husband works as a pizza maker in Rome, is deeply religious, and forces Sofia to wear the veil. Issa and Sofia’s stories unfold in parallel. Each tells their own story: a literary device that fails to lend vibrancy and appeal to the narrative, ultimately rendering it superficial due to the limited scope afforded to the protagonists. For Issa, being a Tunisian immigrant entails discovering the realities of immigration: precariousness, fear, overcrowded apartments, domineering landlords and employers, clashes of nationalities, and, above all, the divide between practicing and non-practicing believers. For Sofia, life in Rome represents an opportunity to carve out spaces of freedom and pursue her dream of becoming a hairdresser. Sofia is religious yet independent in her judgments, and she chafes under the prejudices and authoritarianism of a husband she does not love. Issa and Sofia meet only by chance and for fleeting moments, but it is clear from their exchanged glances and mutual attentiveness that something has sparked between them. Their relationship could shift from a state of suspension, typical of secret lovers, to something more concrete and intimate. Issa receives a request from Sofia’s husband to marry his wife, whom he has repudiated in a fit of rage. Under Islamic law, Sofia and her husband can only remarry after the ex-wife has wed another man, consummated the marriage, and subsequently divorced. Sofia welcomes the idea, not out of any desire to return to her husband, but because she is in love with Issa. Yet the young man cannot bring himself to decide, as he is reluctant to deceive Sofia: he is, in fact, neither Tunisian nor Muslim. The ending holds a surprise that cannot be revealed. Still, the question remains: will Issa and Sofia end up together? Lakhous is a splendid writer: short sentences, concise character sketches, and a subtle irony are the primary strengths of his writing. In this novel, however, the urge to dwell on social and cultural reflections (concerning the Muslim world, immigrants, and Italians) comes at the expense of narrative pacing. The story is at times tedious and predictable, feeling somewhat contrived. Only in flashes do the authenticity and brio that characterized the author’s previous book return. Why read it? It is enjoyable, interesting, and in many respects instructive. One grows fond of the two characters, so much so that one longs to know how their love story concludes, just like in a telenovela.

The novel recounts the peculiar story of Victor, a ghostwriter who is invited over one evening by a married woman, Marta; however, on the verge of making love, Marta dies, and Victor, frightened and uncertain, leaves the house without alerting anyone. Seized by remorse and curiosity, he manages to make contact with Marta’s family: her father, a Madrilenian gentleman; her sister, with whom he hopes to begin an affair; and her husband, a businessman who was in London at the time Victor was invited by Marta. In the end, Victor confesses that he was the man in Marta’s house, and the husband, in turn, confesses that he was in London with his mistress, who had told him she was expecting a child and wished to have an abortion in the English city. In reality, this was untrue, and the man, in a moment of madness, attempted to kill her; the woman fled and was fatally struck by a taxi. Alongside this main storyline, two parallel plots unfold. Someone has told Victor that Celia, his ex-wife, works as a prostitute. One evening, Victor believes he recognizes his wife in a prostitute named Victoria, whom he picks up in his car in order to determine whether she is indeed his wife or simply another person who resembles her. The difficulty of distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between fiction and reality, recurs in his encounter with a powerful man, the Only One, who has summoned him to ghostwrite a speech. In fact, Victor introduces himself under a friend’s name (another fiction that turns into reality); furthermore, during their conversation, the Only One reveals his despair at being unable to voice the doubts and uncertainties that lie at the foundation of his actions. In his commentary on the book, the author identifies its fundamental theme as deception—not deliberate deception (the outcome of a rational plot or societal hypocrisy), but that which arises from time and memory. > The most complete of biographies is made of nothing but irregular fragments and faded scraps, even one’s own biography. We believe we can recount our lives in a more or less reasoned and precise manner, and when we begin, we realize that they are crowded with shadowy zones, with unexplained and perhaps inexplicable episodes... Deception and its discovery show us that the past, too, is unstable and precarious, that not even what seems fixed and established within it is so once and for all... . Is deception truly the book's leitmotif? I do not believe it exhausts the substance of this novel, in which the characters move through a kind of enchantment, an unreal dimension born of two fundamental forces: time and memory. > What weighs on us, says Marta’s husband, the terrible thing is that the time during which we believe what was not becomes something strange, fluctuating and fictitious, a kind of enchantment or dream that must be suppressed by our memory; suddenly, it is as if we had not lived through that period at all . And again > the dead woman who haunts and spies on and visits him is another, his own dead woman who dwells in his thoughts as mine resides in mine, like an incessant throb in waking or in sleep, his wretched wife and his wretched mistress mingled and lodged together in our heads for lack of more comfortable lodgings, struggling against dissolution and seeking to become incarnate in the only thing left to them to retain their vigor and presence, the infinite repetition and reverberation of what they once did or what took place one day: infinite, yet each time more tired and faint . The protagonists of this novel are swept away by events that appear paradoxical and unpredictable, governed by a rhythm that dissolves the distinction between past, present, and future. Yet an event, the moment it has passed, in turn disperses, and one desperately longs to turn back, wishing that things had never happened or had taken another course. Yet do we truly live, are we truly ourselves, or do we inhabit a continuous fiction, since reality cannot encompass our imagination? In this context, only death seems to be a real fact, yet death is the beginning of a gradual loss of memory. It is an important book, propelled by an irresistible narrative pace, "a literary rap," which demands that one immerse oneself fully in the reading to keep up with its stride.

The novel is set in the early seventeenth century and narrates the exploits of a country gentleman who, inflamed by chivalric tales, imagines himself to be a knight-errant. He thus embarks on a journey through La Mancha with his squire, Sancho Panza, and two faithful beasts: the horse Rocinante and the donkey. The novel is structured in two parts. In the first part, the most incredible episodes unfold, born of Don Quixote’s imagination: an inn becomes a castle to be stormed, a party of wayfarers enemy knights to be engaged in battle, a gang of convicts unfortunate souls to be freed—who will in turn rob Don Quixote. All these episodes generally come to an unhappy end: Don Quixote and Sancho emerge beaten, mocked, and with their bones half-broken; yet Don Quixote remains forever convinced that he was defeated by an “enchantment,” an artifice concocted by some malevolent sorcerer. The first part closes with Don Quixote’s return home, carted away inside a cage. The tale of the knight-errant is interspersed with a series of episodes—genuine autonomous stories—whose sole unifying thread appears to be the depiction of a hypocritical reality where brute force and overbearing arrogance hold sway. This first part pivots on the contrast between the heroic dream, that of Don Quixote, and the plebeian dream, that of Sancho. Don Quixote dwells in a perfect world and collides with history and reality; Sancho lives within history and accepts it as it is: a human realm of petty miseries and mediocre joys, devoid of disillusionment because it harbors no grand illusions. In the second part, the author imagines that Don Quixote’s exploits have already been narrated; consequently, the people the knight-errant encounters on his new adventure take pleasure in playing along with him, contriving paradoxical and often cruel situations. The novel concludes with Don Quixote’s return and his deathbed acknowledgment that knight-errantry is a falsehood and that the only true faith is that of the Catholic religion. This part of the book was written many years later, and one can certainly assert that Don Quixote “dies while living,” in that > the story now precedes him and makes him the ridiculous laughingstock of peasants and servants, of dukes and bandits . The novel is an exaltation of the imagination. In a dull, hypocritical, and unjust world, Don Quixote devises his own rules—those of chivalry errant—and even when these rules clash with reality, the phenomenon of enchantment allows Don Quixote to go on living according to his worldview. Yet is he mad, or does he act deliberately so as to survive and find amusement nonetheless? To Sancho’s admonition that he should not have set the prisoners free, Don Quixote retorts that > knights-errant must aid the oppressed as people in need, looking to their distress and not to their crimes. I came upon a troop of miserable and unfortunate souls, and I did for them what my rule commands, and for the rest, come what may . Yet what is this rule? > The ultimate aim is to administer distributive justice upon earth, rendering to each his own, interpreting and upholding good laws... (arms) have for their object peace, which is the greatest good that men can desire in this life . Don Quixote is thus mad, yet at the same time wise; his figure, still central in the first part of the book, increasingly takes on the role of a counterpart to the other great protagonist: Sancho Panza. A witty yet credulous peasant, he embodies peasant wisdom, resolving problems with common sense. The bond between Don Quixote and Sancho is one of profound affection and deep esteem: the squire is the only one who believes in the knight, and he does so even while recognizing that he is mad, because he loves him. When it is pointed out to Sancho Panza that he too must be mad if he believes in a madman, the squire replies that loyalty to Don Quixote prevails in him, and with it the desire to stand by him and aid him. Moreover, conversation with Don Quixote has been for Sancho Panza > the manure fallen upon the barren soil of my dry wit, and the time spent serving and frequenting your worship has been its cultivation... Don Quixote laughed at Sancho’s speeches, so full of affectation . Along with Don Quixote and Sancho, the other two protagonists are Rocinante and the donkey: > the friendship between the two beasts was so close, so unique of its kind... that whenever the two beasts could come together, they took care to scratch each other... and Rocinante would rest his long neck across that of the donkey . Freedom of the imagination and friendship are thus the two fundamental themes of the book, to which must be added the taste for adventure—expressed not in distant realms, but in La Mancha itself, just a few kilometers from home. The book’s modernity lies precisely in these themes and in the hall of mirrors (fiction within fiction) that unfolds in the second part—which is, however, the less accomplished, and in many passages verbose and redundant.

The delicate elegance of the writing welcomes the reader from the novel’s very first pages: the prosaic, tranquil life of a provincial town, daily routines, rigid social roles, thwarted romances, predictable and mundane existence are described with such affectionate and ironic detail that one wishes the story would continue along this path, as if it were a modern, condensed edition of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece (*In Search of Lost Time*), where truly nothing happens. Non è così, because war bursts in! The story begins with a scandal: against the will of his grandfather, a powerful and wealthy industrialist, Pierre marries Agnes, a girl without a dowry or useful social connections, with whom he is nonetheless deeply in love. Pierre’s mother > thought confusedly: to have loved him so much, protected him, shielded him from every evil, only for him to be snatched away from me in an instant! He will not be able to stay in Saint-Elme. His grandfather will not allow it. I have lost him . The First World War breaks out, and Pierre is called up to arms. There is far more to worry about. People cling to the illusion that > a world war must unfold almost without bloodshed. (...) no State will want to answer before posterity for such a crime! (...) It is impossible for such a thing to happen, she told herself, and millions of people that evening repeated the very same words. (...) But out there, my God, there is Pierre; come now, there is Pierre, my baby boy! It is not possible. It is a nightmare . (...) And yet, not a single tear escaped her. Her grief was too strange and too intense to allow her to weep > . If these were the mother’s conflicting feelings, the newlyweds had bid each other farewell with calm resignation. Alone, in the silence of their room, in the warmth of their bed, the night before they had exchanged their parting kiss, a mute and deep kiss, without lamentations, without futile recriminations. Now their lips were weary and lifeless > . When returning home on leave, the soldiers do not recount what truly happens at the front; they want to keep the war separate from the lives of their loved ones. It is enough that we suffer > , they think. Yet that is impossible. Saint-Elme, too, is overwhelmed by bombings, by columns of refugees and fleeing soldiers, by the German occupation. The population stubbornly resists. On the other hand, the war will pass, we will pass, but there will always be these simple, innocent pleasures: the coolness of the air, the sun, a red apple, a fire burning in winter, a woman, children, everyday life... the roar, the din of wars will eventually fade away > . It is a vain hope: once the first great slaughter is over, another follows, even more terrible. War was awaited as a man awaits death. He knows he cannot escape it; he merely pleads for a reprieve > . It is the Second World War. This time it is Guy, the son of Pierre and Agnes, who is called up to the front. During a leave, Rose, Guy's wife, announces to him that she is expecting a child: this war is horrible... No, don’t laugh. I’m a woman, I’m childish. But what do you expect? I see things as a woman. (...) Do you remember the book you had me read, (...) a military commander is ironic because the man he sent to his death has a wife waiting for him at home, with the lamp lit on the table and flowers on the tablecloth, and clean sheets on the bed? But she is the one who is right, and I, I....(...) I am very happy, he repeated without looking at her, with a strange shyness, very, very happy. (...) It was a feeling of triumph. Ah, you mock me, but I mock you too. (...) You want to destroy me, and I live! You want to rob me of all hope? Look, I marry, I love, I rejoice, I have a child! And the more you vent your fury upon me, the more stubborn I will be on my part! > By many, the novel is viewed as the story of a provincial bourgeois family during the two world wars. It is a reductive approach to a book that speaks of how feelings—real ones—withstand every tempest and allow human beings to overcome any disaster. Pierre and Agnes continually seek each other out, drift apart, and reunite; there is perhaps not the passion one might expect, but rather a profound tenderness. In the novel’s conclusion, Agnes finds her husband again after a long and arduous journey through the war. He is alive; he is safe. She stopped at the doorway, seized by such a trembling that she could go no further. He seemed to sense her presence. He walked toward her: Is it you? My God, at last it's you!, he said. Everyone was watching them. They kissed fleetingly, awkwardly. No kiss, no embrace could express the joy of their hearts". Is it a bourgeois story? Perhaps, but it expresses the strength that enables survival and rebuilding after the most appalling disasters. It shows how a woman, with her sensitivity and gentleness, views one of man’s most absurd follies: war. One can speak of death without being captivated by it: a lesson for our own time, traversed by so much violence, both real and narrated. Why read it? It is a masterpiece, for its splendid writing.

The book is autobiographical in nature and historically set in the early twentieth century. The protagonist, still a girl, is raped by a young man whom she later marries and with whom she has a child. She lives with her husband in a small provincial town, where she strives to abide by social conventions that dictate a woman be confined to the home, in total dependence on man. When her husband loses his job, the couple relocates to Rome, where the protagonist begins writing for a literary journal, makes herself known in cultural circles and within the feminist movement, and cultivates a broad network of friendships—among them a singular intellectual with whom she becomes fascinated. The husband himself is attracted to one of his wife's colleagues, and thus traditional social values begin, in a sense, to shatter. The husband, however, finds the opportunity to return to work in the small provincial town, and the protagonist once again finds herself locked within domestic walls, despite having awakened to the ideals of the feminist movement, to her own literary abilities, and, above all, to the fact that she no longer loves—and can no longer endure—her husband. The crisis erupts, turning into a tragedy for the woman, as she knows that should she decide to leave her husband, she will lose her son. Yet she resolves to move to Milan, enduring an agonizing separation from her child. With great discernment, the author titled the book *Una donna*, because, beyond its autobiographical dimensions, it chronicles woman's emancipation and, above all, the spiritual conflicts that engulf her on a path that runs counter to the maternal role. "It struck me as strange," writes the author, recounting a parliamentary debate, > inconceivable that educated people attached so little importance to the social problem of love. Not that men were unconcerned with woman; on the contrary, this seemed to be their principal concern, or nearly so. Poets and novelists continued to rehearse the eternal duet and trio, with sentimental complications and sensual perversions. No one had been able to create a great figure of a woman . And this is the premise of the book: to narrate the realm of male-female relations as seen by woman. In this sense, the novel deals not so much with the social emancipation of woman as with her role within the couple's relationship. Its contemporary relevance lies precisely here: the great social revolution that shattered the nineteenth-century social fabric is woman's autonomy from husband and children, even if this autonomy is subsequently circumscribed by woman's acceptance of male benchmarks in the workplace and, more broadly, in politics. There are four fundamental themes in the novel: the rupture of the dependent relationship with man in order to construct a different relationship with the other. > How can she become a woman, if her relatives surrender her—unaware, weak, incomplete—to a man who does not receive her as his equal; who uses her as a piece of property; who gives her children with whom he leaves her alone, while he fulfills his social duties, so that she may continue to play with trifles as in childhood? and further > between the two phases of female life, between the virgin and the mother, stands a monstrous, unnatural being, created by a bestial male egoism: and she avenges herself, unwittingly. Here is the crisis of the struggle of the sexes. The naive, dreaming virgin finds in her bridegroom a sorrowful heart and withered senses: made a woman and experienced, she understands how her love was forestalled by a brutal initiation. Between the two, the intruder often returns, and the mere memory degrades their kiss ;eroticism, namely the pursuit of pleasure, including physical pleasure, in the relationship with man. > He would enter the dark room, tired or irritated, light the lamp, move about without looking to see if I was asleep. Then, my eyes were shut, and I would feel a heavy mass stretch out beside me; in the silence a few words, meant to express passion, ecstasy; and I was in his power.... This is my life. To be used as a thing of pleasure, to feel my innermost substance bound. And to see days follow nights, one after the other, without end ;the crisis of motherhood as both a bond and a prison for woman’s autonomy, but above all the depiction of the harrowing conflict ignited by two opposing imperatives: love for one’s children and the pursuit of a full and complete life. > Why in motherhood do we worship sacrifice? Whence has this inhuman idea of maternal immolation descended upon us?... It is a monstrous chain... What if, once and for all, the fatal chain were broken, and a mother did not suppress the woman within herself, and a child learned from her life an example of dignity? . the pursuit of truth, which transcends the hypocrisy, ambiguity, and deceit of a society capable of accepting anything so long as it is not spoken or done openly, in the light of day; and all this even at the expense of the relationship with her son, opening a lacerating conflict. > To leave, to leave forever. Never again to relapse into lies. For my son even more than for myself! To suffer everything—his absence, his oblivion—to die, but never to feel disgust at myself, never to lie to the child... This was the dreadful dilemma. If I left, he would be an orphan. If I stayed? A debasing example; he, too, would grow up between crime and madness . I do not know for what reason, after an initial great success, this book was cast aside in Italian literature, accused of aestheticism and sentimentality. Criticisms were even leveled against its excessive fidelity to reality, to the author's actual lived experiences. Pirandello himself believed that the novel should have concluded with the protagonist departing with her son: talk about a happy ending! The novel exhibits lapses in style, at times overly lyrical and emphatic, and in narrative pacing, especially in the section dealing with life in Rome. It is nevertheless a profoundly relevant book, precisely because it brings to light the figure of woman as an individual, in her expectations and her contradictions, demonstrating how the quest for an autonomous female role generates harrowing conflicts of great depth and complexity: in particular, the relationship with motherhood and children. It would do well for this book to be read—indeed, learned by heart—by people like Buttiglione, who presume to accuse women of superficiality and hedonism merely because they seek to claim a fully realized role as individuals.

In upper-bourgeois Turin, a crime is committed: a former Romanian prostitute, married to a wealthy banker, is found strangled. It is later revealed that she was killed by two thugs, hired by the banker's "dear" friend, jealous and bent on revenge after being rejected. The narrative unfolds through the accounts of women involved in one way or another in the crime: the caretaker who discovered the body, a barmaid who was present at the scene of the crime, a volunteer, a female carabiniere, a journalist, the daughter, and the banker’s dear friend. A series of female portraits takes shape, complete with their family histories, their loves, and their ideas. The book is thoroughly enjoyable, the pacing is consistently brisk, and the prose is at once elegant and simple. One senses formidable craftsmanship, yet it lacks vigor. The characters remain in the background, the plot develops slowly, devoid of plot twists, only to draw to a predictable close.

Fridolin and Albertine are a couple belonging to the solid, respectable bourgeoisie. Their union is founded on "a perfect interpenetration of feelings and ideas." Yet, a masked ball is all it takes—where both had been courted, he "with insinuating kindness," she > at first fascinated and then suddenly offended... with an insolent swearword , for them to be brushed by, > and not for the first time, a shadow of adventure, of freedom and of danger . From this insignificant prelude arise the hint, the desire, the possibility of a second life, made of transgressions, voluptuous secrets, daring acts, and even cruelty. Fridolin, a physician by profession, must visit a patient in the evening. During the night, seized by a restlessness unpredictable in so measured a man, he is gratified by a daughter’s declaration of love at her father’s bedside, is on the verge of brawling like a schoolboy with a gang of drunken students, finds himself in a disreputable neighborhood and accepts the invitations of a young prostitute, and finally attends an extraordinary gathering. Men, dressed in "festive costumes as white, blue, and red cavaliers," dance with women, > their head, forehead, and neck draped in dark veils, small black lace masks over their faces, but otherwise entirely naked . At first the scene is austere. Then the men rush > all toward the women, who received them with furious, almost wicked laughter . > The ineffable pleasure of the sight transformed within him into an almost unbearable torment of desire , but Fridolin is soon discovered. He is an intruder; he would be punished were it not for a lady stepping forward, naked but veiled, who declares she will "redeem" him, assuming the consequences of her act. He is safe and returns home. Albertine is fast asleep, but, upon his arrival, awakens with a shrill, sinister laugh. It is the conclusion of a dream in which Albertine imagines being amid "an infinite sea of nakedness" and witnessing the torture of Fridolin, "without feeling pity or horror, with absolute detachment": right up to the murder of her husband, during which > I was tempted (said Albertine) to mock you. to laugh in your face , to wish "that you could at least hear my laughter while they crucified you." Fridolin is shaken and, after entertaining the fleeting notion of "beginning a new life under another guise," resolves to take revenge on his wife by somehow seeing the night's adventures through to the end. But retracing his steps proves disappointing and concludes at the morgue with the sight of the lady's corpse—the one who saved him, and who was likely poisoned as punishment. > A stranger, an unknown woman never met before... represented nothing to him, nor could represent anything other than the pale corpse of the previous night, irrevocably destined for decomposition . "No dream is entirely a dream," just as, > the reality of a night, and indeed not even that of an entire human life, does not signify, at the same time, its deepest truth . A part of ourselves is, therefore, dark, pierced only with difficulty in reality, yet more readily knowable through fantasy, in dreams. This concept, the central thread of the novel, can bear two meanings. The first is comforting, albeit limiting, and reflects what Lorenzo the Magnificent states so well in a sonnet: > O Love, too envious of my bliss, let me at least be happy in sleep . The second meaning is more unsettling and leads back to the fact that each of us assumes that > the dwelling place of one's own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him (Teju Cole, *Open City*). We do not rationally accept what we truly are because we would have to acknowledge that we are not heroes. It is no coincidence that in the novel Fridolin does not go all the way, even though he would like to: he does not have sexual intercourse, for example, with the young prostitute, just as he would like, as a nobleman, to refuse the lady's sacrifice. Albertine, on the other hand, whose second life unfolds only in dreams, is free to give unbridled rein to her lasciviousness and her longing for transgression (she, married young and still a virgin), and to display coarsely the contempt and rancor toward her husband, rationally repressed. The novel's flaw lies in the sluggishness of the plot, which could be encompassed in a few pages, but which the writer instead drags on with pedantry. In fewer than a hundred pages, he manages to make the story tedious and prolix. Why not read it? It is pointless.

> He wears old boots, one gaping open at the toe, like a toothless grin. (...) But ultimately nobody sees him, because in Milan, even with the Universal Exposition and its status as the center of the world, a homeless man pushing a cart filled with his life is merely part of the landscape, and thus invisible . With this image of commonplace social indifference, the novel held out the promise of a Noir with a strong social imprint; especially when paired with another hallmark of Milan as "capital of the world": the world of television and major annual trade fairs, such as the Salone del Mobile. The protagonist, Carlo Monterossi, is a famous producer of a television show that even he despises; he lives in a splendid apartment with an efficient, protective housekeeper: it is a fake, superficial life that could go on forever, comfortable amid parties, fleeting affairs, and self-pity. Until everything is upended. At the end of a party, he finds a Japanese man in his home, dazed and terrified. Who is he? What is he doing in his house? And why is he murdered, and Monterossi's fine residence ransacked? It is from this premise that a Noir sets off, bogged down by an entangled and redundant plot featuring everything except the essential ingredient: suspense. Like a grand mélange of Simenon and De Cataldo (see the citation of *Romanzo Criminale* on this site), we have police intrigue, the secret services, an alienated yet sharp inspector, the cynical, wheeling-and-dealing backdrop of the "Milano da bere," marginalization, illegal immigration, and finally—why not?—even love. In short, it is a miscellany, fortunately seasoned with frequent Bob Dylan quotations steeped in a melancholy romanticism, as in these lines: > In the early morning rain with a dollar in hand / An aching in the heart and pockets full of sand / I am far away from home and I miss my only love so much . The narrative style is dynamic, alternating effective descriptions with tight, rapid-fire dialogue; yet narrative fluency is undermined by the constant entrance and exit of various characters—tiresome and confusing in its repetition—and by the recurrent psychological introspection devoted to Carlo, who slowly evolves from a frivolous dandy into a "real" man. It is, perhaps, an attempt to introduce an inner transformation in the character: a shift that remains unresolved because it is never fully explored, reducing it to a mere literary device. The writing is elegantly simple; it deserved a sturdier, better-constructed story. Why not read it? It is prolix—the worst possible flaw for a Noir.

The figure of Dracula has spawned a literary and cinematographic output that has exalted its horrific aspects, thereby distorting the complexity of Stoker's novel. The opening of the narrative reflects the preconceived notion we have of Dracula’s story. Jonathan Harker, a young real estate solicitor, travels to the Carpathians to conclude the sale of a property to Count Dracula, who intends to move to London. Much like in Conrad’s *Heart of Darkness*, the journey through these largely uncharted mountains is an immersion into the unknown of the human consciousness—one that the young Jonathan struggles to accept. One need only consider the physiognomic description, so dear to nineteenth-century anthropologists, of Dracula’s face: > had a very marked, very marked, aquiline face, with a thin and prominently protruding nose and particularly arched nostrils. (...) The eyebrows were exceptionally massive, almost meeting over the nose.(...) The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth . With mounting dread, young Jonathan realizes he is caught in a nightmare, trapped inside a castle where he is a prisoner and could fall prey to the bloodlust of Dracula and four female vampires. Jonathan miraculously manages to escape (it is not clear how, and narrative gaps of this sort are frequent throughout the novel). The narrative then shifts to England with an opening reminiscent of Jane Austen. Mina, Jonathan’s bride-to-be, meets Lucy, who "looked sweeter and lovelier than ever": what follows is an idyllic description of the English countryside. The reader is initially taken aback, but then Stoker deftly prepares us for Dracula’s arrival aboard a phantom schooner and the transformation of the charming Lucy. It is difficult to fathom what is taking place; it is something inexplicable to a mindset steeped in scientism and rationalism. The mystery will be unraveled by a Dutch scientist summoned to the rescue by one of his disciples, a psychiatrist and friend of Lucy’s. Slowly yet stubbornly, the professor realizes that Count Dracula requires blood to secure his immortality and has come to London to create new vampires, thereby conquering the world. The professor also discerns the weaknesses of Dracula and vampires in general: their power exists only by night, by day they lie in a coffin, and they recoil before the Cross and the Host. To rid oneself of vampires, one must drive a stake through their heart and decapitate them. The group attempts to save Lucy. In a dramatic scene that alone justifies reading the book, Lucy—clutching at night a child whose blood she has drained—seeks refuge in her tomb, not before attempting to seduce her fiancé in order to turn him into a vampire as well. It will fall to the professor to stop her, and to the fiancé—at first incredulous, then devastated—to pierce her heart, thereby saving the girl's soul. The message is unmistakable: true love demands an extreme act, and what ultimately matters is the spirit, the Good that must be shielded from Evil. From this moment on, it becomes an all-out battle between the cohesive band of friends, led by the professor, and Count Dracula. The protagonist of this clash is Mina, Jonathan’s wife, who also falls prey to Dracula and runs the risk of becoming a vampire like her friend. It will be Mina’s determination, coupled with her resolute rational vision, that guides the group to their foregone victory—for now. The novel is read in a single breath; the episodes follow one another at a pace that is not always relentless, interspersed as they are by lengthy disquisitions from the professor—a pivotal figure in the plot, yet far too predictable in his erudition. The reader remains captivated by the gloomy atmosphere and by the secondary characters who are, in truth, central to the narrative, Mina in particular. As the story unfolds, Dracula recedes ever further into the background: a terrifying monster, yet "childish" in his reasoning and thus easily predictable in his conduct (notwithstanding everything, we Europeans remain superior from an ethical and rational standpoint). One can identify three narrative strands: the Gothic imprint typical of the nineteenth-century English novel, with its penchant for the exotic, the mysterious, and the gory; the reflection on a science that must stand ready to accept the incomprehensible and reckon with religion; and finally, friendship and love, seen not merely through a romantic lens, but as forces capable of driving human beings to fight and sacrifice themselves. Mention must be made of the narrative structure. It is built upon the accounts of the various protagonists through diaries and letters. The narrative 'I' shifts continuously, thus affording insight into different perspectives: the psychiatrist friend who can scarcely believe what is occurring and, for much of the novel, accepts events out of deference to the professor; Jonathan, who manages to leave a record of his journey into the Carpathians and subsequently expresses his love for Mina by keeping her vampiric impulses in check, preparing himself for the ultimate sacrifice—namely, driving a stake through her heart; and finally Mina, who fights desperately to avoid turning into a vampire, aiding the group by accepting a subordinate female role (she types up her husband's journals to make them available to the circle), ever anxious not to become an unwitting conduit of information for Dracula. Mina’s reasoning is subtle (astounding for a woman, remarks the professor!): she weighs the various alternative routes Dracula might take to return to his castle to find sanctuary; in doing so, she anticipates the monster’s moves—a splendid display of strategic thinking! As so often happens, multi-authored narration bogs down the narrative momentum, rendering it at times repetitive and redundant. Why read it? Compelling and evocative.

Thiongʼo is a Kenyan writer, and in this book he recounts his youth in 1950s Kenya, torn apart by ruthless British repression. It is not a political or historical text, although references to figures and events in the history of the African nation are numerous. > Despite my dashed hopes, the events, even the arrival of British battalions, were largely abstract, happening in a misty land as far away as a story in a distant setting alternating between dreams and nightmares . And indeed, amid dramatic events and social upheavals, the young Thiongʼo pursues a stubborn desire for schooling and education, leading him from the seemingly sealed fate of a peasant to that of a writer. This is the profound core of the book: it is possible to keep dreams alive even in times of war. Thiongʼo was born into a typical Kikuyu family. His father is a small landowner with four wives and many children. The portrayal of this community, with its multitude of brothers and sisters, is the finest part of the book. The author offers a vivid, affectionate representation, rich in memory and steeped in nostalgia. It is a happy childhood anchored by a cornerstone, his mother, who wishes for her son to “always seek the best, whatever the difficulties and obstacles.” And it is by listening to peasant tales and songs that the child “begins to hear the music in words,” the magic of choice, arrangement, cadence—everything that makes a story so beautiful and endures so long in memory. Thiongʼo falls in love with words, both written and spoken, and from that moment on, his destiny is sealed. Family upheavals and national events leave a deep mark on the boy’s adolescence: his mother is repudiated by his father, the extended family disintegrates, and British repression brings death, injustice, and devastation. The educational path itself is fraught with obstacles, as schools must often shut down or conform to British dictates, which oppose the cultural advancement of the local population. In spite of everything, the boy masters English, even having to learn it from an absurd textbook describing two Oxford boys discovering London. He knows everything about the British capital and little to nothing about his own country! He devours the great classics of English and world literature, memorizes *Treasure Island*, and it is precisely thanks to this passion for Stevenson’s great novel that he brilliantly passes the entrance exam for secondary school. He is admitted to one of the finest educational institutions in Kenya. The entire community shares in the boy’s triumph, contributing collectively to pay his tuition and provide the young Thiongʼo with the necessary school kit. Indeed, everyone knows full well that > in our times, education and schooling are the path to bettering men and women . The narrative unfolds unevenly. The portrayal of childhood, of the large paternal family, as well as several observations on the school environment, are lively and engaging. The author holds them vividly in his memory and relishes returning to them. When he shifts to recounting the events of the nation—the independence struggle, the British repression—even when narrating dramatic episodes in which he was personally involved, the prose turns cold, resembling a historian’s report, a bystander’s chronicle. The narrative grows ponderous, loses its vitality, and leaves the reader bewildered by events and figures far removed from their familiarity. Nor, on the other hand, does a clear picture emerge of the events leading to independence, for everything remains fragmented, ill-defined, as though the author himself were incapable of reconstructing his country’s history. The English is textbook-like, elegant and precise, yet—at least on the surface—concedes nothing, in either vocabulary or syntactic construction, to the author’s native tongue. And this, too, contributes to an overarching impression of sterility and abstraction. Why read it? The first part of the book offers a highly interesting and intriguing glimpse into Kikuyu society.

> For ten years now I had been living up here in Vallorgàna alone, in the villa of my ancestors. (...) I was certain that I found myself in the best fortune I could desire. Nothing of importance occurred in my days. Nothing complex entangled my gaze. No disruption in daily life. No decision to hinder my stride . Such is the opening of the tale of the man we will come to know only as the Duke. Heir to an ancient noble family, the Cimamonte counts, the Duke belongs to the culture of the few, > that of those who, by means and tradition, live in a world of thoughts from which the majority are excluded . The Duke lives, or would like to live, on an island, formed by his villa and Vallorgàna. Two events intervene to shatter this "terrifying" isolation. Mario Fastrèda, the acknowledged head of the small community, has the trees cut down in a woodland owned by the Duke; it is a petty transgression, one that could be let pass, were it not that the Duke discovers an ancient codex recounting the history of the Cimamontes. Reading the deeds of his ancestors, the chronicle of Cimamonte abuse and violence, he realizes that the feuds were "fatuous and pretentious," yet for a nobleman they were instead "duties of respect," worthy of the utmost attention. And it is as if a dragon, dormant for centuries, > were rising up from the earth, from roots stretching taut, from rubble crumbling, from crusts breaking apart . A war begins between the Duke and Fastrèda; it is dictated by "a profound past, (...) the fruit of the ancient order of above and below." For page after page, the author retraces the events of this senseless feud, incomprehensible from a rational point of view, yet rooted in ancestral hatred. It is the setting that lends fascination to the story: the Mountain towering over the village like a sacred monolith, the woods, looming and menacing, advancing at the expense of the meadows, the small community, growing ever older and desperately anchored to traditions, grudges, and legends, and finally mysterious, ancient omens, such as the flight of a white-winged crow. We are not before Dino Buzzati's magical forest (see *Il segreto del bosco vecchio* reviewed on this site); Melchiorre is a historian of trees and of their land, and he knows full well that it is not true that "woods and mountains are a mirror of virtue," as naive naturalistic mythology would have it. Fortunately, the narrative of the feud is interrupted by Maria; against hatred, love supervenes. "It was an enchantment of an extraordinarily physical nature, entirely directed toward the body:" sweeping and utterly distinct, untamed, mercurial, irreverent, and with something, moreover, inexplicably wild." But Maria is the niece of Fastrèda, the enemy. The autumn wind, "dancing and whispering, showed me in its mirror shreds of myself and fragments of other things, and finally, embracing a beech stump, delivered a lash and began to whisper more insistently. It asked me whether I wanted to lose Maria or keep her. (...) Whether I was intoxicated by her body alone or whether in her I had grasped the inexpressible > . It is a dilemma that the Duke would probably not have been able to resolve on his own. First, a violent storm drives him from Vallorgàna, instilling in him a disillusionment with the past, the looming history of his ancestors; he no longer wishes to return to the village, he wishes to abandon the villa to ruin. He returns to take inventory of the things to be sold, encounters Maria, and through her brown eyes discovers this rare and yet raw and yet enclosed place, which can open only by braving steep slopes and ascents, skirting cliffs of woods.... > He realizes he belongs to Vallorgàna not by the will of his ancestors, but because this is his place, whose history towers over and transcends that of individuals. When he tells Maria, the alluring Maria replies: perhaps > . But why so much agonizing? Was it not enough to tell her that he was staying because he loved her? Estrangement, fury, love, disenchantment, and enchantment are the cadences of a great novel, unfolding within a confined setting over which looms the history of men and nature—a history that from remote past "continually risks becoming" present past." In the end, it will be the present that triumphs, but this long-awaited conclusion is reached only after many pages, numerous philosophical reflections, and frequent digressions. The plot loses momentum; at times it resembles a *zibaldone* in which the author sought to say too much about his own world at the expense of the narrative and the characters. What makes reading it a pleasure is the prose, rich in adjectives that never hinder the fluid cadence of the words, offering instead an enjoyable sense of the baroque. Why read it? Enjoyable, captivating, even if long.

The setting is India and the cruel Thugs, who have abducted Tremal-Naik’s daughter to make her the “virgin of the pagoda” in service to the ruthless deity, Kali. Sandokan and Yanez set out to rescue the young girl, embarking on an expedition that leads them into the Ganges Delta—a swampy expanse infested with ferocious beasts and plagued by cholera—down into the subterranean lairs inhabited by the Thugs, and all the way to Delhi at the height of the clash between Indians and the British during the 1857 uprising. All the quintessential ingredients of Salgari’s major novels are present: the hostile environment, treachery, Sandokan’s valor and strength, and the enduring themes of friendship and honor. Yet a theme emerges with striking force—one often latent in Salgari’s fiction, though never fully articulated: that of colonialism and the conqueror’s brutality toward the Indian people. From this standpoint, Sandokan assumes an ambiguous posture: he naturally does not side with the British, even though he owes his survival to a British army safe-conduct and his friendship with a French officer; yet neither does he champion the insurgents, remaining indifferent to the wholesale slaughter of women and children. > Terrifying screams rose from every street, accompanied by tremendous volleys... Let us flee as well, said Sandokan . The Tiger of Mompracem is not the *Black Corsair*: he remains a figure confined to his own pirate sphere, bound to ties of personal friendship that never mature into a genuine political consciousness. He lingers, as it were, suspended between hostility toward the oppressor and the conviction that his individual struggle can be resolved on his own, alongside his companions. It is paradoxical that the Tiger of India, the cruel Suyodhama—leader of the Thugs, ultimately slain by Sandokan—feels the cause of the Indian subcontinent’s independence far more acutely than the pirate of Mompracem, valiant and honorable though the latter may be. Salgari’s own perspective seems quite different, as he concludes the novel with a note of admiration for the leader of the rebels: > by now the insurrection was subdued, and only the brave Tantia Topi, with the beautiful and proud Rani of Jhansie, and a handful of valiant men, still held high the banner of freedom, amid the thick jungles and numerous forests of Bundelkund . Why did he never write a novel about this extraordinary figure?

We find ourselves in Germany in the years immediately following the Second World War. The wounds of war are still palpable, physical and psychological: destruction, destitution, memories of the conflict’s horrors, and no hope for the future. Fred, a telephone operator at the city’s archbishopric, has abandoned the family home where his wife, Kate, and their children live, after catching himself venting his rage on the children, beating them. He can, in fact, no longer endure the cramped misery and desolation of the single room in which they live. Given over to drink, he roams the city and arranges clandestine encounters with his wife in squalid hotel rooms, in parks, and amidst abandoned courtyards. The story is indeed constructed around one of these meetings, through the alternating narration of Fred and Kate. In this way, it becomes possible to grasp the two different points of view: Fred’s despair and Kate’s exhaustion. Despite their mutual love, they are now divided by the different ways in which they have responded to hardship. Kate is sustained by a profound devoutness, grounded in a direct relationship with God. > God alone seemed to remain with me in that malaise that overwhelmed my heart, filled my veins, circulated within me like my own blood..... I was seized by a great indifference toward them all, and nothing remained with me but the word of God . In Fred, religion offers no comfort, but rather further proof of the falsity and vacuity that govern the world; for him, nothing remains but a dark affliction, a somber existential despair, a monotonous succession of tavern visits, hurried meals, and the desperate hunt for money, often to be spent on drink. Are they by now two strangers, or is love stronger than desolation? The novel’s conclusion leans toward the former outcome. In several remarkably powerful pages, the author brilliantly renders the sense of a growing estrangement. After a night during which Kate has told Fred of her intention to leave him, the man, locked in a mute resignation and an agonizing passivity, walks aimlessly and catches sight of a woman > no longer young, but beautiful, I could see her legs, the green skirt, the worn brown jacket, I could see the green hat, but above all the sad and gentle profile..... and suddenly I knew that it was Kate. Then she seemed a stranger to me once more..... it was she, but she was different from how I remembered her.... so we walked on, one behind the other, both thinking of the children, and I did not have the courage to catch up with her, to speak to her . The novel has been interpreted in various ways: an erotic tale, where the reader waits in suspense for the love scene between husband and wife, turned once again into clandestine lovers; a meditation on the loss of meaning in religion and, more broadly, of values after a war; the description of a battered city, where survivors wander in an endless struggle to stay alive, and thus the representation of a mutilated Germany. Toward this latter interpretation points a narrative inextricably fused with madness, visions, noises, advertisements, and the popular songs of the metropolis where the protagonists live. To me, however, it seems that the novel should be read in the simplest way. It is a love story that does not, despite everything, survive destitution, because Fred and Kate react with differing moral strength to their own desolation and to that of society. Kate still looks to the future despite a deep-seated malaise; Fred allows himself to be dragged along, with self-pitying indulgence, in an attitude of victimhood and self-destruction. The narrative plot, slender and sparse, is sustained by an exceptionally effective style. The spare yet incisive prose and the stripped-down syntactic structure are clear proof of how a complex narrative can be crafted without getting lost in linguistic redundancy. Why read it? It remains intensely relevant, capturing as it does the sense of disorientation before a society that is dissolving, while no traces of the emerging one can yet be seen.

*The Shadow of the Sun* is a collection of notes from journeys across Africa spanning thirty years: from the independence of the continent to its more recent upheavals, such as the Rwandan genocide. The book encompasses both the nature of an essay and that of a memoir of lived experience, profoundly engaging for the author. A penniless reporter for an equally cash-strapped Warsaw daily, Kapuściński falls ill with tuberculosis and explains to the doctor that he cannot return home: “The dream of my life, working in Africa, would have vanished forever.” From this passion for travel and for Africa begins a journey across the continent: from Ghana on the west coast to the island of Zanzibar in the east, through Sub-Saharan and tropical Africa, all the way to the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes. The reader skips along, and > everything blurs, overlaps, fades. (...) Often our memory is so saturated with names of localities, regions, and countries that we can no longer associate them with an image, a view, a landscape, an episode, or a face. (...) World unity, so difficult to achieve in practical reality, comes into being in our brains, in their layers of lost and confused memory . No differently from the superficial businessman who knows only the world's airports, fine restaurants, and luxury hotels, the inquisitive reporter risks his life to deliver the very same portrait: an Africa unchanged across time and space, and ever devoid of hope, because all corners of the vast continent are united “by the same misfortune, the same fate, and the same uncertainty.” To be sure, Kapuściński raises his voice loud and clear against “the international of predatory rabble,” just as he feels part of the “tormented life, the painful vegetating forever on the brink of death” of an oppressed and violated people, and for that reason perpetually in exile. Yet, after so many years on the road, the splendid concluding chapter, bearing the evocative and elusive title “In the Shade of a Tree, in Africa,” leaves us with a message of bitter resignation. Slavery, rapacious and cruel colonialism, the greed of ruling elites, desertification and environmental plunder, and the death and displacement of entire populations have destroyed the “shade of the tree” under which stories and traditions were once handed down: without this shade, the African > would lose every notion and even the memory of his yesterday, becoming people without a past, that is to say, nobody. Those men would lose everything that united them, scattering each on his own way, alone. Africa spans an area of 30.37 million square kilometers—large enough to contain the United States, China, India, Europe, and several other nations. It has 54 states and 1,500 languages. One cannot help but wonder why we persist in viewing Africa as a monolith, never attempting to grasp its diversity, and with it the changes and potential of this great continent. However well-meaning and observant, Kapuściński falls into the same Eurocentric and exoticizing trap that has long characterized relations between the West and Africa. From this, and not merely from the disjointed structure of the book (travel notes left as they were, without an overarching narrative), arises a sense of repetitiveness: each account seems identical to the last, personal encounters and singular stories rarely break through, while the critical assessments—agreeable though they may be—feel prepackaged. In *Orientalism* > Edward Said argued that the West sees the Orient as a mirror of itself: it seeks what it fantasizes the Orient to be (a cherished idea, sedimented across its history) without genuinely studying the peoples and cultures that make up the Orient of today; through this very same process, we view Africa: it is always *Heart of Darkness*", a land vibrant and fascinating, to be sure, but forever detached from modernity and consequently doomed to subjugation, to endure unspeakable suffering from which it cannot escape. Why read it? It is worth it for the final chapter.

We are in Maine in 1934: in the wake of the Great Depression, a family has had to leave the city and relocate to the foot of a mountain, on the edge of the forest, adapting to life in an environment entirely foreign to their urban past. The mother confesses to her daughter Ellie, still an adolescent: > she looked at her ruined hands. I feel like a stranger in this new skin. I left behind too much of who I had always been. Ellie, by contrast, is fascinated by this new life; she wants to understand and adapt. In this she has been helped by her father, a vital anchor for the young girl. > This bond with my father and the wilderness drove a wedge between me and my mother, and especially my sister, because both seemed to think that I had somehow betrayed them by feeling happy when they were not. To understand what the "mountain’s echo" represents for the girl, one can point to the episode of her encounter with the bear. > But then I made the mistake of reading, in his eyes, that primitive quality I so admired. Of sensing, in him, a love for things I loved: lying in a meadow with the grass growing tall all around, hiding from everything except the sky and swarms of bees, heavy with flower pollen, nodding toward me (a splendid turn of phrase!) bobbing the way bees fly. Or the pink of the sunset. Or the clear whisper of a wood thrush. We are in the throes of a full romantic idealization of nature! In Ellie, contradictory feelings coexist: an aching loneliness because she no longer feels part of the family, and a sense of freedom in an environment where she can roam, exploring the forest, learning to harvest honey, and doing practical chores under her father’s guidance. This precarious situation unravels when her father suffers a grave accident that leaves him in a coma. Ellie takes the blame upon herself, concealing the truth of what had happened: it was her little brother who, chasing a rabbit while the father was sawing a tree, caused the man to move, leading him to be struck by the falling trunk. > Part of me wanted to tell her that it was Samuel’s fault (the little brother), if the little boy could be blamed for anything. But when I thought of saying those words, I felt fragile and sad. (...) I decided that shifting the blame would be worse than shouldering it. If I had learned anything from the mountain, and from my father, it was that I would feel stronger and happier if I were able to face adversity and do it well. So I remained silent. And they took the silence for a confession. How will Ellie overcome the anguish that overwhelms her: the estrangement from her mother and sister, the sight of her paralyzed father, the strained relationship with her little brother, the arduous life in the wilderness, the material hardships of an impoverished and isolated family? She will do so by venturing into mysterious nature, uncovering its magical and salvific secrets. It is certainly a *bildungsroman*, though it must be said that Ellie appears to be a strong, resolute girl right from the outset. It is as if life’s hardships and the forces of nature merely brought out something Ellie already possessed. What weighs upon the entire narrative, rich in characters and adventures, is the banal depiction of a benign nature—the dream of an escape from urban and industrial life. It is too easy! The woods, the mountain, the wild animals are not friends, but primordial forces answering to the blind laws of the primitive world. Ellie ostensibly sets out to discover her new surroundings; in reality, the latter are merely a mirror of what we romantically daydream nature to be. To understand the novel’s limitations, one must turn to *Treasure Island* (see review on this site), where Jim faces dangers alone, evades the allure of evil—which exists regardless of what we might think—and in doing so truly comes of age. The writing is elegant, alternating tight dialogue with fine descriptions rich in musical and captivating phrasing. Across too protracted an expanse, the plot frays, grows prolix, and loses the sharpness of the opening chapters. Why not read it? It is banal.

Nicolai Lilin comes from Transnistria (a no man’s land between Moldova and Ukraine) and writes in Italian. He belongs to that cohort of immigrant authors who are making a significant contribution to the renewal of our literature, so often bloodless. And indeed, the novel overflows with energy, with a vitality and brutality barely kept in check by the canons and formative paths generated within the communities of origin, beyond and outside the State. The narrative opens with a few intense, harrowing pages. We are in Chechnya and the Russian soldiers are exhausted: “we kept going like water waves.... we fought always, always.” And precisely where respect for rules and hierarchy should be paramount, a soldier, > as soon as the captain turned his back... with an insolent look on his face, shot the prisoner in the head and chest. He was sleepy and tired, like all of us . There follow two long chapters, “The Hat and the Knife” and “When the Skin Speaks”, in which the author describes, with anthropological meticulousness, the rules of coexistence and the modes of communication of the Siberian criminal community, which had been forced to relocate from Siberia to Transnistria. A profound nostalgia for a world, whether real or merely envisioned, forcefully emerges: > I knew for certain that I was living through the death of our society, and so I tried to survive, passing through this great vortex of souls, of human stories, from which I drifted further away with each passing day . A narrative that still imparts a sense of security (just as in territory ruled by the mafia one feels protected from petty crime) is followed by two chapters in which the clash between gangs devolves into pure violence. In “The Day of My Birthday”, the protagonist, along with a friend, must deliver a message to a representative of another criminal community. It is a simple errand, yet it translates into clashes, fights, ambushes, all set against a degraded urban landscape abandoned to itself. And where coercion, promiscuity, and corruption prevail, as in “Juvenile Prison”, violence turns into moral, physical, and sexual subjugation. From the outset of the next chapter (the decisive one in the protagonist’s coming of age), one might expect a glimmer of hope, and perhaps of love. Ksjusa is a fragile autistic girl, protected by the Siberian community both as a woman and on account of her disability. Yet she falls victim to a gang rape, and the hunt for the rapists begins: a protracted chase through every district of the city leading up to an inexorable, bloody vengeance. Yet for the young protagonist, it is > impossible to feel peace. It was right to punish them for what they did, but by punishing them we didn't help Ksjusa. What still tortures me is her pain, against which all our justice proved useless . The epilogue is “a free fall”. It seems the protagonist has managed to carve out a different future for himself, outside the criminal community. Until, forcibly conscripted into the Russian army, he finds himself sucked into a new spiral of violence. Yet here is where one realizes that what is truly needed in life is a Siberian education. It is unclear how much of the novel is autobiographical and how much pure invention. Certain gang battles recall those recounted by other contemporary Russian authors, such as Elizarov in *The Librarian*, just as the sexual violence in the juvenile prison relies on common tropes of prison life, and some descriptions in this context are decidedly pornographic and overwrought. Yet whether fact or fiction matters little. The message is clear: the fragmentation of modern society, whose rules of coexistence seem increasingly rooted in kinship communities and clan logic rather than in state institutions. In this descent toward a medieval world, there are rare moments of serenity: the relationship with nature (the fishing scenes are the most evocative), camaraderie among peers, the connection to the wisdom of the elders, the adherence to rules and rituals. It is an anti-Enlightenment world that turns inward on itself. The painstaking description of the rules and the various criminal communities, the repetitiveness of episodes that ultimately become predictable, the deficiency in narrative pace and in character depth—characters who remain, at bottom, stereotypical and often indistinguishable—are all factors that make the reading tedious. One struggles to reach the end of the novel. Why read it? It prompts reflection on modern society, but it fails to captivate.

Eugenio is a well-known Italian set and costume designer living in Los Angeles. A phone call from Italy takes him back to the origins of his career and to the figure of Olga. Many years earlier, when he was still in Italy, Eugenio had had an affair with a friend of his wife, namely Olga: > petite, pretty, dark-haired, with fringe and kiss curls à la Louise Brooks (...) she had an elusive, ambiguous gaze . Eugenio loved his wife, an intelligent, cultured, and refined woman, yet he was captivated by the repetitive cadence of the encounters with his mistress: a long period of indifference, a furtive, silent, violent, swift coupling, and then indifference once more, as if nothing had happened. What is the appeal of a betrayal so barren of eroticism and sentiment? > Eugenio felt superior to Olga, (...) to the point of taking pleasure only if he risked—oh, with impunity!—the charade of pretending to be inferior and worshipping her as though she were truly his superior (...) (yet) Eugenio always knew that Olga was a wretched slave . It was the pleasure of deceiving himself, even if only for five minutes (the duration of the coupling), that was the trigger of Eugenio’s desire; he who, in his selfishness, relished the thought that Olga deluded herself into believing she was the mistress, knowing all the while that it was merely a game. Naturally, this was not the case: the woman had no desire to be the futile occasion for the man’s outsized ego, for a "double lie" perpetually identical to itself. > Eugenio never noticed, and found it convenient not to notice, or even suspect, that she too might possess a soul, might even, in the long run, begin to care for him . Olga fled, vanishing without a trace, yet she lingered in Eugenio’s fantasy: the aspiration of a subject woman who becomes sovereign for a few minutes. The novel resumes "in the present." Eugenio has returned to Italy to shoot a film, but his stay in Europe is nothing other than a search for Olga. And when he must travel to Barcelona, where the woman is rumored to live, Eugenio repeatedly walks down El Paseo de Gracia in the hope of crossing paths with Olga, who, > strangely, miraculously, would appear to him identical to how she had been fifteen years before: with her sleek helmet of hair à la Louise Brooks, her silly yet sly little face, her pouty smile . And he would have said to her, > with the greatest possible composure: Of course it is all over. But... but perhaps, we could try once more... just once . The backdrop is the marvelous yet hollow world of cinema. The author also develops a series of intrigues, intended to impart at least some narrative pace to a plot composed essentially of sensations and reflections. A primary layer of meaning in the novel lies in the depiction of transgression, all the more captivating the further removed it is from ordinary life. As the author observes, > long periods of abstinence (...). Then, a sudden, subtle awakening of desire, but, for a few days, merely a distracted reminder, a seemingly harmless memento. Finally, all at once, a restlessness that gave him no peace (...) And everything repeated itself more or less as it had the time before . There exists, moreover, a deeper, existential and philosophical key to the text, aptly expressed by the passage on the obsession with tiles. Eugenio sees the same pattern continually repeated across the bathroom tiles, yet with endless subtle variations. Viewing the tiles from different vantage points, two recurring figures emerge: the Bravo, who could be recognized > always in profile, his coarse, heavy hooked nose immediately visible, his cruel mouth, the piercing eye of a stalking beast; and the Soubrette, a small and graceful little face (...) with her delicate little mouth smiling in turn . The Soubrette was the Bravo reversed: the dominator can become the dominated, the violent the docile, and so forth; in varying circumstances, we can all be both at the same time. Already in *Lo Smeraldo*, a visionary novel, Soldati explored the theme of the double by resorting to the device of the dream. Do other worlds exist within us? In the more traditional *A cena col commendatore*, he returns to the complexity of the human soul: the mask behind which we hide is not an artifice, but an intrinsic part of consciousness. In these two novels, the narrative is sustained by the prose; in the former, D’Annunzian and lavishly imaginative; in the latter, simple and reminiscent of the nineteenth century. In this book, by contrast, the style is fractured, laborious, verbose, poorly sustained by a slender and inconclusive plot. Why avoid it? It does not do justice to Soldati the writer. It marks a decline in quality.

Renée is the concierge of an elegant Parisian apartment building, inhabited by well-to-do bourgeois families. Outwardly, she behaves like a typical concierge: obliging, reserved, and humble. In reality, Renée is a woman of vast culture and refined intellect: she reads high literature, takes an interest in philosophy, listens to fine music, and appreciates quality cinema. She never reveals these pursuits, preferring to live hidden, far from the “indifference that surrounds us,” like a hedgehog. In the same building lives Paloma, a young girl endowed with a keen critical spirit, an “absolute pitch for contradictions.” For two hundred pages, the novel develops along two parallel tracks: the life and reflections of Renée, often too steeped in intellectualism to captivate the reader, and the diary of Paloma, who depicts family life with the attitude of an angry adolescent already disillusioned with the world. Elegance—understood also as subtle irony, disdain for the unsightly, and the quest for beauty—characterizes the narratives of both characters, always delivered in the first-person singular: at times, it almost seems as though the novel is merely an opportunity for the author to assemble and present a series of philosophical and literary reflections, reducing the characters to mere vehicles of communication, devoid of a life of their own. The arrival in the building of a Japanese man and the fortuitous meeting between Renée and Paloma trigger a change in the characters’ lives as well as in the narrative pace. At the root of Renée’s peculiar behavior lies a family tragedy. At last, Renée manages to recount to Paloma the events that led to her sister’s death and her decision to become a “clandestine figure,” since > as I could no longer cease being what I was, I understood that my destiny was secrecy, I had to keep silent about who I was and never mingle with the other world . With this confession, Renée emerges from her hedgehog shell and begins to live, forging ties outside her social station with the wealthy Japanese man and the bourgeois adolescent. It is not, therefore, culture that dismantles social hierarchy, but rather the pursuit of spiritual affinities, of deeper commonalities. Yet just as Renée begins to live, she loses her life in a banal accident. At the moment of death, she feels the longing for a cup of tea, for performing once more a ritual forever identical to itself, shared by rich and poor alike, during which > silence falls, the wind howling outside can be heard, autumn leaves rustling and taking flight, the cat sleeps in a warm light. Time is sublimated . Is the life of the hedgehog, then, the best one? Of this book, one can say that it is very elegant, often rich in evocative ideas and reflections, yet devoid of life—almost an intellectual exercise. Why read it? It consists of a series of fragments that come together in the final part. The elegance of the style, the author’s consistently witty reflections, and the singularity of the situations make it possible to stay the course until the very end.

Upon picking up this novel by Grazia Deledda, one's mind immediately turns to *Canne al Vento* (see the review on this site), hoping to rediscover the same magical atmosphere of the Sardinian author’s masterpiece. The environmental and social context is the same; here too, pain is treated as destiny, life as a journey toward death, yet that living, magical, and indecipherable nature—the hallmark of *Canne al Vento*—is missing. Instead, the Sardinian landscape serves as a counterpoint to a human drama irremediably doomed from the outset. This is how the author describes the *tanca*, the land set aside for pasture. > The lush pastures, as spring drew to a close, took on a luminous, golden green: thistles opened their golden and purple blossoms, brambles flaunted their wild roses. (...) In certain places, the watercourse flowed among groves of elder trees, where the sun barely penetrated, forming mysterious green pools surrounded and intersected by rocks, against which the water broke murmuring . Petrarch’s verses seem to echo here, yet we are not in Provence; we are in harsh, savage, ancestral Sardinia. It may well be that the verdant, luminous *tanca* is not real, but rather a delirium of Elias Portolu, a way to bring solace to a restless soul. Unlike his brothers and his father, "short, sturdy, bearded, with bronzed faces and long black hair," Elias "was tall and slender, with an extremely pale, delicate, clean-shaven face." He has returned from the prisons of the Kingdom, and this experience has transformed him profoundly, physically and spiritually: > the long imprisonment had made his hands and face pallid, (...) his laugh was tired and fractured, his voice faint; (...) he looked like a woman dressed as a man. Furthermore, his language had taken on something peculiar, half Italian and half dialect, with curses that were entirely continental . In prison he learned to read and write; he brought back church books with him, which he studies in secret. "Confused visions" sway through his sleep. In his dreams, it seemed to him that > strange sheep with human faces leaped over the wall that enclosed the *tanca*; and he pursued them, panting . When a man comes toward him. It is Uncle Martinu, a sort of giant whom everyone calls the father of the forest. To him, still in his dream, Elias confesses that he is weak, that he can take no more. And with his mighty voice the giant tells him, "if you don't want trouble, go become a priest!" And it is to Uncle Martinu once again that Elias turns, no longer in a dream, when he realizes he has fallen in love with his future sister-in-law, the beautiful Maddalena; he rejects the old man's counsel to openly declare his love, fearing he might offend his brother, shatter a marriage arranged long ago by the families, terrified of scandal, lacking courage. But > unfailingly, Maddalena appeared to him in dreams. And they were dreams that troubled and painfully aroused him. Above all, the scene of the dance with Maddalena returned incessantly in his dreams, > for his shoulders, his waist, his hand retained intact the physical impression of Maddalena’s body and hand: and his mind, recollecting her words, lost itself once again in a vertigo of pleasure and anguish . His pusillanimity will be his undoing, and it will be up to Death to decide for him. Before the lifeless little body of the child had with Maddalena, he will feel "a tenuous veil of peace and almost joy descend," alone and free from all human passion. If we look beyond the Sardinian context, the figure of Elias is emblematic of those unable to break out of society’s constraints, of unwritten rules of which he is, in fact, a prisoner. How difficult it is to voice one's feelings and be authentic! Reaching perhaps beyond Grazia Deledda’s own intentions, there appear to be three worlds in the novel: the simple world of the common folk who accept death and suffering with resignation, and who would be ready to acknowledge the love between Elias and Maddalena; the hypocritical and superstitious world of religion, which represses feelings while tolerating petty carnal sins provided they remain buried beneath a blanket of silence; and the figure of the wild sage, who does not believe in God and urges courageous choices. It is an interpretation that would make the novel compelling, were it not engulfed by a melodramatic and penitential tone. Why not read it? Melodramatic and mawkish, a disappointment.

Emma is a young woman, determined, independent, but inclined “to think a little too well of herself.” She lives in a small English country town with her father: a frail widower, fearful of novelties and above all of being abandoned by his adored daughter. Then again, why marry? > If I were to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing! But I have never been in love; it is not in my way or in my nature; and I do not think I should. And, without love, I am convinced that I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine; (...) and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and only in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s . It is not merely pride and the desire to be mistress of herself; it is also her ideal of a husband: high integrity, adherence to truth and principles, contempt for deception and pettiness. Will she remain faithful to these criteria, so confidently asserted and lived? In part. The story begins with the decision of her governess, Mrs. Weston, to marry and leave the house where she had been in service for so long. While her father is distraught, for Emma it means losing the only person in whom she could confide, the only one who managed in some way to restrain the young woman’s temperament—sensitive, reflective, yet also headstrong and determined to impose herself upon others. There is also her brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley, who has known her since childhood, but with him it is a continuous bickering, a perpetual clash of differing perspectives. Emma meets Harriet Smith, with whom she strikes up an intense friendship. But if > Mrs. Weston was an object of respect, based on gratitude and esteem, Harriet would be loved as one to whom she could be useful. For Mrs. Weston there was nothing to be done; for Harriet, everything . Harriet possesses no dowry and comes from a low social class, but that is no reason she must demean herself by marrying just any suitor! With a healthy dose of presumption and recklessness, Emma persuades the docile Harriet not to marry Martin (a humble tenant farmer!) and to set her sights on the hand of Mr. Elton, the vicar of the small town. When Mr. Elton, rejected by Emma herself (why, then, was he the right husband for her friend?), marries a vain and shallow girl who nonetheless brings a handsome fortune, Emma consoles Harriet, pointing out to her that Elton was not such a reliable man after all. Two new characters appear: Jane, a beautiful but ailing young woman who comes to live with her aunt and whose only prospect is to become a governess in wealthy households; Frank, the son of Mrs. Weston’s husband, who resides with a rich and overbearing aunt. Emma attempts to befriend Jane (another young woman to manage?), but is somehow rebuffed and kept at a distance. During the few days he spends with his father, Frank manages to pay court first to Emma and then to Harriet. Although Emma, initially flattered and intrigued by the young man, senses that there is something false in Frank’s conduct, it seems Harriet’s turn has arrived—at least so Emma thinks, and she convinces her friend accordingly. In vain does Mr. Knightley warn her, pointing out Frank’s weak character, but once again Emma stubbornly disregards her friend’s far wiser judgment. It is precisely during one of these conversations, often punctilious and contentious, that a premonitory incident occurs. > With a slight movement, quite unlike ordinary friendship, (...) Mr. Knightley took her hand; whether she had not herself made the first motion she could not say; she might, perhaps, have rather offered it . Frank’s aunt dies, and the young man, freed from constraints, confesses that he was secretly engaged to Jane and that his alleged courtship of Emma and Harriet had merely been a ploy to divert attention from the true object of his affections. Hence the cause of Jane’s distress: the false position in which she found herself. Emma feels sorry for Harriet and realizes she was mistaken once again in her assessments, but she is deeply offended by the conduct toward Jane, who was forced to submit to deception through Frank’s lack of courage and dignity. On the other hand, > it might well be said that the world does not belong to woman; its rules are not hers . For Emma, there is a surprise. When she goes to inform Harriet of the affair, she discovers that her friend is in love with Mr. Knightley and is convinced that her feelings are reciprocated. Emma ought to be happy; why then does she feel a sense of pique, of subtle jealousy, of the loss of the beloved object? > What blindness, what madness had led her on! It struck her with the force of overwhelming misery! Emma discovers that she loves and has always loved her friend; great then is her joy when Mr. Knightley, at first diffidently and then with growing assurance, confesses that he loves her too and wishes to marry her. But is Harriet deceived once more? No matter: through a subterfuge, Emma dispatches her to London to stay with her sister, so as to get her out of the way; and then, when she must finally face her, she learns that Harriet had deceived her all along, having never stopped loving Martin, whom she had continued to see in spite of Emma. All ends well, but what remains of the independent and proud Emma? She will live with her father and Mr. Knightley, withdrawing into the domestic sphere typical of a woman. Even female friendships, particularly that with Harriet, will dwindle into mere superficial acquaintances; it is difficult to sustain them when one loves a man. It is a highly intricate novel, perhaps overly long and complex, in its plot as well as in its writing. The core remains female independence, with certain distinctive elements compared to the author’s other novels. While in her other books the setting—the small town, the early nineteenth-century petty bourgeoisie, the English countryside—serves as a backdrop, here it occupies the center of the narrative. One need only consider the second volume: the superficial conversations, the drawing-room gatherings, and the country outings portray a shallow, prudish society, intensely preoccupied with appearances and fortunes. It is like reading Marcel Proust’s *The Guermantes Way* and, as in this volume of the *Search*, the endless dialogues are equally tedious, verbose, and inconclusive. Another aspect that links the novel to Proust’s work is the theme of the discrepancy between what is imagined and reality. “Myself creating what I saw,” Mr. Knightley quotes at one point; and indeed Emma imagines situations that prove to be quite different from those spun by her fancy. Addressing Harriet, Emma exclaims, “Good God! how have I never seen her!” The story unfolds slowly, devoid of narrative pace, lacking in action. Dialogue predominates, frequently repetitive. Only intermittently are the characters explored in depth; they all revolve around Emma, yet without completing or explaining her. The syntax is extremely arduous and convoluted, as though the author wished to showcase her prowess in writing and her mastery of “cultivated” English. Why read it? It is worth reading if one wishes to gain a comprehensive view of Austen’s splendid characters; otherwise, it is better left unopened, for it is long, difficult, and prolix.

We are in the East, in the magical empire of Akbar the Great. > If the war-torn world was a hard truth, then Sikri (the capital of the empire) was a splendid lie . It is a magical world where the mystery of the great sovereign "enchants all the earth, and the future, and all of eternity." Into this wondrous land arrives a traveler hailing from the West, who calls himself Mogor dellʼAmore. He enchants the sovereign and the entire court with tales of an incredible city, Florence: > for him knowledge was of no use, except to remind him of what should never be forgotten: that sorcery requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language made of silver words is enough for enchantment . Mogor dellʼAmore tells of three young Florentines: one of them leaves his native city in search of adventure and becomes a great general in the Ottoman army. In a war against the Persians, he meets a princess who becomes his bride. With this woman he returns to Florence to become the captain of its army. This princess is "the enchantress of Florence," who uses her magical powers to bewitch the entire city. Yet the boundary between sorcery and enchantment is exceedingly tenuous, and soon superstition is unleashed against the woman. What a contrast between the magical world of Sikri and the paltriness of Florence! The princess flees to the New World, but > her magic was no longer strong enough to help withstand temporal forces, just as it was not powerful enough to alter the geography of the earth. No middle passage was found, and she found herself trapped in the new world until she chose to die . Yet even the magical world of Sikri must vanish to yield to the force of reality. > I have returned home after all (said the princess to the great emperor), you allowed me to return, and so here I am, at the end of my journey. End until you are not, said the great regulator of the universe, my love, until you do not exist . Everything can exist within the imagination, even beyond time; nothing can survive in reality. With an imagistic and baroque style, the author narrates an incredible, entirely fictional tale that nonetheless, beneath the tone of a fairy tale, develops three arguments: a) the East is superior to the West, insofar as the East gives expression to the wealth of the imagination; b) fantasy is an enchanted realm that allows one to achieve perfection; c) the movement of history from East to West (from Sikri to Florence, and ultimately to the New World) corresponds to a slow, inexorable decline of civilization. The individual words and the phrasing captivate the reader, yet the events are too implausible and, at the same time, excessively real to enthrall and convince. The digressions—which appear to stem more from a brand of literary narcissism than from the requirements of the plot—encumber the novel, rendering it prolix. Why not read it? Certain pages are delightful, the premise of the book is intriguing, yet it is too fragmented and long-winded to make the overall reading experience genuinely compelling.

Like much of McEwan’s fiction, we are confronted at the outset with an extraordinary event (in this case, the death of a person falling from a hot-air balloon) that brings profound upheaval to a life that seemed quiet and settled: the couple’s relationship enters a crisis, an undercurrent of paranoia and instability emerges within the protagonist, and his professional choices are called into question. And up to a point, the novel follows this trajectory, with some truly fine and effective pages on the breakdown of the marital bond; it almost seems as though everything the protagonist endures (in particular, his harassment at the hands of a religious fanatic) were a figment of his imagination, the result of an increasingly pronounced depressive and paranoid spiral. The protagonist discovers himself to be different from who he thought he was. Then, just as the story seems to have reached an impasse, a happy ending emerges—almost worthy of a detective story—but along with it comes the reader’s disappointment. McEwan writes very well, in an English that is simple, fluid, and yet richly expressive: individual pages are remarkable, the whole somewhat less so.

The poem recounts the journey of Aeneas toward Italy and the war he was forced to wage > so that he might found his city and bring the Penates into Latium, giving rise to the Latin race, the Alban fathers, and the lofty walls of Rome (Book One). The poem is divided into two parts. The first, which chronicles his wanderings until his arrival on the shores of Latium, adopts the structure of the *Odyssey*, while the second, recounting the clash with the Latins, takes the *Iliad* as its model. The poem is remarkably complex, as several interpretive keys coexist and overlap. First and foremost, the *Aeneid* is the song of a preordained destiny: laying the foundations for the building of Rome. To this grand design all must submit, mortals and gods alike. Unlike in the Homeric poems, the dynamic unfolding among the gods—and in particular the clash between Juno, Aeneas’s nemesis, and Venus, the hero’s protective mother—is only apparent. In the final book, the twelfth, Jupiter addresses Juno: > What shall be the end, my wife? What remains? You well know, and must know, that as the tutelary deity of his homeland, Aeneas belongs to heaven and is raised by the fates unto the stars. What do you seek? With what hope do you cling to the icy clouds? The *Aeneid* is the epic of human history (in philosophical terms, one might say of Being becoming manifest in history) rather than that of individuals. Beneath providence, however, life quivers, yearning to break out into the open. Disrupting the established order are, above all, the female figures: Dido; the Trojan women who refuse to journey on; Amata, mother of Lavinia, the bride destined for Aeneas; Camilla, the warrior woman; and Juturna, sister of Turnus, the foe doomed to succumb. These are women who reject destiny with a furor that swells and spreads through a progressive loss of control, culminating in self-destruction. Amata’s fury is portrayed by Virgil through the famous metaphor of the spinning top (“as, driven by a lash, a top spins wild” in Book Seven), while Dido’s cries rail against the betrayal of love and trust: > Did you hope, then, to conceal such villainy, you traitor, and slip away in silence from my shores? Can neither our love, nor the hand you once pledged me, hold you back? Nor Dido, doomed to die a cruel death? . (Book Four); and Juturna, who, acknowledging her powerlessness to save her brother, begs to die, though immortal herself: > But what joy can remain sweet to me, brother, without you? Is there an abyss deep enough to open for me, plunging a goddess down into mortal depths? Having spoken, amid long moans, she veiled her head in her azure mantle and hid herself in the river’s depths .(Book Twelve). Aeneas himself at times steps outside his role as a hero obedient to duty, revealing an individuality of his own. When Vulcan gifts him a splendid suit of armor, already emblazoned with Rome’s future exploits, Aeneas behaves, at last, like any other human being: > All this Aeneas admires upon the shield of Vulcan, given by his mother, and, ignorant of the events, delights in the images, shouldering the fame and the fates of his descendants (Book Eight). Another major, and strikingly modern, theme is war. Virgil, unlike Homer in the *Iliad*, lingers over the cruelty of war, not least through a meticulous description of the wounds inflicted upon bodies by the warriors’ blows. Yet what is compelling is that the war is framed as the consequence of King Latinus’s weakness; though conscious of the need to ally with Aeneas and welcome him as a son-in-law, he retreats into seclusion, allowing events to run their course. > Swept away by the storm, at the mercy of fate, alas, we are. For all of this with sacrilegious blood, he cries, you, you, wretched men, shall pay the forfeit. For me quiet approaches: in sight of the final haven, a happy death will strip me of all things. He said no more, shut himself in his palace, and abandoned the reins of events . (Book Eight). War is always brought about by the weakness of those who desire peace yet cannot bring themselves to resist. The primary interpretive key—that of the fulfillment of an already written destiny—is so dominant that it often renders the reading heavy and tedious. The translation by Mario Ramous is splendid, just as Gianluigi Baldo’s commentary is deeply compelling. Why read it? It is well worth it for the delineation of the female figures and for certain seemingly marginal episodes, such as the heroic friendship of Nisus and Euryalus.

> When numbers and figures are no longer the key to every creature, when those who sing or kiss know more than the learned, when the world returns to free life, and returns into the world, when light and shadow unite once more in authentic clarity, and the eternal tales of the world are known in fables and poems, then before a single secret word, absurd existence will vanish . These verses express “in the sweetest way the spirit that animates” Novalis’s book: a spiritual journey, even before a physical one, leads a young man to understand how only poetry can synthesize the dichotomies that trouble the world (good and evil, light and shadow, peace and war, man and nature); at that point “freedom will break through,” yet with it an existence will come to an end—one that holds meaning only in the perpetual search for balance with itself and with the world. A contemporary of Goethe and Kant at the height of the Enlightenment, Novalis is a restless soul who remains unsatisfied by truths old and new alike. To express this longing for something else, the author imagines that in medieval Germany the young Heinrich embarks on a journey from his father’s house to that of his mother's parents—from a cold, industrious, and mundane Thuringia to a warm Swabia, full of allure and passion. In a propitiatory dream, Heinrich finds himself immersed in a magical nature, in which > new images, never seen before, (...) seemed like a dissolution of alluring maidens. (...) A sweet slumber overcame him, (...) What drew him, however, was a tall, luminescent blue flower, (...) this began to stir and transform; the leaves grew more radiant, (...) the flower leaned toward him, and its petals revealed a wide blue corolla in which hovered a tender face . What does the blue flower represent, unattainable yet all-encompassing? An expectation, which can only be defined through the various stages of the journey and its characters: the merchants who accompany him, taking him under their wing and telling him fantastic tales; the crusaders with their exaltation of war; the young Eastern slave girl and the injustices she suffered; the miner who reveals to him the complexity and grandeur of nature; and finally the hermit, whose wisdom demonstrates that inner peace can be achieved only in solitude. In each of these episodes and characters, an ambivalence of opposing sentiments and contrasting situations still lingers: the spirit has not yet reconstituted itself into unity. This occurs upon his arrival in Swabia, where Heinrich not only encounters love—the young Mathilde—but, above all, listens to a long fairy tale. Rich in mythical and symbolic motifs, in oneiric and speculative digressions, the tale begins with the destruction of celestial harmony at the hands of the King’s scribe—a sordid personification of the intellect. The scribe has seized dominion over the world, ridding himself of Sophia (wisdom) and Eros (love). It will fall to Fable, the personification of poetry, to restore peace and order to the world, uniting Eros and Sophia, love and wisdom. > The handsome stranger will not tarry long. Warmth approaches, eternity begins. (...) The cold night will depart from these realms only when Fable claims her ancient right. (...) Founded is the realm of eternity; in love and peace the struggle ends, the long dream of sorrow is passed. Sophia is, for eternity, the priestess of hearts . The work is neither poetry nor prose, but stands at the threshold between the two literary genres; it is an early and unfinished work, as Novalis died in 1801 at only thirty years of age. It exerted a profound influence on German literature as a harbinger of Romanticism, through its intense and evocative style and its near-pantheistic conception of nature. Beyond these considerations, what endures of such a unique work? Precisely its core message: namely, the idea that without deep feeling, it is impossible to bring harmony to the World. For instance, what is missing today from the European Union—a complex yet successful institutional construct, given that it has secured peace for Europe? Precisely the lack of a vision, of grand aspirations—in short, of poetry. Solidarity and wisdom are not enough to tear down nationalistic barriers unless sustained by a powerful idealistic drive. Rich in poetic digressions, Novalis’s work often loses itself in heavily philosophical dialogues and narratives; all of this drains the overall narrative of its momentum, often reducing it to meditations on the world and life. So immense is the urge to say, and so pervasive the reliance on myth, symbols, and even the esoteric, that the lengthy fairy tale—the central pivot of the book—proves difficult to comprehend in all its narrative and expressive ramifications. Why read it? It is brief, fascinating, and offers abundant food for thought.

Massimo, an elderly retired mathematics professor, lives in solitude on an island in the Gulf of Naples: he lost his wife Maddalena a few years ago; his daughter Cristina married a wealthy northern entrepreneur and only returns in the summer for a brief stay, accompanied by her eight-year-old son, Checco. In dreams, Massimo imagines telling his wife about the fruit trees and > that sea bass and grey mullet could be caught from the rocks year-round, whereas striped seabream and gilthead bream only in spring. (...) Maddalena, whose voice was so low that it was strange it could even be heard amidst the blowing of the wind and the cries of the seagulls , would ask him about Cristina, and the old professor would reply that he had so much to do and, above all, could dedicate himself to mathematics, > follow the cyclical waves of the sea and calculate their variables with the wind and the moon ; and Maddalena, before fading away, would remind him that behind a daughter, even an adult one, "one must see a child that never ends." The state of bliss in which the old professor seems to live is abruptly shattered by a telephone call announcing the death of his daughter and son-in-law in a car accident, in which Checco was also involved and is now in hospital in critical condition. Massimo is forced to leave his earthly paradise and travel, reluctantly, to a cold and foggy northern town. For a while, the narrative seems intent on exploring industrious provincial Italy, with its undercurrent of intrigue, gossip, and tedious, fragile affluence; then it takes the path of Noir, albeit grafted onto a story that has little of the classic "mystery" about it. The book's true theme lies elsewhere: how to reconcile rationality and feeling? A rational approach would dictate ending Checco's life when faced with the prospect of the child remaining in a coma or emerging severely disabled. And so the professor would do (he could return at once to his earthly paradise!) were it not for the furious intrusion of Alba, the child's nanny. > Who the fuck are you, useless hermit, not even knowing how much he loves you...? (...) Massimo stood motionless where he was, in the exact same position. Suddenly he felt cold, an immense cold. (...) Yes, perhaps I didn't take something important into account, doctor . Alba's outcry, in its primal and boundless love, compels the old professor to react. He does so in his own way. He must understand why a seemingly flawless order—a constellation of affluence, social prestige, and strong family ties—shattered, leaving Checco on the brink of death. "Tomorrow I leave, if there is nothing for me to understand." It remains unclear whether the old professor wishes to investigate the causes and dynamics of the accident out of genuine empathy, or whether he does so merely to identify a rule that might "render the disorder intelligible," bringing peace to his mathematical mind. Dear professor, there is not always a relationship of cause and effect; at times it is impossible to find a method that lends equilibrium to human beings; often emotions burst in unbidden where reason would have it otherwise. In the final chapter, de Giovanni cites Paul Dirac's equation, erroneously dubbed the equation of love: it supposedly indicates that two particles that have interacted with each other for a certain time will continue to do so even after they have been separated. It is like saying that bonds of love are destroyed and do not evolve, insofar as two people who have loved each other are indissolubly linked. In reality, the physicist Dirac's equation states the opposite: it describes the motion of a free particle that interacts neither with external fields nor with other particles. It is disheartening that a writer like de Giovanni resorts so superficially to an urban legend used to sell tattoos to lovers; nor is it clear why he should do so, foregoing a deeper exploration of the story of an old hermit discovering his daughter's true personality and finally grasping his profound bond with his grandson. The novel is very well written; the narrative flows pleasantly and smoothly. The first fifty pages possess great intensity; thereafter, the plot unfolds laboriously, almost as if the writer had lost his direction. The shifting of the narrative voice, increasingly frequent over the course of the story, and the recourse to conversations with the comatose grandson are devices that demonstrate de Giovanni's storytelling skill, but they also expose the structural weakness of the narrative: it does not hold up if left to its natural evolution, neither as a Noir nor as psychological analysis. Why read it? It is enjoyable.

> The Kopanice region lies on the border between Moravia (the south-eastern area of today’s Czech Republic) and Slovakia, comprising various villages scattered across the slopes of the White Carpathians. Si tratta di una regione che ha pienamente conservato le sue tradizioni folcloristiche, anche perpetuate in una forma arcaica, soprattutto perché è un luogo quasi isolato dal mondo circostante . The women called goddesses are > subjects who possess, according to widespread belief, specific abilities enabling them to heal illnesses, to see the past, to foretell the future, and to uncover information generally inaccessible to ordinary people . So read Gestapo documents, intent on confirming the theory that a remnant of Germanic population had survived in Moravia, thereby justifying the Third Reich’s claims over Central Europe. It is not political motives, however, that prompt Dora, a young ethnography researcher, to study the goddesses. She herself was raised by a goddess, her aunt Surmena, ever since discovering—still a child—the body of her mother, hacked to death with an axe by her father. > For a long time, she had thought that this was the origin of all her suffering. But that was not true. (...) Dora was not stupid, and the stricken faces of the villagers spoke clearly: her and her brother’s misfortune had begun much earlier, at a time that her short memory could not recall . With the resolve of a scientist and the tension of someone personally implicated, Dora retrieves and scrutinizes archival documents, tracing back the course of history: from the witch hunts to the meticulous Nazi investigations, right through to the socialist era, with its rationalistic and conspiratorial theories. She does not confine herself to analyzing and comparing police reports, research by anthropologists and ethnographers, letters and accounts; she frequently returns to the places of her childhood to gather the women’s testimonies and experience anew > the woods filled with beeches and oaks, (...) the meadows teeming in summer with rare orchids, marsh orchids, and anemones, interspersed with strips of cultivated fields, with low cottages clinging to the ground, (...) with those cold mornings of a sweltering summer, (...) and with those harsh winters. (...) With that round, gigantic moon rising over the dense mountain peaks. (...) And before the doorstep, on the ridge of the hill, one seems to be in heaven, with the entire world unfolding at our feet. Ma perché tornare al passato? Riportare alla luce i mostri? Sulla famiglia di Dora incombe la maledizione di una dea cattiva, contro la quale Surmena aveva combattuto tutta la vita. Se non si affida a «quelle occulte mani che mʼintridono» (come dice Ungaretti) come può spiegare Dora i tragici eventi: il truce omicidio della madre, il fratello minorato in coma per un attacco epilettico, la zia Surmena rinchiusa in manicomio a morire come una povera pazza, il suicidio del padre? > She rested her head against the tiled wall of the hospital and closed her eyes. (...) And what if it really was the fault of the curse that had dragged itself down to them? What would it have meant for her to grow up with that awareness? The novel can be read from many angles: as a historical thriller, a conflict between science and superstition, a romantic immersion into an ancestral world of women, a search for Central Europe’s common roots—Germanic and Slavic at once because steeped in the same Indo-European paganism; and above all the story of Dora, of her loneliness, of her desperate need for a family, of her resilience that refuses to surrender to mystery. Dora cannot accept the vilification of her beloved Aunt Surmena, accused of collaborating with the Nazis and for that reason unjustly persecuted by the socialist regime. The author wanted to tackle too many subjects: the result is an overabundance that wearies the reading, dissolves the plot, and fragments the narrative. And the reader is left with one question: who is Dora? The protagonist is submerged beneath too many facts and too many characters, and we still do not understand who she is, even after more than four hundred pages. Why not read it? It is intriguing at the beginning, but ultimately proves prolix and tedious.

Chelli is a “minor” nineteenth-century author, forgotten and relegated to the margins of Italian literature. Only Benedetto Croce remembered him in his *Letteratura della Nuova Italia*, misspelling his surname to boot (calling him Ghelli) and citing him as a chronicler of the bourgeoisie of Rome as capital. Chelli, however, is a fine writer, both for his narrative technique and his original handling of the character system. The historical context is Rome in the second half of the nineteenth century, undergoing profound urban and social transformation since becoming the capital of a major state. The social milieu consists of petty-bourgeois shopkeepers and clerks; the dominant values are the “god of money” and social ascent at all costs. > From Piazza di Ponte to Campo dei Fiori, Padron Gregorio Ferramonti enjoyed the notoriety and esteem accorded to a man believed to be nearly a millionaire. He had built his fortune with his own hands . It is true that his wealth was the subject of much gossip, but Ferramonti, > like all enriched wretches, navigating murky waters, knew men, held them in no esteem, and above all mistrusted them . This contempt extended to his children as well: his two sons, Mario and Pippo, and his daughter, Teta. The first squanders his father’s money; the second is coarse and ignorant; while the daughter bears the grave fault of having married a modest, even penniless, petty ministry clerk. Padron Ferramonti severs all relations with his children, who are full of rancor toward their father and, above all, terrified of being disinherited. Yet they are so superficial, so devoid of energy and ambition, that they could hardly wage a successful fight for the Ferramonti inheritance. Irene will take this task upon herself. > She brought... a note of elegance, a charming smile, and a splendor of beauty, a thrill, a joy, a subtle intoxication that permeated men and things, (yet) she felt in her nerves, in her blood, and in her brain something she could not define: a fever consuming her whole being, warning her that she was born for wealth and dominion . The Ferramonti inheritance had to be hers! She had to overturn a destiny that had decreed her > born poor, among shopkeepers, among people who would have thought her raving mad had they been able to know her for what she really was . To achieve her goal, Irene marries Pippo, manages to reconcile the three siblings, and becomes Mario’s mistress in order to enter the “grand circuit” of the Roman bourgeoisie and profit from her brother-in-law’s fortunate financial speculations. And finally, she targets her father-in-law, Padron Gregorio, winning him over with her charm, > with her myriad caresses of an affectionate kitten... with gentle chatter that steeped him in ineffable bliss . When the old man dies of an apoplectic stroke, brought on by the many delicacies fed to him by his so-very-affectionate daughter-in-law, Irene finds herself holding a document that would make her the heir to the lion’s share of the estate. We readers follow her, intrigued and astonished, in the execution of her ambitious and daring design; and Chelli is so skillful that we fail to see where he is heading, or the rationale behind so many unpredictable moves. We are convinced of her victory because the psychological gulf between Irene and the other characters is simply too vast. And yet, our “heroine” suffers a resounding defeat. Why? Chicanery, ruthlessness, the lust for money, and well-concealed adultery are all acceptable to the Roman bourgeoisie—public scandal is not. > She was unhappy. She could not recall a single day of her existence that marked a truce in the secret rebellion against her own destiny, with which her heart was poisoned... (and so she surrendered) to the audacities of a woman who defies the world, having once sought to deceive it through hypocrisy . She flaunts her affair with her brother-in-law (Mario is a notorious libertine) and consents to dress scandalously and provocatively, letting herself be seen walking > with a roguish sway of the hips that momentarily revealed through the slit of her skirt her left leg, seemingly bare under the flesh-colored stocking, the scarlet garter against the white hose, and her arched little feet in satin slippers; then came an explosion: it was a marvel! nothing like it had ever been seen! And to think that at first she had wanted to refuse!.. In short, the desire to please, to feel pursued by > a wave of obscene thoughts, like an outpouring of equivocal smirks and reckless glances , gains the upper hand over the cold calculator and ruins her. Her fragility betrays her. It becomes easy for the lawyers to argue that Irene duped old Gregorio with the vile arts of a harlot, and that the will was therefore extorted by deceit. The victor turns out to be none other than the despised yet shrewd petty ministry clerk, who finds himself heir to a vast fortune after Pippo and Mario die tragically, driven to despair after being abandoned by the woman they loved, Irene. Prudent, opaque bourgeois conduct triumphs over the courage—transgressive though it may be—of one who seeks to upend the social hierarchy: a bleak omen for the new Italy. Behind a seemingly simple plot lies a sophisticated narrative technique. It is as if we were standing before a film in which the camera constantly shifts perspective, without lingering on a single character or setting. Each protagonist becomes, in turn, the focal point of the narrative, so that each appears able to move freely and steer the story toward an outcome different from the one that actually unfolds. Only intermittently does Irene’s point of view emerge, and the reader realizes, with astonishment, that the entire sequence of events is part of the woman’s overarching design. Yet precisely when the camera focuses on her, it becomes apparent, contrary to all expectation, that she is not, perhaps, a purely wicked orchestrator of deceit. She is also a woman, solitary and vulnerable, with her own doubts and weaknesses. The author acts like a director who allows his actors to improvise. Without an omniscient psychologist, > the official portraits of the actors and the explanations of the inner workings of their actions fall away; each is described and intelligible only insofar as they are the object of their own analysis or that of others, and the persuasiveness of these diverse perspectives is in direct proportion to the perspicacity of the observer , that is, of the reader (Roberto Bigazzi, preface to the 1972 Einaudi edition). Why read it? A sophisticated fresco of the Roman bourgeoisie; a splendid portrait of a woman—social-climbing and transgressive.

Don Rigoberto is the director of a major insurance company, has just retired, and is about to embark on his long-awaited trip to Europe. He is a cultured man, a lover of literature: he chose a managerial career "out of cowardice," deciding to > not be a creator, only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. (...) How sad to be forced to deal with lawyers and judges, (...) instead of immersing oneself from morning to night in those volumes, those engravings, those drawings, and, listening to good music, daydreaming, traveling through time, experiencing extraordinary adventures, being moved, growing sorrowful, reveling, weeping, being exalted and thrilled . Felicito Yanaqué is the owner of an established transport company: a pragmatic man, a self-made, successful entrepreneur who rose through sheer determination and hard work, he too needs to dream; he has done so by taking a mistress, a young woman—a kept woman, admittedly, but one with whom he has nonetheless fallen in love, without many illusions. Two ordinary lives, until certainties are shattered and everything seems to descend into chaos. The insurance company's owner, an octogenarian widower, decides to marry his maid, young and beautiful; a scandal that Don Rigoberto is forced to confront alone because the "newlyweds" have embarked on an extended trip to Europe. Felicito receives threatening letters and extortion demands. The man, a true "discreet hero," refuses to submit, even though he is terrified and everyone advises him to give in and pay the protection money. He constantly remembers the words uttered by his father before dying: > never let anyone walk all over you, son. This advice is the only inheritance I can leave you . The two storylines develop in parallel, with a narrative pacing that aspires to be that of a thriller, yet falls short; the figure of Don Rigoberto serves as a pretext for lengthy digressions on art and the human condition, all of which weighs down the narrative and sidelines Felicito’s story, whose stubborn moral fortitude fails to emerge as forcefully as it should. The two plots conclude, intertwining, with a series of plot twists: surprises that should not be revealed so as not to spoil the reader's enjoyment of the tale; suffice it to say that this is not about organized crime, but about petty, sordid family affairs. As Don Rigoberto—behind whom the author hides—puts it, > in this country one cannot build even the tiniest space of civilization; barbarism eventually destroys everything . There are no redemptive spaces, which is to say > the idea that civilization (...) survived in minuscule citadels, built across time and space, which resisted the permanent assault of that instinctive, violent, obtuse, ugly, destructive, and bestial force that ruled the world . The contrasts between the two protagonists are the linchpin of the entire narrative: on one hand, Don Rigoberto retreats into aestheticism and individualism; on the other, Felicito, naive to the point of absurdity, fights for his dignity and takes charge of his own destiny. Whose side are we on? At one point, Don Rigoberto’s son notes that his father is always talking about Europe and asks him if there is anything he actually likes about Peru. The answer is disconcerting: > three things, Fonchito, he said, feigning the pomp of a great visionary, the paintings of Fernando de Szyaszlo, the poetry in French of César Moro. And the Majes river shrimp, naturally. How often have we heard the very same remarks from a representative of our ruling class—xenophilic, defeatist, and provincial? Could it be that hope lies precisely within the many "discreet heroes" rather than vain intellectuals? Beneath the surface and with subtle irony, Vargas Llosa’s book speaks to the inadequacy of a ruling elite. It is certainly not Vargas Llosa’s best novel. The prose, the portrayal of the characters and settings, the plotting all remind us of the great author; yet the narrative is lackluster and devoid of bite, as though the hand were tired, longing only to drift into senile fantasies. Why read it? It is enjoyable, but do not expect the great Vargas Llosa.

I will begin writing from here >the quotation begins now it is no longer here, but there is a word in **bold**

> I publish this old story today because I hopelessly love its free language, its fable without a moral, its *porteña* melancholy (typical of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires) and also because the nightmare in which it was born is still awake and roams the streets . With this note Cortázar introduces a story written in 1950, during the years of the first Peronism, between 1945 and 1955. It was a period of profound social change: emerging wealthy from the Second World War, under Perón's leadership Argentina seemed to face a future of development. And yet, unease and pessimism were growing among intellectuals and within the urban middle class; a moral and psychological malaise born of the muted, tacit awareness of the contradiction between a cosmopolitan city, as Buenos Aires was, and a regime obtusely hostile to culture and individual freedoms. The characters of the story—the young couple Juan and Clara, Andrés, Clara, and the chronicler—wander through the night in an unreal city, shrouded in fog. Theirs is a seemingly senseless banter, constantly revolving around the futility of the intellectual. > All this talk, passing papers to one another, these café tables with books and books and books and premieres and exhibitions.... Believe me, there is a swindle here, a betrayal. All that is left for you is to join betrayal to reality, to life, to action, and with this and an emblem on the jacket lapel you are ready to embark on any career . The group has no destination, nor do the events involving them lend a plot to the narrative; alternating between prose and poetry, Argentine, Latin American, and European literary quotations, the youths continue to dwell on the very same theme, in an obsessive and patently futile manner: > a good biologist would laugh his head off hearing our squeaking. Because we don't even scream; ours is the piping of mice . > So absurd to talk at random, thought Juan as they stepped out, to hear oneself talk and know that one is never sufficiently in the right. This is another, perhaps the worst, of our acts of cowardice . Juan, you are truly right! Unfortunately, we are weary of so much idle chatter; we would like a bit of reality, of sound pragmatism. It is for this reason, together with the lack of plot and the shallowness of the characters, that I painfully decided to abandon the book at the end of the first chapter. The story might well proceed to change its narrative pace radically; I shall never know, so be it! «Free language» is fine, provided it is taken in small doses. The question that naturally arises for us Italians of the second millennium is this: how much of this story do we find in our own country? > Creation is born of morality, not of ingenuity (says Juan). Ay, ay, went Clara, we are spineless. Right, spineless, without tension. (...) I mean that we lack a spirit of system (be it freedom or for freedom), and this is above all a moral defect . Why not read it? It is profoundly boring.

> Fieramosca's father, grown old in the wars that tore Italy asunder during the fifteenth century, could give Ettore nothing but a sword; and as a youth, the latter believed the profession of arms to be the only one worthy of him, nor could he for many years conceive thoughts above the times in which he lived, wherein the force of arms was employed solely to augment reputation and wealth. Ma wisdom grew with the passing of years; and in the brief lulls from warring, rather than spending his leisure in hunts, jousts, and other youthful pleasures, he held studies and letters dear; and having come to know the ancient authors, and the honorable deeds of those who had shed their blood for the good of their homeland and not for the profit of whoever could best pay them, he understood how wicked a trade the profession of arms was in itself, if practiced in the manner of a brigand with the sole aim of enriching oneself with the spoils of the weak, and not for the virtuous cause of defending oneself and one's people from foreign aggression . This lengthy quotation, with which D’Azeglio encapsulates the protagonist’s formation, aptly conveys the style and meaning of the novel: the story of a duel fought to redeem slighted Italian honor, but also a reflection of a towering figure of our Risorgimento, Massimo D’Azeglio. A man of letters, painter, writer, soldier, patriot, and ultimately prime minister and mentor to Victor Emmanuel II during the turbulent years that followed the defeat in the First War of Independence. With this novel, D’Azeglio embellishes with imagination a historical event that genuinely took place in 1503: the Challenge of Barletta. Several Italian knights in the service of Spain were gravely insulted by a French baron, who had cast doubt upon the valor and loyalty of our fighters. A challenge ensued, from which the Italians emerged victorious. The historical event, however, serves as a backdrop to an intense and ill-fated love story. Ettore Fieramosca, > perfect in the proportions of his body, [which] he displayed... in close-fitting attire , is in love with Ginevra. The young woman is the object of Cesare Borgia’s depraved desires. Ettore fortuitously manages to save Ginevra, hiding her in a convent near Barletta. It is not merely romantic passion—chaste though it is—that binds the two youths. Ginevra, too, is a fervent patriot. When Ettore informs her of the challenge, > Ginevra’s breathing grew more hurried; her bosom, like a sail caught by the gusts of an oncoming wind, rose and fell, swelling with vehement, conflicting passions, yet all worthy of her; her eyes, which seemed to temper themselves according to the youth’s words, caught fire, casting sparks. What daring sensuality in D’Azeglio’s words! It is pointless to expect a happy ending. We are in the nineteenth century, and love stories must end tragically. Ginevra dies, abducted and defiled in her virtue by the cruel Borgia. Ettore, unaware of the loss of his beloved, wins the challenge, but upon learning the truth, disappears without a trace. For many years, the mountaineers of the Gargano spoke > of an armed knight upon the summit of certain inaccessible crags, which hung above a chasm plunging sheer into the sea . Adventures of daring and love, intrigues and betrayals follow one another with an agility and mastery that are surprising and in some ways unique for nineteenth-century Italian literature. D’Azeglio is a forerunner of Salgari. The wealth of episodes and characters nevertheless weighs down the plot, often making it difficult to return to the main thread. In many instances, the narrative seems merely an occasion for grand frescoes. D’Azeglio, as an accomplished painter, depicts with meticulous detail and vivid colors the feasts, receptions, and duels of a century that loved amusement even while constantly waging war. And the author recalls that the culinary art was exceedingly difficult in those days, because > all dishes were required not only to please the palate, but likewise to delight the eyes of the guests... the platters of confections were fashioned, now like mounds upon which grew trees laden with candied fruits, now in the likeness of ponds of distilled waters, wherein floated little skiffs of worked sugar, filled with sweets: some depicted an alpine mountain with a volcano at its peak, and the smoke that issued from it was of the most delightful fragrance . It is difficult to find the novel in its unabridged form, as D’Azeglio’s Italian is often archaic, even grandiloquent. One must not surrender. It is precisely his writing that imparts that sense of the imaginative and the unreal which is the book’s very charm. Why read it? It is a pleasure to lose oneself in D’Azeglio’s ardor and imagination.

Cela's long tale is a pervasive novel, fearsome and pitiful at the same time; one might wish to see it as a fresco of an ancestral peasant society dominated by violence, or consider it "a clear vision of man's vulnerability," as stated in the motivation for the Nobel Prize awarded to the Spanish writer in 1989. In reality, Pascual Duarte is not a victim; he is, quite simply, a murderer: > blood seems to be the relish to the bread of your life , Lola, his first wife, tells him, confessing that she has a lover. To be sure, in the long letter written in prison prior to his execution, Pascual attempts to demonstrate how he was dragged along by destiny; in the long, rambling account of how he came to murder three people (his sister's lover, his mother, and Don González, > distinguished patrician to whom he mischievously dedicates this confession of sorts), sentences recur such as: I tried to postpone > the collision that was bound to happen nonetheless, fatal as diseases and fires, as sunsets and death, because nothing could prevent it. or: > had my condition as a man allowed me to forgive, I would have forgiven, but the world is made as it is made and wanting to go against the current is not possible. After being released from prison, where he was serving the sentence for his first crime, Pascual goes so far as to accuse the leniency of the law of having dragged him > toward a worse evil. Better it would have been to stay in prison! Mad impostor or fragile soul, shaped by an unhappy childhood, by the agony > of not being able to escape evil while within us rots this charnel house of hopes stillborn.... If we take as true what Pascual tells us, we must lean toward his innocence, not before the law, but before Divine Justice: a brutal father, > tall and massive as a boulder , a mother, > tall and thin, (...) skittish and violent ; both devoid of any moral principle and of any restraint on their instincts; and then, a simpleton brother and a sister who soon abandons the home to become a prostitute; and what of Lola, who insults him, telling him he was no man, he was just like his simpleton brother. There are the dead children, one due to a restless mare and the other to the freezing wind of Castile. Pascual harbors within himself a hatred that relentlessly erupts into a bloodthirsty fury; a monster from which it is useless to escape. > I began to run; and the shadow ran too. I stopped; and the shadow stopped as well. I raised my eyes to the firmament: there was not a single cloud across its entire arc. The shadow continued to accompany me, step by step, all the way home...(...) I would have liked to put the earth between my shadow and myself, between my name and myself, between my blood and myself, this self from which, were one to strip away the shadow and the memory, the name and the blood, so little would remain.... In the Hindu conception, every individual has their own "karma," a kind of supra-temporality of being that upon death does not follow the fate of the body but passes from one life form to another in the eternal cycle of rebirths. Pascual's karma is a bloodthirsty inclination; this is the shadow that pursues him. Pushing the interpretation, one might say that underlying the narrative lies a metaphysical vision, a timeless pessimism regarding humanity. If we bring this condition into the present, if we think of the genocide in Gaza, the massacres in Ukraine, the countless conflicts across the world, Pascual's story does not remain confined to his personal tragic plight, but constitutes a kind of apocalyptic prophecy for all of humankind. As Sebastiano Vassalli writes in *3012: The Year of the Prophet* (see the review on this site), men > began slitting each other's throats with such enthusiasm that no natural or supernatural force could have stopped them. (...) Amen . Built around a clever literary device—a kind of rambling confession rediscovered by a mere transcriber—the novel possesses a seemingly disorganized plot, owing to the flow of overlapping memories and the lengthy interruptions in writing by the imprisoned Pascual; in truth, the narrative is handled exceedingly well, suffering, perhaps, from a lack of plot twists, if one excludes the dramatic murder of his mother. I do not know whether it is deliberate or an oversight: nowhere is the assassination of Don González recounted. The writing is effective, alternating tight dialogues with expansive, evocative descriptions of the settings and deep insights into the protagonist-narrator's state of mind. The other characters are supporting players. Why read it? It is a punch to the gut.

The central theme of the story is the family, viewed by Leavitt as a closed, central nucleus in which relationships among members are vitiated by convictions and hypocrisies. A family reunion is organized, serving, however, as an occasion for each to expect roles and behaviors from the other that often bear no relation to the individual’s true desires. Not even the discovery of one of the family members’ homosexuality manages to break this pattern, as the gay condition is subsumed within the roles and rules of the bourgeois family. David Leavitt has often been regarded as the writer of homosexuality. In truth, he is the chronicler of the bourgeois family in an open society, which accepts anything provided it is reabsorbed into established frameworks. The elegant and effective prose cannot conceal the passage of time on this story, now dated against the neoconservative wave that has restored to homosexuality its status as an otherness and a threat to the family. Why not read it? Because it is predictable and stale.

The essay is a brief biography of Dostoevsky, accompanied by an in-depth examination of a series of events, figures, and literary works that had a significant impact on the writer’s life. It is a «sort of study guide» that can serve anyone needing to study the author and gain a general framework of the relationships between his life, context, and literary output.

The book won the 2015 Strega Prize and was framed by many reviews as a sort of Italian-style *Buddenbrooks*: one would expect a fine novel with a pronounced social dimension. Nothing of the sort. It is a dreadful novel, poorly written, intimist-existential, reflecting a perception of reality typical of the 1990s. Bored by the plot, disgusted by the narrative style, I stopped reading at page 237 and can therefore recount the plot only up to a certain point. It begins with the suicide of Clara, the spoiled and eccentric scion of a social-climbing entrepreneurial family from Bari: a scheming and greedy father, a typical Southern building contractor; an absentee mother, placidly satisfied with the affluence they have achieved, and three siblings; an established physician, a twenty-year-old well on her way to becoming just as spoiled as her sister, and Michele, the son of one of the father’s mistresses who died during childbirth. The bond between Clara and Michele is particularly intense, owing also to the young man’s fragility, who finds in his sister—so self-assured—a pillar of support and perhaps an object of love. The novel seeks above all to delve into this relationship, doing so through constant temporal leaps, from the present (Clara dead) to the past, with the young suicide victim still cast as a vivacious girl with an unbridled sex life. Revolving around Clara and Michele, across these different temporal dimensions, are the other family members, all seemingly indifferent to the terrible tragedy that has occurred or to the increasingly morbid nature of the relationship between the two youths. Perhaps because > we are not ourselves, (...) we are driven by forces of which we are unaware, we act without knowing why, we say things whose motive is unknown, crimes without guilt and deaths without apparent cause . Our lives repeat themselves according to the cycle of the seasons, with an inevitability we would like to attribute solely to nature, yet which belongs to us as well. > Startled by the motorbike, the lizard plunged into the blades of grass. It vanished among the branches, tearing in its flight the web of the jumping spider, which, having reassembled the image of the reptile through its eight eyes, had managed to avoid the impact. The spider scurried. The dry, parched ground registered the information, superimposing it onto the alphabet of ants crossing paths, breaking, bifurcating, and then recombining a line that was never the same. The law they obeyed shifted within them, confirming itself in the law of every kindred creature; it received fresh impulses from the depths of the anthill, and further still, from the tremendous force that changes the face of the seasons . It is certainly neither a social novel nor a psychological tale aiming to probe feelings and motivations. The author operates on a metaphysical plane, rooted in the deeply southern conviction of the immutability of the human being and of the socio-political context. Hence, perhaps, the title: *La Ferocia*. Still, a narrative rhythm could have been provided! An intelligible plot! What worsens the literary outcome is the minimalist imprint, reflected in an exaggerated reliance on full stops and the near-total absence of semicolons and colons. In this manner, it is difficult not to splinter the prose, rendering it ponderous and unintelligible. An example: > Michele returned to his room. He made to lie down on the bed. He stopped. From right to left. The nightstand. The wardrobe. He looked around with a worried expression. The half-open window. His heartbeat quickened. Stay calm. She can’t have jumped out of the window already. He sat down on the edge of the bed. And so on and so forth; now one understands why I gave up reading. Why not read it? It is a bad, boring, and dated novel.

What are the mechanisms that uphold a dictatorship? Vargas Llosa sets out from history, from real protagonists and events, to investigate the dark allure of the despot, and he does so starting from a cruel character in whom the peculiarities of tyranny have been distilled, stripped of the smokescreen of ideologies and good manners. We read from the Treccani Encyclopedia that Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 > through dictatorial methods until his death, thanks to his control over the armed forces, that exercised (directly or through members of his family) over the national economy, and the systematic resort to terrorist methods against his opponents ; and, I would add, through the backing of the United States and the Church, who saw him as a bulwark against communism. We are in the final phase: the regime’s atrocities have driven the United States and the Church to abandon Trujillo, strangling the small country with sanctions and isolating the dictator internationally. There are three narrative strands, running in parallel and later intertwining, always circling the baneful figure of Trujillo. Urania, a successful young woman living in New York, returns to Santo Domingo to visit her aging father, confined to bed in an almost vegetative state. For many pages we do not comprehend so much rancor toward her father; we only know that Urania > had not managed to overcome the insurmountable revulsion, the disgust men inspired in her... you had never wanted to get treatment . In the second narrative strand, the setting is where Trujillo will be assassinated and where the conspirators anxiously wait (first called executioners, then patriots): they are a heterogeneous group of figures, driven by revenge or by revulsion toward a cruel regime; they were once beneficiaries of the dictator and remain bound to him by a love-hate relationship: a > paralysis, the numbing of the will, of reason and free will that that contemptible character—dapper to the point of ridicule, with his fluting little voice and hypnotist's eyes—exercised over Dominicans, rich or poor, learned or unlettered, friends or foes . His assassination is a catharsis, a deliverance from a tragic spell, rather than a political act. And finally, we find ourselves before Trujillo and his court: the depraved, sadistic sons, the greedy and thousand-times-betrayed wife, the puppet president, the police chief—the perpetrator of the most heinous tortures and crimes—the cunning pettifogger, and many others. All live in perpetual dread: it is the Chief’s habit to dismiss them, expropriate their wealth, cast them into prison, have them killed, on a mere whim, to assert his power over life and death. And they submit; if they fall from grace, they yearn to return to the tyrant's good graces, ready for anything, like Urania's father, formerly an esteemed senate president and then cast aside without explanation. The country is falling apart, inflation and poverty run rampant, the regime is fracturing, yet just hours before his assassination, Trujillo is concerned with only one thing: he is unable to use "the part of the body I will not name" (Patrizia Valduga *La tentazione*). The narrative unfolds slowly, at times verbosely, until one reaches several splendid chapters, for which alone the book is worth reading. The conspiracy hinges on the commander of the Armed Forces, who was supposed to intervene swiftly and decisively upon news of Trujillo's death. Instead, he stalls, temporizes, > plunged into that kind of hypnosis, he thought that perhaps his indolence was due to the fact that, although the Chief's body was dead, his soul, his spirit, or whatever it was called, continued to hold him in thrall . And like the conspirators of July 25, 1943, when the Grand Council of Fascism effectively ousted Mussolini, our conspirator slips into the quicksand of torment. Next, we follow the puppet president in his seizure of power, > a defenseless little man who wrote verses and seemed of so little consequence in this world of real men with pistols and submachine guns , and, allowing for the obvious differences, the mind turns to Dino Grandi or to Pietro Badoglio himself, accomplices to the Fascist dictatorship yet ultimately its gravediggers. And finally, in the last and dramatic chapter, we understand the depth of Urania's bitterness. While still a young girl, her father sold her to the dictator simply to regain the Chief’s favor. And he, > taking her by the arm, threw her down beside him. (...) That mass of flesh crushed her, suffocated her against the mattress. (...) But the suffocation did not prevent her from feeling the roughness of that hand, of those fingers exploring, groping, and forcing their way into her . Many words can be used to describe a tyranny, yet it is epitomized in its most ancestral and brutal manifestation: rape. I am not aware whether there exists a great novel on the Fascist dictatorship capable of probing the dark fascination of tyranny as Vargas Llosa has done. Were such a narrative to exist, it would bring out of the shadows the lavish court that surrounded the dictator: his double-breasted blackshirts, the illustrious heirs of the liberal class, the magniloquent and craven intellectuals—either naive or merely pandering—the cowardly, complaisant generals, and the many women whom Mussolini used and cast aside, or dragged with him to his death. If I were the ANPI, the National Association of Italian Partisans, I would entrust Vargas Llosa with the task of giving us such a fresco, to answer the question: > who was it? (...) Whose fault is it? And all those who died, poor souls? (...) I saw them die, it was all useless... he felt like foolishly bursting into tears (Mario Tobino *Il clandestino*, see review on this site). Masterfully translated, the novel is nevertheless too long, and in particular the extensive reliance on dialogues—often soliloquies—burdens the narrative; it fails to enchant or nourish the imagination, remaining somewhat cold and detached. The writer stands at a distance from the reality of the Dominican Republic; he is a spectator to a drama, interested in investigating the mechanisms of cruelty and dominion without allowing himself to become involved, driven instead by a barely concealed irony. This approach prevents the reader from truly feeling the weight of the characters' dramatic and harrowing ordeals, the tragedy of a nation. Why read it? A profound inquiry into tyranny.

The book comprises three novels spanning the entirety of the 1990s: *Luce del nord* from 1991, *Colpa di nessuno* from 1995, and *L’amico d’infanzia* from 1999, finished only a few months before the author’s death. All three novels revolve around a male protagonist, set against the backdrop of the Roman petite bourgeoisie and a Rome undergoing profound transformation. In *Luce del nord*, Angelo has long lived in New York, far from his family, his brother, and his mother. One day, he receives a letter from his brother, Ferruccio, who tells him of a strange dream: he is gravely wounded, and Angelo urges him to run away, to flee, as though he had faced grave danger. A few days after the dream, he learns that his brother has died. He thus decides to return to Rome, but pretends to be a friend of Angelo's, Cesare. The novel unfolds around this deception, which allows Angelo to infiltrate his brother’s life and grasp all its squalor, amid financial hardships, professional disappointments, and marital betrayals. Indeed, he becomes the lover of Ferruccio's wife, who despises Angelo yet learns to love Cesare. Angelo also reconnects with his father and grows attached to his brother’s son. The story seems to move toward a happy ending, when Angelo decides once more to flee and return to the United States, where, to gain acceptance, he begins inventing other stories anew. It is a novel of perpetual flight, wherein America represents a dream of freedom and individualism. In *Colpa di nessuno*, perhaps the most socially conscious novel of the three, the point of departure is the protagonist's need—a squalid door-to-door insurance salesman—to pick up the threads of his life: > it is time to take down the streamers, gather the paper ribbons and carnival masks, and throw everything into the basket of past celebrations . Paolo, the protagonist, meets Laura in the United States, and once she becomes pregnant, they marry and return together to Italy. To make a living, Paolo takes a job as a salesman for Italo, his father-in-law. He thus enters his wife’s family, comprised of his mother-in-law Ida, a greedy and dismal woman; Laura’s sister, Silvana; and her husband, Daniele, a violent, right-wing man. Paolo leads a squalid existence in which his marriage progressively falls apart, to the point where, one day, he discovers that his wife is cheating on him. The embrace of fatuous, crude, and vulgar values brings about Paolo's steady decline, which is repeatedly underscored by his father, a man of another generation. There is no real conflict between son and father, as the title given to this collection of novels might suggest; political, social, and intergenerational conflicts have vanished, replaced by resignation and individualism. In reality, all the characters suffer, in one way or another, from the crisis of Italian society in the 1990s, and it is precisely this theme of the decay of relationships and values that appears to define the novel. An old man he meets urges him to always remain alone. > Already now, friendship and solidarity are called complicity and omertà. Never trust anyone, never give in. It is no longer time to be together. You must never have to say we; that would already be a sign of yielding And then the author inserts an intensely evocative autobiographical note > When I was little, I believed the world was a kind of carousel made solely to amuse me. But now what dragon’s mouth have I wandered into, what sort of figures are these before me that no longer amuse me, two-bit little monsters, capable of everything and of nothing? . A crime—the murder of Italo, of which everyone believes Paolo to be guilty—becomes the cathartic element that opens the protagonist's eyes. Paolo realizes the sterility and squalor of his life, of this acquired family that drags greed and violence in its wake, as well as the malice of his wife, Laura. The novel concludes with a cry of despair and hatred. > When I think of the future, Laura, I imagine it as a vast, crowded square, where people scream and laugh. There will be men and women from all corners of the world, in clothes bought in New York, Rome, Sarajevo, Jerusalem, and Mogadishu. People of all races and origins, crossing paths and contaminating each other with history. Each with the other's story, infected with the world. Only the two of us will not be there, Laura. We, with our tangled feelings, were unable to give anything to the present, so let alone to the future. We are two specks of spit from the past that somehow ended up here. But our son, yes, he will be there. I hope he crosses the entire square, and that a roar laden with hatred accompanies him always and never leaves him, that he feeds and grows on all their malice. I will leave him to corrode them with their own teeth . *L’amico d’infanzia* is the most intense and profound novel of the three, almost premonitory of approaching death. Fausto's story is narrated by his journalist friend. It is the story of a failure. The two had been friends since childhood in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome and later drifted apart: Fausto began scraping a living through odd jobs, eventually ending up as a real estate salesman for a company that buys public housing on the cheap to flip it at higher prices, evicting the tenants. It is a squalid job that Fausto accepted to scrape together money so that his son, who lives far away with his mother in Milan, could study abroad. The story takes a tragic turn when Fausto, in a fit of rage, bludgeons his boss to death after being denied a loan. What follows is Fausto’s descent into hell: he lives as a vagrant, hunted by the police, yet precisely at the height of his despair he finds solidarity and help among the destitute. In the end, in a moment of lucid madness, he blows up the real estate company’s offices and is fatally wounded. Fausto's story overwhelms his friend as well, leaving him drained of energy. The narrator-friend acknowledges that “there was not the wretchedness of a single seed in the great tornado that shattered our lives,” leaving behind only vast misery and extreme existential pain. The novel ends with a profound reflection on life and death. Confronted with Fausto's death, the narrator remains bewildered by the thought > that in reality we like and hate one another solely based on the contingency of a moment and closes the novel with this stanza: “but we were born to be here / and for a while we managed / and it is this that our dry / mouths now want to sing.” Reviews emphasize above all the social hallmarks of the three novels: the 1990s, the urban and cultural decay of Italy. In truth, it seems to me that the three novels (and especially the last one) revolve around existential despair and the search, often disillusioned, for hope. The very setting of the final novel, the decay of the Roman periphery, drifts gradually toward a surreal context where everything is possible, even the most incredible occurrences: an elephant strolling through the streets of Rome, a hooded crow colonizing the city to forage, a child learning to play soccer in an empty stadium, a new life represented by the child expected by Elena, the great love of Fausto's life, the solidarity of the victim's own wife, the school principal who has become a hermit on the outskirts of Rome—all of these demonstrate that within the underbelly of urban life there still exist positive energies capable of transforming such a degraded reality.

Rudi, the naive and dreamy husband of Kathe, one of the protagonists, encapsulates the novel's overall meaning in a poem: > against the light I saw/that the bridge has fallen/and the faint light/I have now lost/and I surrender myself/to the current that carries me . Four young women are lifelong friends; they fall in love, marry, some of them become mothers, are widowed or divorced—in short, they lead an apparently normal life in Germany between 1919 and 1945. They live through the economic and social crisis of the post-WWI era, hyperinflation, the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic (with the suppression of the Communists by the Social Democrats), the rise of Nazism, racial purity laws (with the reporting of infants born with deformities), the gradual yet inexorable marginalization of the Jews leading up to the Shoah, and the catastrophe of the Second World War. How is it possible to lead a normal life in the face of such dramatic events? > But what was left to do now, if not retreat into the private sphere? The world was no longer an enchanting place . (thinks Bunge, the spendthrift father of Ida, another protagonist). And indeed, the novel develops the stories of Henny, Kathe, Lina, and Ida from a deeply intimist perspective, only superficially grazed by the horrific events that affected the German people. Henny and Kathe have been friends since childhood and mutually decide to pursue careers as midwives, bringing children into the world precisely when one knows not what to expect from the future (a metaphor?). While Henny pursues the idea of family, Kathe makes different choices. The former marries young after becoming pregnant, has a daughter, loses her husband, and marries another, with whom she has another child, only to discover that her second husband was an informant for the Nazis; Kathe does not want children, is a communist, and urges her husband to become politically active, thereby upending both their lives. Ida, on the other hand, was born and raised in luxury; her father, on the brink of bankruptcy, marries her off to a wealthy and powerful banker, condemning her to unhappiness that is only partially redeemed by a long love affair with a handsome Chinese man. Lina soon discovers she is a lesbian and moves in with her partner, in a situation that grows increasingly precarious because homosexuality is condemned by the Nazi regime. There are many other characters, but even from this brief overview of the protagonists one can deduce the fragility of the entire narrative. It is true that war intrudes upon peace and that people strive to the very end to live in indifference; one does not expect *War and Peace*, but one might have expected a plot and character analysis capable of capturing the deep wounds of the human soul when confronted with danger and horror. Peace awaiting war creates a kind of suspension, and people cling desperately to the private sphere, to pale sentiments, customs, friendships, and familial affection. Two splendid novels immediately come to mind: Alba de Céspedes's *There's No Turning Back*, with its young women secluded yet sheltered within a boarding school, and *The Makioka Sisters* by the Japanese writer Tanizaki, a work in which the minute depiction of a 1930s Japanese family serves as a critique of inert familism and, at the same time, of aggressive, warmongering imperialism, so distant from the common sentiment of the people. There is none of this in our novel, so much so that Germany's dramatic events seem merely an excuse to inject some vigor into a plot that would be far too flat and mundane if set in a context of normalcy. It is the beginning of a trilogy, which we leave to other readers. The narrative structure and the writing also warrant a negative verdict. The four young women's stories are developed in parallel through brief paragraphs within a chronological chapter framework. Consequently, the narrative is muddled, making it difficult for the reader to grasp the overarching story, and the plot ultimately proves verbose and repetitive. Too many characters contribute to compromising overall clarity. The writing, in turn, is flat, reliant on short sentences and dialogue; descriptions of the setting (Hamburg) and the social and political context are sorely lacking. Why avoid reading it? Pointless, poorly written, and distasteful, considering what happened in Germany between the two wars.

The Son of the Red Corsair > was a handsome young man, (...) of exceedingly elegant form that bespoke the great lord, with jet-black, fiery eyes, a black moustache, and very pale skin . One would expect a new Black Corsair. Yet such is not the case: first, because the son of the Red Corsair frequently distances himself from the pirates, even paying them out of his own pocket to prevent them from sacking conquered cities—confirming a notion widespread among the buccaneers, namely that the counts of Ventimiglia (the Black, Red, and Green Corsairs) were always “amateur corsairs”; second, because the son of the Red Corsair does not seek revenge, but merely wishes to find his sister, even though she is held by the Marquis of Montelimar, the very man who killed the Red Corsair and now keeps his daughter captive. The relentless hatred of the Black Corsair is missing. And this is why the exploits of the son of the Red Corsair lack the tension of the great novels of the Caribbean cycle: *The Black Corsair*, *The Queen of the Caribbean*, *Jolanda, the Daughter of the Black Corsair*. The classic ingredients of Salgari’s narrative structure are all present: the duels, the equatorial rainforest, the naval battles, the sieges of Spanish fortresses. What is missing is the sense of these adventures, the anticipation of something dark and brooding—the true source of the author’s astonishing narrative rhythm. The book’s peculiarity lies elsewhere. In Salgari, we invariably find sidekicks flanking the protagonist, often helping to humanize him and introduce elements of levity. Here, the system is inverted: the son of the Red Corsair remains in the background, while ostensibly supporting figures take center stage. The first part of the novel takes place on the island of Santo Domingo. Our heroes are pursued by the Spanish and by “exceedingly ferocious” hounds. The setting is at once terrifying and wondrous: thickets of vegetation, marshes, and deadly quicksands alternate with islets, boasting > splendid clumps of rhododendrons, over ten meters high, (...) clusters of purple flowers, (...) magnificent palms crowned by parasols of immensely long palmate leaves, cascading elegantly with spathes of an iridescent violet edged in purple, and clusters of fruit that resembled green apples . In this unreal nature, described with a few grammatical lapses (*parasole* being an invariable noun), the son of the Red Corsair comes across a buccaneer who appears quite savage. He lives by hunting and inhabits a > wretched dwelling made of crudely woven branches and a few poles . Aided by wine and conversation with a European gentleman, the buccaneer reveals, “with dilated eyes, his face bathed in sweat,” his terrible secret: > I must drown distant memories! Ah, the sad fate that has struck me down! (...) Well, such is this terrible life, if one falls prey to an evil genius . Thus we learn that the buccaneer was a nobleman of France, who dishonored his ancestors’ coat of arms and fled to America. Can the Count of Ventimiglia restore him to his former rank? It is no longer possible, > everything is past, everything has been forgotten. I killed two wild pigs, down there on the edge of the marshes... that is my trade. The buccaneer leads the son of the Red Corsair to safety, who then discovers that his sister has been taken to Panama. We move on to the wealthy Spanish cities of Central America’s western coast. The chases, clashes, and sieges are repetitive, almost formulaic. An exception is the duel between the son of the Red Corsair and a hitman, a skilled swordsman hired to kill the Count of Ventimiglia. Deluded fool! The bandit “crouched down completely, almost curling into a ball.” It was his secret move: the hundred-pistole strike. The count’s sword caught him in the throat, sinking in several centimeters. > He stood almost upright for a moment, arms outstretched, then tumbled heavily into the sands, murmuring: I am finished . In this section of the novel as well, the real protagonist is a supporting character: a Gascon—a drunkard, a chatterbox, always ready to throw punches, yet capable of resolving the direst predicaments through his cunning and brazen audacity. The band of buccaneers is on the verge of being captured by the Spanish in the city of Panama. Whereupon the Gascon, instead of fleeing, steps forward and tells the guards he was there to serenade his > splendid Catalan girl, you know, with two eyes that sparkle like stars and... a sweet little mouth, my dear sirs, enough to turn the head even of the Lord President of the Royal Audiencia . On another occasion, he poses as a Castilian nobleman, the Count of Alcalá, laden with titles and names, and even manages to obtain horses, provisions, and muskets—naturally, to make his escape. It is one of the rare instances where Salgari departs from adventurous, imaginative, or shadowy storytelling to invent an amusing, witty character, a sort of Harlequin. The story naturally has a happy ending, yet a feeble and hurried one. Despite not knowing him, the sister, still a young girl, embraces her brother and flees with him. Yet she had never seen him before! She feels the pull of the blood tie: a somewhat shallow explanation. Even more so is another fact: once the son of the Red Corsair is captured, it is the Marquis of Montelimar himself who leads him to his sister. A true gentleman! What remains of the gloomy saga of *The Black Corsair*? Very little, merely the trappings! By the end of this lengthy novel, Salgari seems more preoccupied with convincing the reader that what he recounts is true, not invented, than with lending rhythm to the tale. The entire narrative frays; the author himself realizes he has dragged it out too far and for too long. Why skip it? It is dull, and that is surprising for Salgari.

Let us imagine that in a world—our own—imprisoned in a crystallized social structure, an extraordinary event occurs, upending established arrangements and enabling the destitute to climb the social ladder. Perhaps a revolution is possible only in the wake of a war or a natural disaster. With a tenuous narrative, this novel introduces the theme of change, setting it in an era far removed from our own: 452 AD, when the Huns invaded Italy. We find ourselves in Atesis, modern-day Este, a town then lapped by the Adige River, which shifted its course in 589 following a catastrophic flood. It is a sluggish town, dominated by a powerful Roman family and local notables, the so-called *curiales*. Pietro is a strapping, red-haired lad who works as a swineherd; a hulking fourteen-year-old, timid, withdrawn, illiterate, born of a single night of passion between his mother and a barbarian "who came from the sea, from the lands that lie beyond the great water." Having foolishly humored the curiosity of Giustina, the master's pretty, restless daughter, Pietro earns himself a sound thrashing—just punishment for daring to speak to the girl: a swineherd you are and a swineherd you shall remain; better to consort with the buxom Galla, a commoner like yourself! Everything changes with the arrival of the Huns, received with dread as ferocious, invincible warriors: > they appeared very tall and robust, with compact physiques (...), their steeds had foam frothing at their mouths and eyes full of madness . In reality, toward Pietro and Giustina, who find themselves held captive together, they do not behave as abominably as one might expect: they spare their lives and allow them to return home, where Pietro will fight valiantly in the epic, futile battle to save Atesis. The town is sacked, the countryside is overrun by barbarians and bandits, food and shelter are gone; there is nothing left to do but flee and seek refuge in the lagoons, where the Huns dare not venture for fear of pestilence. They set out on a perilous journey, alone, brutalized by fear and starvation: two teenage boys, Pietro and Tito; a girl accustomed to the comforts and protections of an affluent household, Giustina; and an old black mare. There is little point in following them across the plains and canals leading to the Venetian lagoons: the narrative is trite; it foreshadows *The Adventures of Tom Sawyer* without possessing any of its pace or suspense, gradually devolving into a cloying tale, rife with implausibilities, and thoroughly detached from its historical and natural setting. "There is no journey longer than the one that brings you home," the author declares in the Acknowledgments. After numerous novels set around the globe, Morosinotto turns his attention to his native soil, embarking on a saga that presumably intends to trace the fortunes of Pietro and Giustina—and their heirs?—in the founding of the future, magnificent Venice. Well, he might have applied greater care, rather than relying on timeless adolescent clichés (are we so certain that teenagers in 500 AD were just like our own?) and striving instead to cultivate an atmosphere rooted in the marshy wetlands of the lagoons. One must grudgingly concede that war serves as an effective device for pacing: the defense of Atesis, with its skirmishes and plot twists, engages the reader, evoking an *Iliad* in miniature. The prose flows lightly and smoothly, free of rough edges: an agreeable read, yet one that contributes to the sense of hurried superficiality permeating the novel. I would highlight a stylistic idiosyncrasy: across nearly four hundred pages, the punctuation consists solely of periods and commas; there is only a single colon, and not a single semicolon. A display of virtuosity à la Cesare Pavese, a nod to the journalistic style so in vogue, or pandering to an adolescent readership presumed unaccustomed to articulate syntax? Why not read it? It is trite and dull.

On December 15, 1943, the Jewish De Fano family was arrested and sent into internment: Omero, «the gentle bookbinder», the elementary school teacher Alma, her mother, and little Velia, the couple's daughter, an albino child nicknamed Fiordicotone. In the chaos of the roundup, the girl was hidden beneath a man's black cape, thereby surviving. Omero and the elderly mother were immediately put to death, while Alma was set aside for the SS officers for their sexual diversion. «Do whatever they ask of you, if only to save your life», her mother had told her, «naked among other stripped women». Yet if placing her body at the service of her tormentors had preserved her life, the experience had profoundly wounded her spirit. Looking into the mirror after the liberation, Alma > could not recognize herself. She had unbuttoned tunic and shirt and looked at herself. A perfect, desirable body. She saw herself colorless, her eyes worn out, her face faded and lifeless. In that body she once loved so much, she caught the sadness, the anguish of a solitude continuously abused . It was from this dual suffering, as an internee and as a prostitute, from the heaps of the dead and the humiliation endured ( > the sour taste in her mouth, on her skin the wretched, lingering scent of violence ) that there grew in Alma the perception that no afterwards existed, > for that hell was so bottomless and devoid of dignity as to leave no room for hope. Nothing was left. Only Fiordicotone. As is to be expected, the book recounts the search for the daughter: the initial shelter in Switzerland, the journey through a ruined Italy as far as Lugo, the discovery that the girl was no longer in the town, the struggles to learn where she was, and finally the encounter with Velia. An old blind woman's omen hung constantly over Alma: «You will find her, and when you have found her, you will return to the shadows». Like Alma, the reader too fails to understand the words, obscure as the oracles of the Sibyl. What does it mean to return to the shadows? We discover throughout the narrative that Alma cast no shadow; she was like a ghost, corporeal yet insubstantial, soulless. Alma «was the prisoner of a tattooed number», had no hope, and did not believe there was a future for her daughter. In tones perhaps overly melodramatic, yet keeping us suspended in anxious anticipation, the author carries us through to the conclusion.   In an earlier novel (*Il bambino del treno*, reviewed on this site), Paolo Casadio took as his starting point a true event, set in a precise location: a small, now-abandoned station on the Faenza–Florence railway line. Both the setting and the historical episode provided a concrete anchor for the narrative; along with the elegant style, they contributed to the novel's success. In *Fiordicotone*, Casadio disperses his focus across too many themes, from the existential drama of the internees to the search for the daughter. The unifying thread is not so much the story or the protagonist, but an aura of death, of ghosts hovering from the past, running the risk of slipping into «fantasy» (one need only consider the image of the shadow, frankly overstated) or, more nobly, into the evanescent, abstract register of much of Mario Luzi's poetry. In attempting to say too much, the author neglects the setting of Lugo di Romagna, the characters, and in particular the reconstruction of the ambiguities, the craven compromises, and the petty, well-intentioned subterfuges of so many people who nevertheless acquiesced to the horrific aims of the Nazi regime: consider, for instance, the figure of the *maresciallo*. The frequent resort to full stops, with the resulting verbless sentences, fragments the narrative and undermines the elegance of the prose: a detrimental legacy of the prevailing journalistic style. Why read it? It reads very well and is interesting from a historical perspective.

For William Faulkner, the short story is akin to poetry, "almost every word must be the right one"; and indeed, the narrative is dense, hermetic, rich in symbolism, and difficult to interpret. As in *Red Leaves*, the very choice of title raises numerous questions: what does it signify? For some commentators, the writer intended to refer to the cycle of the seasons, thereby emphasizing that what suffocates and destroys the Negro people is a natural destiny. The red leaves are said to express an existential, cosmic condition, as in Giuseppe Ungaretti’s poem addressed to the soldiers of the First World War: "Like leaves on trees in autumn." A great Indian chief has died; as tribal tradition dictates, those who served him in life (the dog, the horse, and his Negro slave) must follow him into the grave. Two Indians head to the slave quarters to retrieve the man. What disgusts them is the stench of the bodies, a revolting smell. The Negroes > seemed to be suspended as upon something remote, inscrutable. (...) They were like the roots of a great uptorn tree, the earth momentarily sheared away from the contorted, thick, fusty maze of its outraged and despairing life. From what the two men say, we learn that slavery is a burden, the fruit of the pure Indian people’s contamination by the white man. Born of a mixed marriage between an Indian and a white woman, the deceased himself had been to Europe and returned with several objects whose utility he did not understand; among them, a pair of red slippers; whenever his son tries to put them on, he falls into an unconscious state. What does this mean? Perhaps because > this world (...) is being ruined by white men. We got along fine for years and years, before the white men whooped us into using negroes. In the old days the old men sat in the shade and ate parched corn and venison slowly over the fire, and smoked and talked about honor and big things; and now what do we do? Contamination does not break the absurd ritual of death, as if to say that white, technological, and advanced society reinforces ancestral customs rather than evolving them toward civilized forms. It is mere corruption in an immobile society; it is not progress. Faulkner’s reflection does not concern only the American South, which, at least from what we know, seems trapped in nostalgia for the past; consider certain phenomena that strike us as inexplicable—femicide, infibulation, brutal exploitation—so widespread in our advanced Europe, despite proclaimed laws and values. Only individual acts of Resistance can overcome corruption and generate new visions and moral rules. Paradoxically, this is what the victim in our story does. The Negro, destined to follow his master into the grave, flees into the forest and, when captured, fights for life until the very end: he amputates an arm to survive the bite of a venomous snake; he accepts water on the brink of death. > It’s just that I didn't want to die, he said. Then he said again, it’s just that I didn’t want to die, in a quiet tone, of slow, faint wonderment, as if it were something which, until the words had formed themselves, he had not known, or not known the depth and measure of his desire . The death endured, without resignation yet with equanimity, bears witness to a moral strength absent in the story’s other characters, corrupted by white society while trapped in ancestral rituals. > The Negro was still about to step, his knee raised and bent, his head up as if he were looking into the teeth of a millrace. The pupils of his eyes were wild and cold, like a horse’s . Ralph Ellison, the first great African American writer, said that Faulkner > has actually explored the nature of man. (...) Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as man's weakness. He knew that understanding and overcoming fear was a large part of a writer's reason for being. Faulkner’s narrative is imbued with a strong ethical tension, a desperate quest for human goodness, for that which is deepest in the human being. He pursues this aim within his world, the American South, where everything in reality seems static and violent; yet what he narrates concerns us all; and quoting Ungaretti once again, one could say: "I seek an innocent country." At the center of his writing is the word, not the plot or the characters; and this is precisely its limitation, at least in the short stories: it is difficult to understand, it must be read too many times to grasp its manifold meanings, it demands too much imagination to interpret. Why not read it? It is difficult to interpret and, in fact, boring.

The novel is set in Spain during the Civil War and unfolds over the course of a few days. Jordan, an American, is dispatched behind enemy lines to blow up a bridge in support of an offensive by the Republican army. To carry out this mission, he makes contact with a band of guerrillas, among whom he meets Maria, with whom he falls in love. The group is led by Pablo, who clashes with Jordan, and Pilar, a fiercely strong and energetic woman. Despite internal friction, the group accomplishes the mission and Jordan destroys the bridge, but is killed during the escape. The novel’s true theme seems to be the futility of war, its inherent cruelty, manifested on both sides of the front. Powerfully tragic are the pages describing the capture of a town by Pablo’s band and the slaughter of the Fascists: one by one, they emerge from the church where they have been imprisoned and are forced to pass between the ranks of villagers and partisans, only to be hurled into a ravine. At first the crowd hesitates, but soon hatred and bloodshed take over. The same cruelty is pursued by the Fascists in the murder of a group of partisans who are decapitated. The anticipation of the final assault, the presence within the partisan group of a boy still very young who, shortly before dying, defends the integrity of a Communist party leader whose son has taken refuge in Russia, and the tragic impossibility of Jordan’s band to intervene and help represent magnificent moments in the novel that, more than any others, convey the cruelty of war. Yet war is not only cruel, it is also futile; moreover, it is senseless, and it always ends in death: > whether one is afraid or not, death is difficult to accept: there is no sweetness in its acceptance . The characters are caught in a machine whose futility and absurdity they grasp, yet from which they cannot break free. The destruction of the bridge is utterly pointless, as Franco’s army is aware of the Republican attack and possesses superior air power, thus making it highly probable that they will repel the offensive. Jordan tries to warn the Republican army commander, but bureaucracy, mistrust, and infighting prevent the message from arriving in time. And Jordan knows that «he will still have to destroy the bridge». Except for Pablo, who is a murderer, all the other characters are conscious of this cruelty: from old Anselmo, who does not want to kill yet finds himself forced to do so, to Jordan, who reads the letters of a slain soldier, making it starkly evident that he was a young man, with his own loved ones, likewise swept up in a senseless civil war. War overwhelms personal feelings as well. One must not dwell on loved ones or newly found love; the absurdity lies in Jordan, at the point of death and having had to leave Maria behind, deeming himself fortunate to have lived his final days with Maria’s love. Hemingway’s style is highly articulated, more effective in its descriptions than in its dialogue, which at times proves repetitive and tedious.

A renowned septuagenarian writer, Choko Kogito, returns to his childhood home to examine the suitcase where documents said to reveal the reasons behind his father's suicide are supposedly hidden. We find ourselves in a forest on the banks of the waters where his father drowned on a stormy evening. Choko visits the memorial commissioned by his mother to commemorate the tragic event. > A large, rounded stone protruded from the bare earth, resembling a fragment of a meteorite. When I drew closer and tried to get a better look -- it also bore a likeness to a strange, sea-green cluster of vegetation -- I noticed that it carried an inscription of merely five lines. (...) > You did not prepare Kogii to climb into the forest/ And as though caught by the river's current you will never return./ In Tokyo during the dry season/ Memories surface in my mind in reverse/ From old age back to the years of childhood . The first two lines were written by his mother, urging Choko to prepare for death, but also to ready his son—her grandson, burdened with a severe disability—for the end of life. This is an initial leitmotif running through the entire novel: the contemplation of Death, the desperate clinging to life that manifests as the > lack of the courage needed to attempt writing his "final work" and upend his entire oeuvre. The remaining lines, composed by the writer himself, signal the other theme, likewise characteristic of old age: journeying back to the years of childhood, confronting the figure of the father, interrogating the manifold facets of Memory. Other novels come to mind, such as Salvatore Satta’s *The Day of Judgment* or Christine Dwyer Hickey’s splendid *The Cold Eye of Heaven* (see the reviews on this site). Kenzaburo does not wish to write an "I-novel," where the subject stands at the very center of the narrative, ceaselessly speaking of himself, reducing setting, events, and other people to a mere "mirroring ego." To avoid lapsing into the narcissistic ego so pervasive in our time, Kenzaburo resorts to accounts related by others and to theatrical representations, casting the writer as an astonished, admiring spectator. As in Dante, the protagonist-narrator remains in the background, overshadowed by characters and events. This preamble sidelines the plot, which nevertheless exists and will burst forth toward the end of the novel. Choko wants to recount his father's drowning, which he witnessed helplessly as a child. Why did his father kill himself? And why did Kogii, the imaginary friend, lure him toward the waters? What does memory hold? At first, everything seems distinct; then, everything blurs and vanishes between imagination and reality. > All at once I saw dozens of silvery dace before me, (...) and beneath that school of fish, enveloped in the silt of the dark riverbed, I had the distinct impression of catching sight of a large, naked body.... my father! His character gently floated, cradled by the underwater current. And there I was, watching him, trying to mimic his movements. (...) I took an index card and wrote: "I love my father desperately." The suitcase contains no clues to decipher his father’s suicide; Choko sinks into depression, withdraws into himself, mistreats his son, and might even kill himself. What saves him is a young actress, Unaiko, who involves him in the scriptwriting of an episode dating back to the mid-nineteenth century: a peasant revolt led by a woman, a rebellion bloodily suppressed, with the woman subjected to a gang rape before being executed. It seems an "innocuous" historical incident to commemorate, until Unaiko decides to declare during the performance that as a child she was repeatedly raped by her uncle, a powerful official, and that the entire matter was silenced. A scandal looms, the hypocrisy of Japanese society is laid bare, reality bursts onto the stage, and Choko is saved. It is difficult to summarize this complex novel in a review. Alongside the themes already noted, there are many others: the physical decline of the man and the writer, reminiscent of Thomas Mann's *Death in Venice* (see the review on this site); disability, and thus the burden of having a "different" child; the cathartic role of theater, which also enables the demystification of one of the seminal texts of modern Japanese literature, Natsume Sōseki's *The Heart of Things* [*Kokoro*] (review on this site); the magical allure of nature, a quintessential Japanese motif; and finally, the social and cultural transformations of contemporary Japan, still suspended between tradition and modernity. Many topics are present—perhaps too many. The reader presses forward, losing themselves in the meanders of the narrative, at once fascinated and fatigued. To his father, who was speaking to him of the *Great Dictionary of Chinese Characters*, the adolescent Kenzaburo Choko replied: > if all words are in a dictionary, then it will no longer be possible to find new ones, and there won't be any fun left! With an elegant, fluid style, drawing upon deft technical and stylistic devices, the writer explores numerous modes of expression, from epistolary exchanges to theater, from music to oneiric lyricism. It is a broad narrative keyboard (with a lexical one impossible to pin down), in which Kenzaburo indulges all too frequently, ultimately weighing down and protracting the tale, causing the central core to be lost from view. As the author himself observes, they seem like "fragments," as though the unity of Being were no longer attainable. Why read it? It is a stream of consciousness with an unobtrusive "I."

The narrator-protagonist sets off from Berlin on a long journey through the countries to the east of Germany, across that vast geopolitical space where everything seems to have taken place unbeknownst to us Western Europeans. First, she visits the grand German Historical Museum in Berlin with her daughter (a visit I recommend to everyone), and in the area dedicated to the Shoah, her daughter asks her: > where are we here on this panel, Mama? (...) I would have liked to add that we did not appear in that image at all . Yet that is not true, and it is perhaps for this reason that she seeks to trace back her family tree: Jewish, partly Polish and partly Russian, victim of dramatic upheavals: the collapse of great empires, the Russian Civil War, the rebirth and partition of Poland, Nazism and Stalinism with their massacres, slaughters, ghettos, concentration camps, millions of dead; and worse still, the loss of one's own language and one's own history. And indeed the author skips, “in an odd and clumsy way, like the needle on a record that has reached its end.” Names and pet names follow one another along the family tree, and it is futile to identify and remember them; the confusion is perhaps intentional. Certain passages of the narrative leave a lasting impression, such as the genocide at Babi Yar, not least through the words of the great poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (“Every old man shot here/me. Every child shot here/me”). In general, people, events, places, and words are like “lost scripts,” inscriptions found by chance that one tries to decipher, without even understanding which alphabet they belong to. > I realized that I had arrived too late, that knowledge had been lost, and I lacked the strength to recover it; I had lingered, with my birth and in general; it was not a fault, it was just too late . But does it make sense, then, to search for one's roots? Or does that “naturally” used by the author at the opening of the story serve to > underline the senselessness of her journey, (...) as if that disappearance and that nothingness were natural or even obvious phenomena . In Warsaw, the author believed she had found the house where her family had lived, only to discover it was another one, now destroyed. > During the night I couldn't sleep, I dreamed of the sauna, the ghetto, naked bodies twisted in death or pleasure, I dreamed of difference, men and women, (...) I don't know whether I was ever among my own people and who my people are, these ruins around us and inside us, and the transition from one language to another that I undertake in order to be on both sides, to be at once me or not-me, (...) in German language is feminine, in Russian it is masculine, what have I done with this exchange? It is a difficult book due to its disorderly plot, as if it were an assemblage of anecdotes, places, and characters crowding the mind without finding an order, a rational arrangement. It is as if memory loomed over and overwhelmed the protagonist; the images are too powerful, the pain too intense. > Knife blades emerge from the wall and move a short distance from the body. They hang somewhere, (...) and you describe them from a theoretical perspective, (...) but you cannot convey that terror, nor the horror of their presence, because to convey it means acknowledging it and granting it access. So terrible are these things. Granted, the family history is exceptional, but one wonders whether it truly makes sense to lift the lid on the past—what does it lead to, if not tears and delirium? The novel closes with an emblematic episode. > When I found myself in front of the house that was supposed to be mine, (...) an elderly lady (...) said to me—or was it perhaps a reprimand?—I've run into you a bit too often around here lately! And in astonishment I replied that I hadn't been there in years. That doesn't count for anything, she said . It is a splendid metaphor for the dark fascination of remembrance. Why read it? It is difficult, yet elegant and refined. It offers a narrative reflection of a history and culture unknown to us

The novel is set in the “Negro” neighborhoods of New York. The narrative style proceeds “in little hops,” making for heavy reading. It is difficult to pass judgment because I cannot muster the concentration needed to follow an apparently nonexistent plot and difficult writing, even translated into Italian.

Francesca and Nunziata are two women upon whom chance bestowed a shared object of love: pasta making. The novel chronicles the story of a family of Neapolitan pasta makers and their evolution from simple craftsmen into industrialists. The story begins shortly before the Expedition of the Thousand and the fall of the Bourbons. Francesca’s grandfather produces the finest pasta in Naples, enlisting his numerous offspring in the work. This is the most evocative part of the narrative, owing also to the use of Neapolitan in the dialogue. Exquisite are the scenes of the *fusillare* at work and their reception of the machine destined to replace their labor: > “Girls, girls, get your bundles ready, get your bundles ready!” Disdainful, the *fusillare* ostentatiously feigned ignorance of the intricate workings of that cumbersome contraption, but the women of the household paused beside it with delight, and the little girls gathered around it in celebration And the grandfather would sing, “Gold and diamonds has the Sultan, but I hold your braids in these hands of mine.” That was the time when > the great ranks of his family, accustomed to sacrifice, industrious and spirited, had always drawn serene happiness from every small thing, but that was the time of their fullest joy . The narrative resumes much later with Francesca, by now a major entrepreneur, a wealthy and powerful woman. As an act of thanksgiving for the recovery of one of her daughters, Francesca adopts Nunziata, a poor orphan girl. Nunziata is the only one among Francesca’s numerous children to work in the pasta factory, thus acquiring the art of pasta making from early childhood. > She hasn’t grown much, Francesca thought, she has stayed small, but she has ironclad health, and besides, she is a worker, she is just like me . Yet Nunziata is a spirited, sensual young woman: she is left pregnant by her adoptive brother, the handsome and cultured Federico. Francesca decides to marry her off to cover up the scandal, and as she bids her farewell, asks what gift she desires: > a *ruotolo* of gold, a diamond parure... And Nunziata had summoned her courage and raised her eyes to answer her. For a moment their gazes met: I want two presses for making macaroni > . In the third part of the novel, Nunziata has become a successful entrepreneur, while Francesca has suffered a series of financial misfortunes that have brought her to ruin. Nunziata’s days, in their rhythm of sunshine and anxieties, sorrows and songs, bore the distinct mark of tireless industriousness, of sacrifice without neglect, just like Francesca’s. Yet in their unfolding they were cheerier and more fortunate, and in their slow unwinding more fulfilled. It brightened her life and helped her endure: *tressette* > . Nunziata is an independent, unconventional woman, sustained by an atavistic desire to live, even off life’s smallest things. Her lovers, alongside her deep bond with Federico’s family—now fallen into destitution—place her in stark conflict with her children. Nunziata’s personal decline, opposed and isolated, is emblematic of the end of a civilization: Naples disappears, submerged beneath a blight that would dry up the working lifeblood of a proud, skilled craftsmanship and erase the vital importance of experience and expertise. The book is a grand fresco that can be read from many vantage points: a hymn to a Southern vitality too often forgotten, the history of Naples and its squandered opportunities, the evolution of an industry from manual labor to mechanization, the role of families and of women. Such a complex narrative rests not so much on its characters and plot as on a lush, captivating style, all while remaining firmly anchored in the storytelling. Beyond the first part—the most authentic and exhilarating—there are some truly magnificent pages, such as the description of the luncheon offered by Francesca. Red and yellow, arranged in quiet rows, gently withered by the fire, muted in the tone of their colors, the stuffed peppers retained glistening oils within their weakened veins, within the wrinkles of their wilting flesh, and slackened, limp and almost sensual, their splits offering a glimpse into the secret of the filling and the eyes of the black olives.” And then the final touch: “The two men of faith went off to eat them in the seclusion of the pine grove... and so in the dark, only the stone eyes of a malevolent Hercules, noseless and handless, knew the carnality of the meal.” Why read it? It is a hymn to Naples, to industry, to women, and to the Italian language.

An old junk dealer, a drunkard and charlatan, stitches together a corpse from the fragments of bodies torn apart by bombs—so frequent in Baghdad during the American occupation in 2005 and 2006. An old woman lives in contemplation of a painting of Saint George, who, in her eyes, has promised the return of her son, missing for twenty-five years in the Iran-Iraq War. Hasib, a young hotel security guard, is killed in an explosion triggered by a Sudanese suicide bomber. It is impossible to piece his body back together, and his family is left to weep over an empty coffin, as so often happens in Baghdad today. Yet the young man’s soul takes possession of the corpse reconstructed by the junk dealer, breathing new life into it. Is this the doing of Saint George, seeking by these means to fulfill the pledge made to the old woman, deceiving her for a greater good? Or > each member of the family dreamed something about Hasib, and those dreams, assembled and intertwined, contemplated one another, (...) giving birth to Hasib’s dream body. (...) And some of them went too far in their dreaming, pushing the tangled, compact skein of dreams with their own hands far away, farther than family, friends, relatives, and neighbors combined could have imagined, to a place that would never have crossed their minds ? Superstition, imagination, and lies are merely facets of history that one ultimately comes to believe, > forgetting that they were merely lies turned true at some point in the past . Be that as it may, a new being, dubbed the “Whatsitsname,” comes to life, stalking the streets of a Baghdad neighborhood; and we follow him along his trajectory: at first an avenger, determined to > mete out exemplary punishment, (...) for the innocents who have no support other than their own souls striving to defend themselves against death ; in the end a murderer, who kills simply to remain alive, replacing decaying parts (a hand, an eye, toes...) with fresh ones. > That was his only justification. He did not want to decompose and vanish. (...) This was why he clung to life, perhaps more than the others—those who surrendered theirs, their lives, and pieces of their bodies, just like that, out of fear . The Whatsitsname has much to tell; he harbors the memories of all who provided pieces of their bodies, yet the only person who listens to him is the old woman, who believes him to be the ghost of her lost son. Yet even she cannot comprehend him; she is weary, it is time for bed. > “Why don’t you rest, my son? Shall I lay out a small mattress for you in the courtyard?” she said, putting an end to his long, sprawling monologue. He felt he truly wanted (...) to lie down on the thin cotton mattress, gazing at the square of sky and counting the stars until falling asleep. But that life was not granted to him . Summarized thus, the novel might seem a cross between a macabre tale and a metaphysical parable, an allegory of today’s existential condition, in Iraq as elsewhere: the only way to reassemble one’s fragmented existence, both individual and collective, is to plunder parts from others, in an endless vicious circle that can sustain itself only through perpetual looting. Fortunately, around this main narrative thread unfold other subplots, leaving the reader unsure whether they are mere background color or the book’s true subject: the neighborhood life and its denizens; the tribulations of a brilliant young journalist ground down by the machineries of power, women, and easy money; a shadowy intelligence department that relies on astrologers and necromancers to divine the bombings that soak the city in blood and unmask their perpetrators; and finally the author himself, the accidental chronicler of a pervasive fear, of > an image that shifted and multiplied according to the number of heads resting on pillows in the night, anxious and alert . Numerous characters and diverse situations alternate and overlap, all rendered with an ironic and paradoxical touch, effectively turning the entire novel into a vast metaphor for power and for how > there are laws that operate only under specific circumstances, and when something occurs that obeys these laws, man is astounded and claims it to be an absurdity, a superstition, or, at best, a miracle . Delicate, elegant, light yet far from superficial, steeped in nostalgia and affection for Baghdad, the novel is near perfect; it lacks only narrative pace. The story unfolds slowly, fragmenting into too many episodes and characters, confusing the reader and depriving the work both of narrative surprises and of the psychological depth that would have lent substance to its protagonists. Why read it? It is an absorbing read despite confronting a harrowing reality.

The novel is set in a Russian provincial town and deals with the events surrounding the Karamazov family and the complex relationships between the father and his sons. The narrative can be divided into three fundamental parts. In the first part, the profiles of the main characters are outlined through a succession of dramatic events, in which the sons' feelings toward their father are revealed (contempt and hatred, but also the awareness of being "cut from the same cloth"), and thereby the complex, contradictory temperaments of the protagonists: Dmitri, impulsive and "animalistic," yet also swept away by passion and love; Ivan, cynical and reflective, yet also anguished by a profound sense of guilt and despair (over the suffering of humanity and the consciousness of being like his father); Alyosha, good and gentle, yet in a sense a bystander to the dramatic events and himself gripped by a sensuality inherited from his father; and finally the old Karamazov's illegitimate son, Smerdyakov, who embodies all the pain, the sense of injustice, and the hatred also present in the brothers, but in an "animalistic" and therefore unrestrained dimension. The first part of the novel, the richest in themes and resonances, depicts the philosophical and religious world of the narrative, in the extensive treatment of Father Zosima (his worldview, his death, and the disillusionment over the rapid decomposition of his corpse), and then in the dialogue between Ivan and Alyosha (the chapters *Rebellion* and *The Grand Inquisitor*). In the second part, the events leading to the murder of old Karamazov and the arrest of Dmitri are depicted. These are the most fragile chapters of the book, centered primarily on the figure of Dmitri and on two female characters: Katerina Ivanovna (Dmitri's fiancée, who nevertheless loves Ivan) and Grushenka, the woman who provides the ostensible motive for the crime (Dmitri loves Grushenka, who is in turn coveted by old Karamazov). The second part concludes with the mutual acknowledgment of love between Dmitri and Grushenka. The third part describes the trial, with the closing arguments of the prosecutor and the defense counsel. Yet the true focus of this part lies in the encounter between Ivan and Smerdyakov, and in the latter’s accusation against Ivan: Smerdyakov murdered old Karamazov because he felt sanctioned by Ivan’s departure. In truth, Ivan is the real instigator of the crime. This revelation gives rise to Ivan's descent into madness and, in a sense, to Katerina's decision to present in court a letter from Dmitri foreshadowing the murder, which will form the basis of the conviction. Critics typically speak of two levels on which the characters should be "read": the empirical and the metaphysical. In truth, one should also distinguish between the metaphysical-religious level and the metaphysical-philosophical one. From the "empirical" point of view, the rhythm of the narrative rests essentially on dialogue between the characters and is embodied in the theme of the contradiction between rationality and irrationality: the characters appear driven by two conflicting forces, yet are continually brought back to a "destiny" grounded in the intrinsic nature (in their genetic code, as one might say today) of the individual. This is the plight of the Karamazov brothers: they hate and despise their father, or take pity on him (in Alyosha's case), but in every instance they are forged from the very same nature, to which they are irremediably bound. This ineluctability of their nature is clear to Ivan (and lies at the root of his madness); it is conspicuous in Dmitri and Smerdyakov, yet it also surfaces in Alyosha, for instance in his dealings with young Kolya. As Ivan says in a conversation with Alyosha: > why lie to oneself, when all men live like this and perhaps cannot live otherwise? Are you asking me this on account of what I said just now, that one reptile will inevitably devour the other? Allow me then, in that case, to ask you a question: do you believe me capable, like Dmitri, of shedding Aesop's blood—that is, of killing him? . The second level is the religious one, which is deeply intertwined with the theme of suffering and its compatibility with the existence of God. As Ivan says to Alyosha in the chapter *Rebellion*: > if all must suffer in order to purchase eternal harmony with suffering, what have children to do with it?... I do not want harmony; I do not want it out of love for humanity... It is not that I do not accept God, Alyosha: I simply, most respectfully, return Him the ticket. If the sufferings of children have gone to replenish the sum of suffering needed to pay for the truth, I declare right now that no truth is worth such a price . There is no certainty in faith; Alyosha himself doubts the very moment he witnesses the decomposition of Father Zosima’s body, and, above all, God cannot be justified if such suffering exists in the world. The third level is the philosophical one, bound to the rise of modern man. It is in the chapter of *The Grand Inquisitor* that the conflict is articulated between Christ's sacrifice to grant men freedom of judgment and the desire of the Church (and thus of any Institution) to keep men in a state of tutelage. Thus speaks the Grand Inquisitor: > what fault is it of the weak soul if it lacks the strength to receive such terrible gifts?... And if there is a mystery, we too had the right to preach mystery and teach men that it is not the free choice of their hearts that matters, nor even love, but mystery, to which they must bow blindly, even against their conscience. And so we have done. We have corrected Thy work and founded it upon miracle, mystery, and authority . The link between the three levels (empirical, religious, and philosophical) is forged by Ivan's assertion that everything is possible for man: this articulates a concept of the "man without limits" that lies at the root of all the novel's events, its philosophical framework, and the contradictions present within the characters and the spirit that animates the book.

Among the possible meanings of the word *Freedom*, one defines it as > being able or having the opportunity to do what one wants without being restricted by something or someone (Collins Dictionary). The characters in this novel have always lived poised between the “set of possibilities” and events (what used to be called destiny), which push inexorably toward a specific direction in life. There are no externally imposed constraints; rather, it is the very nature of things that leads down one path rather than another. And life is made up of the complexity of interpersonal structures, of conformism, and of the pursuit of realizing ideas that are often theoretical and generic. The story unfolds between the Reagan and Obama presidencies, set within an increasingly frightened American middle class, riddled with divisions, moral and political dilemmas, and a burgeoning awareness of the nation’s decline. As in all good bourgeois stories, it begins with a triangle: Walter, an earnest young man brimming with environmentalist ideals, loves Patty, a star basketball player who feels rejected, on account of this passion, by her politically prominent, establishment family. Patty, in turn, is drawn to Richard, a musician and Walter’s close friend. Patty and Richard take a car trip together to join Walter, and for Patty it becomes a missed opportunity: Richard, a consummate womanizer, refuses to sleep with his best friend’s fiancée. The bond between Patty and Richard feeds on regret. > in all these years, (Patty) had treasured the memory of their little trip, had kept it locked in a deep interior space, letting it age like wine, so that, symbolically, what might have happened between them remained alive and grew older with the two of them . Within Richard there grew “envy of his friend for his unwitting possession of his wife.” Walter and Patty’s marriage drags on wearily (“they could not live together, but could not imagine living apart”), until a vacation by Patty and Richard in Walter’s beloved old lake house, set in a stunning natural landscape, precipitates events: the two sleep together. Walter cannot accept being betrayed by his best friend: the couple separates, doing so just as Walter finally realizes he cannot pursue abstract environmental ideals with the money of American capitalism. And it is precisely from the breakdown of false interpersonal relationships and the undoing of vague ideals that Patty and Richard find each other again and can rebuild the family. In truth, the book is not confined to these three characters; it also involves the younger (Walter and Patty’s children) and older generations, chronicling the histories of their families of origin. There are also numerous forays into the political and social issues that have characterized America in recent decades; the author is particularly invested in environmental themes, which are also framed as an emblem of the hypocrisy and vacuity of much of the bourgeoisie. The message seems invariably the same: it is impossible to change the world; we must learn to live with ourselves and our problems. Emblematic in this regard is the final chapter. Walter has retreated into nature, finding his life’s mission in the defense of migratory birds, particularly against a domestic cat prone to murderous rampages. This stance puts him in conflict with the small middle-class community bordering the nature reserve. The tensions are resolved when Patty returns; she nurtures social ties with the neighbors (the conformism of the American bourgeoisie) and eventually brings Walter back to New York, back to the family. At that point, the organization managing the reserve erects a dividing wall between the natural habitat where the migratory birds nest and the small community. Is the world, then, composed of countless walls, within which each person seeks their own freedom? And does true freedom perhaps lie in that other possible meaning of the word *Freedom*: “the condition of being able to move around,” even within separate worlds? The book’s greatest strength undoubtedly lies in its style—marked by tight, highly effective dialogue—and in the depth of its psychological and existential exploration of the characters and their mutual relationships. The narrative pacing is slow, and the story unfolds sluggishly. Overall, it is dominated by that intellectualized, erudite, yet often evanescent approach typical of many contemporary American writers. Why read it? It is interesting, but recommended only to a very patient reader.

San Suu was born in 1945, two years before the assassination of her father, founder of independent Burma and national hero. This biographical detail is essential to understanding this collection of essays, speeches, letters, and interviews, published between 1984 and 1994. Aims and prose vary, circumstances change, yet San Suu’s concern always shines through: to understand her father’s legacy, > to communicate what she has understood and to apply it to the problems of her own country . The essay that lends its title to the collection (*Freedom from Fear*) must not mislead: San Suu is not a moral philosopher, a sort of modern holy figure; she is, first and foremost, a political persona, characterized by a strong and prevailing ethical dimension. When the Burmese dissident calls for liberation from fear and corruption, she intends to assert > the firm conviction in the sanctity of ethical principles combined with a historical vision: despite setbacks, the human condition is placed on an ultimate path of spiritual and material progress . In a recent speech at the International Women’s Forum, San Suu defined politics as > the means to change society, and the change must be effective, not symbolic. And how effective it is depends on how correctly we evaluate the needs of the people and the country (quoted in *La Stampa*, 9 December 2014). That this is a long-pondered reflection emerges from a key essay included in the collection (*Quest for Democracy*). In it she affirms that > the true measure of the justice of a system is the amount of protection it guarantees to the weakest. Where there is no justice there cannot be a secure peace . We are speaking, therefore, of social justice, certainly not of abstract concepts belonging to the realm of philosophy and religion. To properly interpret San Suu’s thought, one must read the insightful analysis the author provides of intellectual life in Burma and India during colonialism. It is impossible to summarize such a complex essay: suffice it to say, in short, that the comparison with India allows San Suu to advance a severe critique of Burmese culture, of Buddhism itself, a “monolithic religion (...) with inflexible barriers”; to identify the sources of the regime’s consensus not so much in repression as in ethnic differences and chauvinism against Chinese and Indian communities; and to clarify how her inspirations are Gandhi and, above all, Nehru, her true spiritual father: a great politician, therefore, is her touchstone. If one does not stop at the vacuous, banal words of *Freedom from Fear* (but why does it lend its title to the collection?), one realizes that San Suu has no intention of locking herself within the spiritualist and Buddhist persona that the West would like to assign to her; she wants to be judged by what she manages to achieve for her country. To those urging her to leave Burma, > I replied that I would do nothing from abroad, and that if I wished to commit myself to a political movement, I would have to do so from within the country . Having read the entire collection, one asks oneself: has San Suu truly reckoned with her father? The answer is no. The daughter, San Suu, continues to idealize the father figure, without asking herself why the dictatorship originated in an army forged by her father: a man educated in monasteries, yet trained militarily and politically by the Japanese. As often happens, filial love compromises the lucidity and detachment that are, in any case, necessary in a political figure. Why not read it? It is dull, perhaps pointless. fragmentary, repetitive, and prolix.

I have always wondered why Italian editions do not retain the original title. It often conveys the sense of the book far better, as in the case of *From the Land of Green Ghosts*, which became, who knows why, *Il ragazzo che parlava col vento*. The title "from the land of green ghosts" neatly encapsulates the autobiography of one who, to save himself, had to forfeit his own identity through detachment from the spirits of an ancestral world made of lush fruits, rice paddies, forests, water, birds, and animals. Then again, misunderstanding must be this novel's destiny, if in his preface John Casey himself—Pascal's savior, mentor, and friend—offers this definition: > this is less a book of politics and history than a spiritual autobiography, in which, uniquely, (Pascal) writes from the perspective of a member of a Bronze Age tribal society, recently opened to the outside world, and at the same time of someone who ultimately managed to receive a Western education at a famous English university . Truly an arrogant and reductive assessment for someone who endured terrible atrocities, witnessing the material and social destruction of Burma! The novel is divided into three parts. The first part, "Tribal Idyll," depicts a tribal, agrarian world on the fringes of the great forests. > We were Padaung, we were Catholic, and we seemed to live in a world of our own, with our ceremonies and traditions. We had no sense that anything different could break in. The feeling of being safe showed me that we were living in paradise . The author describes for us, as meticulously as an anthropologist, the customs, way of life, and natural environment of the Padaung, even detailing, with a wealth of particulars curious to us, the food and the manner of cooking it. We discover ancestor worship, the formidable authority of the elders, and the spiritualistic and magical elements that characterize every moment of life. Even though Catholic—and the same holds true for Buddhists—the tribe jealously continues to preserve its traditions, all while observing the precepts of the new religion. His paternal grandmother's tales permeate Pascal's childhood: they are grim stories, like all folklore of peasant societies, yet in them animals, particularly birds, seal the fate of men. One day, the young Pascal catches an owl and wishes to cook it, but his grandmother tells him to speak to it and release it, so that one day he might call upon it for help. > Years later, when I was in the greatest danger, that memory became fraught with meaning for me . Through his involvement with the parish, Pascal receives an initial education and develops a passion for learning. He leaves the village to attend first a seminary, then university. He becomes a student, which places him in the most dynamic and politicized segment of Burmese society. Toward the regime—authoritarian, cruel, mendacious, and corrupt—Pascal has yet to take a stand. There is no political consciousness, and even the grief over the imprisonment and death of his girlfriend does not seem to translate into a deliberate taking of sides. Yet he is a student, and therefore an enemy of the regime. He must flee and hide in the jungle. The second part, "Revolution and Struggle," recounts Pascal’s experiences among the rebels, who have entrenched themselves in the border areas between Burma and Thailand. Through Pascal’s pen, we witness countless atrocities; suffice it to say that Burmese soldiers advance through minefields—laid, moreover, by themselves—by herding beaten, terrorized, and starving civilians ahead of them, clearing a path through bodies torn apart by explosions. Such is the cruelty that even > the animals and birds, which regularly drank from the river, fled, leaving only the human beings trapped in a fit of madness . The third part, "Rescue," recounts how Pascal managed to escape to Thailand and reach England, where he would become a professor of English literature. The story has a happy ending, yet there is a disturbing revelation. In Cambridge, at a dinner party at the home of English friends, he learns that he was singled out for rescue because years earlier his hosts had attended a circus performance of "giraffe women"—Padaung women with elongated necks adorned with metal rings; in short, Western man delights in preserving specimens of rare and endangered species. Yet is Pascal aware of this? No, because as the closing lines tell us, by now his dreams are > images all jumbled together, the elements overlapping. Snow might fall on the jungles, or palm trees grow on the Alps. The visions are often blurred by mist . It is a long novel, dominated by a flat narrative style incapable of conveying sensations and emotions. It is as if he were a reporter investigating, describing, filing an account. While the facts undeniably speak for themselves, it is not the writing that grips us; it is the history of Burma itself. It is no coincidence that the narrative engages the reader in the second part, as the tempo accelerates and the episodes of war and violence cannot fail to shatter us. Yet even here, the narrating "I" and protagonist, Pascal, appears almost as a bystander, a social scientist. Could it be that the author is forced to write in a language not his own? Or is this apparent detachment a psychological shield to survive, to defend against memory, against a destructive existential grief? Why skip it? The book is worth reading only if one harbors a deep interest in the landscape and history of Burma.

Mattia Pascal lives in a provincial town and has found himself, almost by chance, married, poor, and working as a librarian. He suffers from the stagnation of his existence and is terrified by the idea of living “thus, always, until death, without any change, ever…”. Seeking a momentary escape, he flees to Monte Carlo, where he gambles at the casino and wins a substantial sum. He then discovers that in his hometown the unrecognizable body of a suicide victim has been found, presumed to be him, Mattia. This is the most felicitous part of the novel: briskly paced, ironic, rich in well-crafted portraits and an effective depiction of provincial life and the milieu of casino gamblers. Upon the news of his presumed death, Mattia decides to disappear, to become another man, freed from all ties to the past, > with my conscience made virgin and transparent once more, and the vigilant spirit of my new self . This is, however, an illusion, for within deceit he cannot live authentically. He becomes fully aware of this when he falls in love with a woman to whom he cannot declare himself. In truth, Pirandello is not so much interested in the drama of Mattia Pascal the man as in the paradox of a character who has managed to deceive even death. Is life not perhaps an immense mystery, Pirandello asks himself, and “all this mystery does not exist outside of us, but only within us,” and > what if death did not exist, but were merely the extinction of the wretched feeling we have of it ? In the second part of the novel, the author loses interest in the study of characters and situations, which become increasingly predictable and mundane, focusing instead on his cherished theme: life as an illusion, as a hall of mirrors reflecting consciousness—a consciousness that is, moreover, false and deceitful—of the self. The narrative pace becomes slow and repetitive, the dialogues are in many instances redundant, and the book loses the freshness and originality of its opening pages. The conclusion of the novel comes as no surprise. Trapped within a web of lies, Mattia Pascal decides to stage a second suicide—that is, to die once again—and return to being Mattia Pascal. Yet his wife has remarried, rightly believing herself a widow; thus Mattia Pascal, even having returned to “real” life, must continue to live in deceit and falsehood. He is now, irrevocably, the Late Mattia Pascal. The desire to “evaporate,” as the Japanese say, is one of the never truly voiced aspirations of every human being. Can one retrace one's steps? Can one live another life? Pirandello seems to answer in the negative, not because he believes that what matters are the authentic relationships we maintain with people and with the environment in which we live, but because he is convinced that everything is an illusion and a deception. This is the theme of Pirandello’s major plays, which, from a stylistic standpoint, hinge on the dialectic between characters—an extraordinarily effective device for unveiling the lie in which we live. Transferred to the novel, this approach renders it ponderous, diminishing the pleasure of the reading experience. Why read it? The momentum and irony of the novel’s first part compensate for the sluggishness of the second.

“If this were, for instance, a Hemingway story, by the second paragraph its protagonist would already be shooting fascists, (...) a nurse would have fallen in love with him (...). Naturally, she would be a woman so wonderful and caring that she would die along with the baby during childbirth, if only to save him from the monotony of family life. (...) However, I am not Hemingway. Looking at things realistically, for the most part I am merely an extra in my own story.” The narrator—such a nonentity that we are not even told her name—is a young woman who spends her time glued to the TV, binge-watching her beloved shows. How do the Japanese manage to barricade themselves inside; don’t they have mothers? And hers forces our protagonist to abandon her cozy, protective den to attend the funeral of Aunt Stana, who choked to death on a chicken bone. She finds herself thrust into ancestral, corroded family ties in the village of her childhood, where adolescent dynamics—long repressed or simply buried in the deepest recesses of the soul—resurface. The narrative is caustically ironic and yet so violent that it repeatedly forces the narrator to pause “and take a breath of fresh air.” The relatives are extreme figures, caricatures of the archetypes found in every family: the overbearing and the submissive personalities, the mutual hatred and contempt calcified over decades, the rote repetition of habits and gestures, the vulgar greed over a prospective inheritance. And at the center of it all is she, the narrator, invisible, just as when “the bus drivers would drive right past me without stopping, even when I stood in the middle of the station, even waving my hand at them.” Events rapidly escalate. A torrential downpour sweeps everything away, dragging our protagonist into a ditch of mud where she might finally rot in peace; though, knowing her luck, archaeological excavations will likely exhume her centuries later: “there’s simply no way people will ever leave you in peace!” That is, until a stroke of fortune lands her a thick roll of euros hidden inside an overcoat. “At that moment, a brilliant idea flashed through my mind. I’d love to tell you all about it in detail, but unfortunately I don’t have the time. The hill above me is about to vanish in a terrible explosion, and right now I don’t much feel like sticking around for the show. I have to leave at once. If I don't hurry, everything could easily turn to dust.” The novel is set in Bosnia, yet the backdrop could easily be Japan, Italy, or anywhere else in the world. Both the allure and the limitation of many Eastern European writers lie in the universality of their stories. As in László Krasznahorkai’s *The Melancholy of Resistance* and Elvira Mujčić’s *La buona condotta* (see the reviews on this site), here too the author operates within an ahistorical, surreal, and Kafkaesque dimension. If, on the one hand, the reader sees themselves reflected in the narrative (who among us hasn't attended a funeral among complete strangers for relatives?), on the other, one fails to sense the tragedy of a nation like Bosnia and Herzegovina—torn for years by religious, linguistic, and national divides, perpetually teetering on the brink of civil war. Or is this an escape from a harsh, harrowing reality that frees the writer to tell extraordinary tales, as the author suggests in the afterword? From a narrative standpoint, the prose flows smoothly within a well-constructed plot, even if it ultimately grows repetitive and predictable. While it is true that the narrator is merely an “extra,” the story becomes far more compelling precisely when she steps forward, offering evocative windows into her life and oneiric departures—glimpses into her personality that are all too brief. Why read it? For its biting, surreal dissection of the family unit.

The book is part of a series that explores social and civic issues through the lens of noir. In this case, the backdrop is the Camorra. Leonardo is a businessman colluding with organized crime. Seeking revenge for a slight, he attempts to kill someone under the protection of a powerful clan boss and is subsequently forced to go on the run, accompanied by his daughter, who remains entirely unaware of her father's true line of work. He takes temporary refuge in a holiday resort in Salento. In parallel, another story unfolds: Lu is a troubled youth sent by his father for a few days to stay with relatives, also in Salento, near the resort where Leonardo and his daughter are staying. A romance begins between Lu and the daughter, Cecilia. Meanwhile, in an effort to protect himself, Leonardo makes contact with another clan boss, a bitter enemy of the first mobster. As Leonardo sinks ever deeper into criminal complicity—to the extent of taking part in an arson attempt on a forest near the resort—Cecilia gradually comes to understand the true nature of her father, whom she had always believed to be an honest man. The Camorristi kidnap Leonardo and Cecilia, but Lu's intervention saves the girl, and love allows the young man to achieve an emotional balance he had previously lacked. The novel weaves together multiple themes: the crime narrative intertwined with the nexus between business and the Camorra, youth social alienation, parental absenteeism—parents perpetually consumed by their own problems and emotionally distant from their children—and the environment as an arena for the assertion of power (indeed, the motives for burning down a forest are inexplicable, save for those linked to prestige and organized crime’s pursuit of visibility). The narrative unfolds with a certain lightness, using irony without ever becoming heavy-handed. The result is an enjoyable, engaging read, further bolstered by an effective, fast-paced style. Why read it? It is a book that tackles crucial themes of social relevance in an accessible, engaging manner.

Eyal, Yirmy’s son, was killed during his military service by his own comrades, who mistook him for a wanted Palestinian. Amotz, Yirmy’s brother-in-law, in breaking the news of his son’s death, inadvertently uses a cruel term: Eyal was killed by friendly fire. This is the premise of the narrative, which gets underway from the moment Daniela, Yirmy’s sister-in-law, departs for Africa, where her brother-in-law has sought refuge and where her sister died. From this point onward, the novel unfolds along two parallel trajectories: Daniela’s journey to Africa and the life of Amotz, alone, in Israel. Daniela wants to know where her sister died, and in some way she is undertaking a journey of liberation from grief and death. Yet she also wants to understand why her brother-in-law, now in his seventies, chooses to live in Africa. The landscape, the animals, and the people form the backdrop of an ongoing dialogue between Daniela and Yirmy, in which familial themes (the sister, Yirmy’s quest to uncover the true circumstances of his son’s death) overlap with broader issues linked to the condition of Israel and the peculiarities of a religion—Judaism—so unyielding and severe. If it is possible to come to terms with the death of one’s loved ones, it is far more difficult to serenely overcome the existential anguish of an entire people. And so, the only recourse is flight to a distant continent: I came, Yirmy says, > to take a break from my people, from Jews in general and from Israelis in particular “everything that oppresses me slips away without philosophies and arguments.” Meanwhile Amotz, head of an engineering design firm, must find a solution to strange noises emanating from the elevator shaft of an apartment building: is it a technical issue, or is there something mysterious, unfathomable, arising from a country blithely living on the edge of a precipice? *Friendly Fire* addresses many themes, perhaps too many: death, family, religion, the destiny of a people, flight from it all. The underlying thread is the notion that the true threat comes not from without (for instance, from the Palestinians), but from within—from a people, the Jews, who have always wandered without ever wishing to integrate with others. The book does not intend to be an indictment of Israel, even if the passages concerning the Bible are undeniably critical; rather, it constitutes an expression of profound existential suffering. The Israeli people today are like that elephant paraded around as an attraction because of its gigantic eye. > Daniela feels her heart ache at the sight of its suffering, as though it were a relative. And in that iris flecked with blue, yellow, and green looking at her with sadness, a drop gathers that gradually turns into a tear, followed by another, and the weeping of that mute, and perhaps even grateful, animal shakes Daniela to the core, as if in that moment the desire that brought her to Africa during the festival of Hanukkah were finally fulfilled . *Friendly Fire* expresses the suffering of a people and its inability to break free from its condition. The flaw of the book, however, is that the theme unfolds sluggishly, almost smothered by words that seem to serve only to conceal and dissipate it. The phrasing is pleasant, but the sluggishness, the lack of narrative drive, and the monotonous reliance on the device of parallel plots are all factors that render the book verbose and tedious. Why not read it? It is a rambling, ponderous tale despite the author’s seasoned skill. The reader gets lost in an infinity of words.

The subject of the novel is Naples: “a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition.” Diego Ventre is a brilliant and refined lawyer, but in reality a Camorrista. He learns from a volcanologist that an eruption will destroy a large part of the city. Diego sees in this catastrophe the opportunity to renew Naples, to halt its decline, but he also realizes that enormous profits can be made. He keeps the news secret and begins a series of speculative operations. Meanwhile, he falls in love with Luce, the daughter of a prominent aristocratic family. A courtship begins, through which Diego can display all his classical learning and refined tastes. This does not prevent him from continuing his criminal activities, spinning business schemes, corrupting, and threatening. Naples is destroyed by the fury of nature; Diego and Luce marry, but on their very wedding day Luce discovers that she has married a violent mafioso. She flees, is captured by Diego’s enemy, and raped multiple times as an act of defilement; yet at the very moment of the rape Diego arrives, kills his rival, and points his gun at the young woman’s chest. Does he want to kill her according to a mafia code that cannot tolerate one’s woman having belonged to another man, or is it merely a protective gesture? We will never know, for at that very moment Diego is killed by his brother. The author draws upon an idea from Curzio Malaparte in *The Skin* (the eruption of Vesuvius as the destruction and creation of a new Naples), but this motif remains merely in the background. In truth, the entire novel unfolds around Diego—a villain, yet one ultimately admired, and an instrument for an aestheticizing indulgence in the beauty and ugliness of Naples. The weakness of the plot, the shallow character analysis, the perpetual invocations of an unreal city made solely of monuments, the protagonist’s pedantic and inconclusive soliloquies: these are all factors that reduce the narrative to a sequence of images, of sketches. As the author wrote regarding Naples, > it is a novel without a story, a novel without chapters. The words seem assembled at random, without a true before and without the hope of an after . Why not read it? It is pointless.

The setting is an American town in Navajo territory. Jim, half-Indian and half-white, returns to his hometown only to become embroiled in a series of murders committed by an avenging shadow, unleashed by an Indian ancestor to exact vengeance for a massacre perpetrated by adventurers. It is a return to the past—both the distant one and the more immediate past tied to Jim’s childhood and his choice to leave his hometown behind. The book’s conclusion is partly predictable—the culprits of both yesterday and today meet their punishment—and partly bitter, as Jim must sacrifice himself, taking his own life to halt the vengeful fury of the shadow, which is his own shadow. The story is overly New Age, as is its style. Yet the narrative pace remains brisk, making for an enjoyable and compelling read.

The year is 1860. Chiara is the daughter of a well-known patriot, a friend of Garibaldi. Disguised as a boy, the girl manages to join the Expedition of the Thousand and thus meets Simone, with whom—predictably—she falls in love. The story is pleasant, but handled far too superficially, both from the standpoint of Chiara’s personal affairs (her desire that her father not marry a Turinese lady, her yearning for adventure, the blossoming of her love for Simone) and with regard to the historical context. The latter emerges in a fragmentary fashion, without illustrating the environmental conditions and political premises of the expedition.

What is the fascination of books? Why do so many of us spend so much time reading novels and poetry? The author attempts to answer these questions through a coming-of-age story, a cross between *Harry Potter* and *Treasure Island* (see the reviews on this site). Natsuki Rintaro is the typical *hikikomori*, a term synonymous with an antisocial, apathetic, and misanthropic adolescent. To be sure, he possesses a passion for reading, born of living in his grandfather’s crowded, dusty bookshop. It is a small secondhand bookshop with a peculiar layout. > When entering the bookshop through the brightly lit front door, the room seemed in perspective far deeper than it actually was, and for a moment it felt as though that book-lined corridor stretched out endlessly into the darkness . There is a power in books, the grandfather used to tell his grandson as he quietly opened a volume. Upon his grandfather’s death, the boy is supposed to go live with an aunt—a fate he accepts passively, almost indifferently. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a cat appears; with gentle yet firm manners, it invites him on a quest: to save books. Together with the cat, the boy ventures down the corridor beyond the back wall of the bookshop; the two find themselves in palaces, veritable labyrinths, from which the boy will only be able to escape if he frees the books. Each labyrinth corresponds to a specific way of understanding our relationship with this “collection of sheets of paper covered in printed characters”: the obsessive urge to hoard, the pursuit of digests that allow one to consume the greatest number of writings in the shortest possible time, and the conception of the book as a consumer good—a business in which everything that does not sell must be destroyed. It is a taxonomy all too familiar to us book lovers, yet one forgets that > reading a book is rather like climbing a mountain. (...) Every now and then you have to examine line by line, re-read the same sentence backwards several times, and proceed slowly, striving to understand. As a result of such arduous effort, suddenly your mind opens up . These are the grandfather’s words resurfacing in the boy’s mind, dense and vigorous words. Through the climbing metaphor, the grandfather means that one can only endure the grueling ascent if one loves the mountain. And it is this very argument that disarms his interlocutors and saves the books: how can one hold them prisoner, chop them up, and treat them as mere commodities, if one truly loves them? The journey of personal growth is not yet complete. To paraphrase Karl Marx in *The Poverty of Philosophy*, we are still in the realm of ideas, bound in an erudite and narcissistic attachment to reading. Only the final trial will bring the adolescent’s maturation to fruition: as Confucius held, the humanities, literature, and poetry allow us to understand “the sense of reciprocal humanity”—that is, the empathy that binds all human beings together. The author attempts to give narrative momentum to the story while simultaneously conjuring a magical atmosphere. To this end, he resorts to the literary device of the cat, a frequent trope in Japanese literature—one need only think of Natsume Soseki’s *I Am a Cat* (see the review on this site). Yet while in Soseki’s work the cat is an ironic, wise figure, an alter ego to the dull and narrow-minded schoolmaster, here the small feline is a plodding censor of the protagonist, akin to the Owl in *Pinocchio*. The long corridor that opens mysteriously into the labyrinths calls to mind the far more original railway platform from which the magical adventure of *Harry Potter* begins; moreover, the description of the palaces is so meticulous as to become predictable and verbose. Having started off well, the novel lapses into a pedantic meditation on the book, containing reflections that would be agreeable and worthwhile were this a work of non-fiction. What elevates the novel’s quality is the prose: plain, pleasant, and fluid, even if occasionally repetitive; the brushstrokes portraying the bookshop and sketching the boy and his friends are spot-on. What a pity the author did not develop the characters more thoroughly! Why read it? It speaks of our love for books.

The book is not about Genoa, despite its title. The city is merely a setting, devoid of imagery and depth, in which to recount the life of a police officer. The protagonist is a young man without hope, who believes that life is > merely a scheme of the system, one of many, but men do not control it, not even those gathered at Palazzo Ducale. The system is a headless machine, an autonomous machine . What matters is the group, belonging through courageous and violent actions. This young officer’s entire life is a succession of drills, off-duty leaves, overtime, and interventions against hooligans and protesters. He is assigned to a special squad trained for the G8 summit in Genoa. The drills, grueling and geared toward counter-insurgency tactics, reinforce esprit de corps. In Genoa, the young man’s convictions are put to the test, not so much by what happens, but by his love for a girl who might just convince him that destiny is in our hands, that it is not true that «human beings are what they are». Then everything spirals out of control: the officer takes part in the raid on Via Diaz and discovers that the mysterious girl, met in Genoa, is there among the beaten, bleeding youths. Once again, it was destiny that decided: > I was fucked, I always had been, I cried because Sara was right, I had had my chance to choose, I cried for myself, because I understood that now it really was over . The novel’s overarching theme is cynicism as the consequence of a hopeless life. The story, however, unfolds monotonous and slow, devoid of narrative pace and without the author managing to grant psychological depth to the characters, starting with the protagonist. The greatest disappointment comes from Genoa, which is simply not there (has the author ever set foot in the streets where the G8 clashes took place?), with the result that the whole affair feels cold and artificial. Why not read it? It is boring and pointless.

*Gerusalemme Liberata* recounts the climax of the First Crusade, when Godfrey of Bouillon conquered Jerusalem in 1099. It can be interpreted as an epic poem (a sort of Christian *Iliad*), but in truth its interpretive keys are far more intricate than those of Homer's work. First and foremost, the poem is the narrative of a purification, both collective and individual: > thus singing, the devout host unfolds and spreads in wide circles, directing its slow procession toward Olivet ( Canto XI, verse 10). This holy advance collides, in bloody combat, with the Saracens and with the forces of evil: a struggle between supernatural powers of the underworld and the heavens. The clashes between armies and knights form one of the poem's central threads, allowing Tasso to display a consummate mastery and knowledge of the art of war and dueling, imbued with a taste for the macabre that anticipates modern adventure cinema: > and between neck and nape he strikes the blow; severed the sinews and slit the throat, the spinning head fell down and stained its face with foul dust before the trunk could fall; the trunk remains (a wretched monster) seated in the saddle, but freed of the rein, wheeling and kicking wildly, the steed shakes it off . ( Canto IX, verse 70). Yet what a contrast between dreams of military glory and the harsh, cruel reality! In memorable verses, Tasso sings of the absurdity of war. At the battle's end > there is no silence, nor any distinct cry, but a hoarse and muffled sound is heard: shudders of fury, murmurs of rage, groans of those who languish and those who breathe their last. The weapons, once so joyous to behold, now made a grim and mournful show; the iron had lost its gleam, the gold its rays, and no beauty remained in their once-fair hues . ( Canto XX, verses 51 and 52). Alongside the epic component lies the elegiac and lyric dimension, made up of extended landscape and sentimental interludes. It is the most luminous facet of the poem, pivoting upon woman—a figure who, for Tasso, is complex, richly nuanced, a mystery to be unveiled. Erminia, a delicate Saracen maiden in love with Tancredi, a Christian knight, longs to become a warrior to remain near her hero: > ah, why did Nature and Heaven not make my limbs and breast as strong, that I too might exchange skirt and veil for cuirass and helmet ( Canto VI, verse 83). Yet Erminia realizes that war belongs to men, and that she can only be a gentle wife: > unhappy Erminia flees, and her swift steed gallops across the earth ( Canto VI, verse 111). And Armida, the true protagonist of the poem, is a sorceress, an enchantress, and a conqueror of men; yet when she beholds her Rinaldo—himself a Christian knight—her hatred turns to love: > but when she fixed her gaze upon him and saw how placidly he breathed.... from an enemy, she became a lover . ( Canto XIV, verses 66 and 67). It is precisely the portrayal of the poem's women and their star-crossed love for Christian knights that reveals the complexity of Tasso's universe. He aspires to be the poet of the Counter-Reformation, of steadfast faith unclouded by doubt; yet one senses how deeply the poet loves the feminine realm, probing its torments and sentiments, just as he harbors a predilection for the vanquished and the infidels. In contrast to the rigid, impersonal Christian knights (Goffredo, Tancredi, and Rinaldo), stand complex characters endowed with profound humanity: the tender Erminia, the ill-fated Armida, the valiant Saladin, and the fierce Argante. These are living figures, fraught with doubt, affection, and memory. This is Tasso's spiritual world, mirroring his own anguish: > I shall live amidst my torments and my cares, my rightful Furies, frantic and wandering; I shall dread the dark, solitary shadows that bring my first transgression before me, and of the sun that unveiled my misfortunes, I shall abhor and loathe the sight. I shall fear myself; and ever fleeing from myself, shall have myself forever near .( Canto XII, verse 77). Here is the modern, pre-Romantic, and existential Tasso, with his passion for nocturnal scenes: > meanwhile night rises, and beneath its wings the sky shrouded the boundless plains; and sleep, the soul's repose, oblivion of woes, with flattering touch lulled cares and senses into rest yet there is no peace, “for the cruel fury appears before him in dreadful phantoms, striking him with terror” ( Canto VIII, verses 57 and 59). Why read it? It is a long poem, at times tedious, written in demanding verse that is dense and convoluted. Yet when Tasso breaks free from religion, from faith, from what must be said, and gives rein to his inspiration, a musical and profound lyricism captivates the reader.

The narrative recounts the love story between the author and Micòl within the milieu of a prominent Jewish family of Ferrara: the Finzi-Continis. Two fundamental themes emerge: nostalgia for a serene, peaceful Ferrara and, above all, an intimate tale tied to personal relationships that unfolds as if suspended over an abyss: the protagonists attempt to live as though nothing were happening, but in truth the racial laws, marginalization, war, and deportation, as well as illness, loom over and increasingly engulf their lives. It is reductive to read the novel as the story of Ferrara or a tale of unrequited love; it is the story of the Jews, but also of anyone who, in the face of danger and the dissolution of a world, «pretended not to see, let things slide...». The style is characterized by a pronounced musicality, as well as a richness of adjectives and narrative threads, which nonetheless does not come at the expense of incisiveness and concision. The characters are not «excavated» but remain on the surface, almost indecipherable and contradictory in their sentiments and behavior.

Who knows whether Alba de Cèspedes had read this novel before writing *Nessuno torna indietro* and *Dalla parte di lei*, published respectively in 1938 and 1948, just a few years after the 1934 Italian release of Irmgard Keun’s novel, heavily censored to excise its most transgressive passages (see the reviews of de Cèspedes’s books on this site). Even allowing for a completely different style (elegant and baroque in the case of the Italian-Cuban writer; cinematic and remarkably modern in that of the German author), there are numerous affinities. The young boarding-school girls of *Nessuno torna indietro* seek their own path beyond the stereotypes of the “pretty wife and mistress,” just as Gilgi forcefully asserts her independence from Martin, the man she loves—fatuous and manipulative. > All tenderness vanishes from Gilgi’s face, her voice hard and clear: I settle my own affairs myself, (...) I will not tolerate anyone feeling responsible for me, it is the greatest insult one could pay me, I... Even greater similarities seem to emerge with *Dalla parte di lei*. Like Gilgi, abandoned by her birth mother, Alessandra is haunted by her mother’s suicide, which upends her life and drives her to seek a man with whom she can find total harmony. And if Alessandra kills her husband when she realizes she cannot be loved completely (“Francesco,” I cried out in despair, “help me, Francesco”), so Gilgi leaves Martin when she recognizes the vast gulf between the external world into which he has dragged her (living day-to-day in superficial lightheartedness) and her inner world as a young woman determined to remain a cog in the whole. Confronted with the destitution that drove a family to suicide, Gilgi understands that > lightheartedness has become an illusion, (...) that one cannot hide within the collective, that one is alone. This is what must be learned: one must learn to be a person, one must learn that a single laugh costs a thousand tears, must know that an hour of happiness must be paid for with a thousand hours of pain... And so it is impossible to continue living with a man to whom > everything else becomes utterly, deeply indifferent. One must leave, reclaim one's own life. > She belongs to the universal structure, she is not made to stay outside... now she believes once again, deeply, in the duty of young, healthy hands... Set in 1930s Germany, Gilgi’s story carried clear political and scandalous undertones, which prompted the Nazis to burn the book and the Fascists to censor substantial portions of it. Through contemporary eyes, Gilgi appears as a typical, conscientious office clerk, a sort of Carla from Elio Pagliarani’s eponymous poem. The charming Miss Gilgi loves an orderly life: she wakes up early in the morning, takes a cold shower to invigorate herself, does gymnastics, hurries to the office (she is a model employee), then studies foreign languages. > The fact that my demands (Gilgi tells a friend) are never beyond my reach makes me free... Shattering this industrious life arrives Martin, a carefree, selfish globetrotter. > Gilgi’s imagination had always been a well-behaved child. (...) Now the well-behaved child is straying a little too far; Martin tells his tales, and Gilgi sees oceans, deserts, landscapes—what she sees is not reality. Love overwhelms her and seems to consume her entirely. After an occasionally wry depiction of Gilgi’s life, such as the small ploys to ward off her boss’s advances, the narrative dwells at length on Gilgi’s infatuation, an incessant oscillation, a pendulum swinging between the bourgeois values with which the girl is steeped and the transgressive existence that awaits her with Martin. The prospect of an unwanted child, the encounter with an old friend who has lost his job and been reduced to penury by children that came unbidden, Martin’s glaring superficiality—attentive only to himself and heedless of what is happening in a Germany ravaged by poverty—are all factors that drive her toward a fateful choice in a feverish, dreamlike delirium: first she contemplates suicide, then she flees to Berlin, opening herself to a new life. The novel's virtue lies in its writing, which one might describe as cinematic: the dialogues evoke a film script where the actors must be given room, the descriptions are replete with vivid imagery that imprints itself on the reader’s imagination, and even Gilgi’s long deliriums, while at times discursive, remain visionary and profoundly striking. Consider Gilgi’s encounter with her biological mother, from whom she intends to ask for money. In Gilgi’s eyes, the rediscovered mother is merely a “white patch.” > There is no sound in the room, only a heavy, silent gloom and a small white patch: the face of the woman from the magazine. (...) They are all dead... I am completely alone, alone on the planet... And what of the image of her departure for Berlin, when Gilgi sees, or imagines seeing, > a small orange rolled down from the platform, lying amid the smooth, straight, ingenious tracks, awkwardly simple and inadequate: an oneiric conclusion to a stylistically singular novel. Why read it? The prose is captivating, though at times the narrative becomes redundant.

David Martin is a young journalist, who begins writing serialized stories for his newspaper. These stories meet with considerable success, and he is consequently put on salary by a publisher to write a series of novels belonging to a cycle entitled *The City of the Damned*. With the money he earns, he rents a mysterious house, abandoned for many years and previously owned by a strange character, Diego Malasca. Meanwhile, several plotlines intertwine: David is in love with Cristina, who convinces him to secretly write a book for a wealthy friend who wishes to become a famous author. He is contacted by a French publisher—who will later turn out to be the devil, or the personification of evil—who persuades him, for a handsome fee, to devise a new religion. At the request of a bookseller friend, he hires a young girl (Isabella) as his assistant, who aspires to become a writer. David, while continuing to write the commissioned book, launches an investigation to discover who the French publisher is and why he wants to formulate a new religion. At this point, a series of gruesome murders ensues, and David becomes embroiled in surreal and implausible events, all steeped, however, in mystery. In vain does Isabella try to bring him back to reality; David desperately pursues the mystery, and with it, his ill-fated love for Cristina. Everyone close to him, friend and foe alike, dies in a horrific and mysterious manner: Cristina, for example, having lost her mind, drowns in a frozen lake before the eyes of her friend. After a succession of grim events and terrible deaths, David manages to flee to a distant foreign land, only to meet the devil one day, many years later, who entrusts to him Cristina as a child, thereby opening up the prospect of a future. The scene faithfully mirrors a photograph David had found many years earlier, depicting the devil walking hand in hand with Cristina as a young girl. Mystery reigns unchallenged. What is the meaning of this book? There are, undoubtedly, numerous interpretative hypotheses: the construction of a religion of death that is nevertheless overcome by love, an unhappy love story, a "noir > inexplicable, a labyrinth of ideas and situations whose guiding thread remains elusive. I like to think that the common motif is the book itself. Books are the true protagonists of the novel, and with them, fantasy and imagination. At the beginning of the novel, when the author speaks of his childhood, David recalls that where my friends saw traces of ink on incomprehensible pages, I saw light, streets, people. Words and the mystery of their occult science fascinated me, and they seemed a key with which to unlock an infinite world > . At another point in the novel, Samperi, his bookseller friend, predicts that David will become a new Edgar Poe. And this writer indeed seems to be the guiding inspiration of the novel. Are the events narrated real, or the product of imagination and fantasy? Is it not always the *Cities of the Damned* dominating the scene? Could David have invented everything in a fit of delirium within the cursed house, or might he himself be the perpetrator of so many crimes? From this perspective, the character of Isabella gains meaning, embodying reality, concreteness, and pedantry in a situation where unchecked fantasy has run rampant. As the devil remarks, Everything is story, narrative, a sequence of events and characters that convey an emotional content". A complex book that nevertheless proves verbose and constantly in search of sensational effect, failing, however, to generate either genuine suspense or real action. Events unfold predictably, and in certain instances the overt borrowing of literary imagery is glaringly evident. In my view, the novel lacks life; it is formal and merely literary.

Vamba, the pseudonym of Luigi Bertelli, imagines having discovered *Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca* “from a portress, wife of a court usher, while she was reading it to her children”; indeed, Giannino Stoppani’s diary had long remained “forgotten among the files of the Judicial Chancellery, which will certainly come as no surprise to anyone who knows how everything concerning Italian Justice is protracted and oblivious, (...) wearisome and costly... > *Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca* begins on September 20 (the day of the capture of Porta Pia) and concludes on March 2 of the following year; the years are not specified, but they are likely 1907 and 1908, when the story was published in installments in *Il Giornalino della Domenica*. The setting is the typical bourgeois family of the early twentieth century, of modest means, constantly awaiting an inheritance and anxious to find a good husband for their three grown daughters. Giannino is the youngest, and we may assume he is around ten years old: mischievous, rebellious, always ready for new pranks, the consequences of which he fails to grasp, whether out of naivety or excessive shrewdness. After the lawyer Maralli, future husband of his sister Ada, nearly loses an eye due to Gian Burrasca’s latest stunt, to his mother who tearfully tells him: “do you see, my Giannino, how much sorrow, how many misfortunes because of you!...” Giannino replies “to comfort her, (...) but if they are misfortunes, excuse me, how is it my fault?” > The diary is divided into two parts. In the first, roughly 200 pages long, Giannino's antics unfold in succession—some hilarious, others frankly exaggerated, often repetitive in their narrative structure. Vamba harbors no pedagogical intent, as is the case with De Amicis’s *Cuore* and Collodi’s *Pinocchio* (for the latter, see the review on this site). A penchant for pranks prevails over everything. In the second part, Giannino is sent to a boarding school, where the boy discovers solidarity among peers and the meaning of revolt as a challenge to authority. Highly effective are the figures of the Headmaster and the Headmistress: he “so very thin and so very tall”, she “so very short and so very fat” and who calls her husband “idiot” > . She, after all, is the owner of the boarding school, founded by her uncle. And here unfolds one of the funniest episodes of the entire story. The boys realize that the pair are fond of séances in which they summon the spirit of the founder; by means of a ruse, Giannino and his friends fake responses from beyond the grave, but they cannot contain their laughter and end up being discovered. The diary ends on a bitter note. Humiliated by the Headmaster and the Headmistress because he is a poor boarder unable to pay his tuition, feeling unworthy in front of his peers, his friend Barozzo flees the boarding school: “he turned to me and threw his arms around me, holding me tight, so very tight; he kissed me and our tears mingled upon our faces, (...) and when I came to my senses I was alone, leaning against the main gate of the institute, which was shut.” The diary could have ended with this feeling of grief and shock over a friendship lost to wounded pride; yet instead, stubbornly, Vamba chooses to add yet another of Giannino’s stunts, thereby pinning the entire diary to its caricatured aspects. Through modern eyes, the atmosphere and episodes of *Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca* seem to belong to another society, distant from our own. For us adults, the diary can serve as an intriguing portrayal of the early-twentieth-century bourgeoisie, that which Guido Gozzano depicted with irony; a social structure that endured throughout Fascism and into the early postwar decades, until it was swept away by consumerism and the sexual revolution. To teenagers, I suspect Giannino may seem an incomprehensible boy, though they might appreciate his spirit of revolt against adults, who are perceived as a hostile, rigid, and downright hypocritical counterpart. Unintentionally, Vamba chronicled the generational conflict, albeit in a paradoxical and therefore implausible manner. The Tuscan cadence of the language makes Giannino’s diary a testament to a living, popular, and authentic Italian. And this is precisely why *Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca* remains an enjoyable read. Why read it? It offers a cross-section of an Italy that is no more.

During the Second World War, a series of personal storylines unfold across a small provincial town near Rome and in the great city of London. Stefano, a legal enthusiast employed at the courthouse, marries Nina as his second wife—a restless young woman who accepts a much older husband to please her family, but is in truth in love with Sergio. At the same time, Ally is an English pilot, homosexual, who is bound by a deep friendship to Edna, an eccentric English girl. Stefano and Sergio take part in the partisan resistance, to which Nina also makes a significant contribution as a courier. The young woman carries on a clandestine affair with Sergio, unbeknownst to Stefano, who is moreover having a liaison with a prostitute. The situation comes to a head when Ally’s plane crashes and he is hidden by Sergio: the two young men are caught showing affection to one another by Nina and Stefano, who realizes from the young woman's reaction that Sergio was her lover. Stefano returns home and sets it on fire, killing himself in the blaze. Nina realizes, too late, that she loves Stefano, while Edna comes to understand her deep bond with Ally, despite his homosexuality. The war is merely a backdrop that clarifies interpersonal relationships, which nonetheless remain grounded in the complexity and ambiguity of human emotions. As the author states: > life is nothing other than a great confusion. A disorder and a turmoil of things and feelings, which ultimately, however, is all that binds us to others and makes us love them .

A few years before his death, an illustrious jurist retraces his childhood in a timeless Nuoro; and > as in a developing negative, distant faces reappear, (...) and perhaps, as I think of their life, because I write their life, they sense me as a ridiculous god, who has summoned them on the day of judgment, to free them forever from their memory . It could easily be a mundane autobiography, interesting merely for its depiction of a Sardinia (between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) where there still existed > a magical sense of things, whereby every act was a ritual, every word the echo of another word, every occurrence a mystery , and the only hope was «to create ghosts to cling to». Were it only this, the book could rest forever on dusty shelves, alongside all too many family chronicles and nostalgic, often folkloric descriptions of a society that no longer exists and can never return. The novel endures, however, beyond its context, because it speaks of another matter altogether: death as the dissolution of memory. Since > each of us, even if we merely look within ourselves, sees ourselves in the fixity of a portrait, not in the succession of existence , the novel is likewise composed of characters and episodes that appear, at first glance, isolated and repetitive; the reader derives from it a sense of fragmentation and incompleteness, of a confused and superficial narration. One longs for more, especially when the author addresses the core of the narrative: the patriarch father, authoritarian and absent; the mother, seemingly marginal yet pivotal in the care of hearth and children; the numerous siblings; the manifold books gathered with love, through which > fantasy entered the austere house (...) and operated silently, touching men and things with its magic wand . We would like to know more of young Sebastiano (behind whom the author conceals himself), of his bond—both joyous and unhappy—with his brother Peppino, of their shared passion for bookbinding, of «a childish industry», meaningless perhaps, yet an expression of the «imagination of the gratuitous». Instead, we are left disappointed, for the myriad stories and characters must converge upon a single objective, both narrative and existential: the day of judgment, the extinction of memory, and with it, of existence itself. Sebastiano is on the verge of leaving Nuoro to study in Sassari. The author treats this episode fleetingly, almost as if he wished to forget it. Donna Vincenza, the mother of many children, > prepared his provisions with good breaded cutlets and sugar-dusted fritters. Sebastiano left it all behind, ashamed of his mother, (...) and departed in the dark of night, like someone eager to belong to others . And what of Pietro Catte, who had gone to the mainland to make his fortune, and who one day stepped off the coach, «amid sneers and taunts», and «like an automaton joined the procession», following the summons of the driver, > the devil himself, with horns and a pointed beard and a twisted tail , who led him to hang himself from a great oak tree. And Gonaria, who spoke with God and was betrayed because God let her brother, the canon, die; whereupon the poor woman locked her brother’s room forever, only to open it twenty-five years later and discover it had become a nest of mice, woodworms had devoured the furniture, and clusters of cobwebs hung from the ceiling. > If one does not die, one lives. And this truth, which seems obvious, is on the contrary fraught with consequences, because life transforms everything; nothing withstands its implacable truth. (...) To know oneself, one must play out one’s life to the very end, to the moment one is lowered into the grave. And even then, there must be someone to gather you up, resurrect you, recount you to yourself and to others, as in a final judgment . It is not an easy book: numerous characters and stories follow one another without any apparent order. Often one must pick up the thread of the narrative again; if instead one surrenders to it, the mind turns to oneself, to one's own life, to the memory of those who shared it with us, and to how this memory has dissolved over time, because «if one does not die, one lives». And then one realizes that it is not so important to keep a «chronicle» of existence as it is to wander in remembrance, because, as the author says, it is not a matter of another’s destiny, but of our own; and there comes a moment when we too face our final judgment. Aiding the reading is a refined, simple, and elegant prose: traces of juridical language can be glimpsed; far from being a flaw, this lends slowness and deliberation to the narrative; it is what one expects, and it keeps the portraits, their characters, and their stories from being trivialized. One must allow oneself to be ensnared by the tale, just as our memory, clouded by time, runs along the course of our life. Why truly remember the past, when it is better to be guided by the imagination? Only myth opens our hearts to mystery. Why read it? Pleasurable and profound.

The setting is once again Sicily, and the subject is mafia murder. A Carabinieri lieutenant from Parma, stationed on the island, finds himself investigating the murder of a small building contractor, soon followed by the killings of a peasant—a pruner by trade—who had recognized the assassin, and of a police informant who had named the instigators. Dismissing the crime-of-passion angle (the pruner’s wife had a lover), the lieutenant skillfully manages to extract a confession from the hitman and the man who commissioned him, tracing the trail back to a powerful mafia figure and risking the exposure of connivance with the political sphere. A member of parliament and a government minister may be implicated, both intervening repeatedly to halt the investigation. In the end, it is the mafia that will provide the three suspects with «illustrious alibis». While on leave in Parma, the lieutenant learns that the killer and the instigators have been acquitted, and that the crime-of-passion lead has been reopened. After dinner with friends, the lieutenant «felt like a convalescent: intensely sensitive, tender, hungry». «To hell with Sicily, to hell with everything»....He walked back home around midnight, crossing the entire city on foot....but before reaching home he knew, with lucid certainty, that he loved Sicily and that he would return. «I’ll break my head against it,» he said aloud. With subtle irony, the author constructs a plot suspended between the detective story—fraught with suspense at times—and the political novel, focusing on the ambiguity of power (magnificent, in this respect, are the exchanges between the member of parliament and other institutional figures whom the reader is deliberately not allowed to identify) and the perhaps natural collusion among the various tiers into which power itself is structured. Precisely because power is the fundamental theme, one of the book’s most famous scenes appears genuinely out of place: the passage in which the mafia boss expounds his vision of society to the lieutenant (men, half-men, pigmies, arse-takers, and *quaquaraquà*), introducing folkloric elements and a trite sociology that diminish the intellectual weight of a work that is not merely about Sicily and the mafia, but seizes upon the mafia crime as an opportunity to reflect on power as an obscure, invulnerable force. It is for this reason that the novel achieves universality, transcending its historical and social context. The style is brisk and brilliant, driven by a narrative momentum that suffers rare lapses in tension (most notably in the aforementioned soliloquies of the mafia boss). The syntactic structure and language are lean yet incisive, entrusting their expressive force to narrative cadence, the careful deployment of adjectives, and the seamless transition between clauses. Sciascia remains an essential reference point for the Italian language.

The book is set in seventeenth-century Holland and recounts the story of a young maid who becomes, first, a painter's assistant and then the subject of a portrait. Layered together are the young woman’s intimate personal story (her family, her working environment, her betrothal, and the blandishments of a wealthy merchant), the depiction of the milieu, and the execution of a portrait, complete with the interplay of light and shadow and the construction of colors. Another theme is the painter’s obsession, which subordinates everything (even the girl’s honor) to the demands of his art. It was a major commercial success, but in all honesty it strikes me as a modest book: one finds neither an incisive analysis of the characters’ emotions, nor a compelling depiction of the setting (which lingers in the background without truly defining the work), nor does the creation of the artwork take center stage, along with the transition from religious painting to portraiture, in which real figures emerge. The style possesses the merit of being very simple and clear, but the narrative pacing unfolds monotonously, devoid of tension.

The novel recounts a paradoxical story. A cantonal councillor murders a friend in a restaurant before a crowd of witnesses. Once in prison, he hires an attorney (the author of the manuscript) to identify a different killer. The attorney gathers a body of information that leads to the cantonal councillor’s acquittal before the court of assizes. Convinced he was merely a pawn of the councillor (who is, in truth, the real murderer), the attorney attempts to kill him, but misses his mark. The novel concludes many years later, when the writer (Dürrenmatt himself) comes to learn the underlying motives of the murder and the actual sequence of events that led to the crime. The dominant theme of the novel is the incomprehensibility of reality and its potential inversion into absurd situations, devoid of logic and of any social or historical meaning. As the author writes, > is the story that became real only in my imagination and that now, written down, recedes from me, perhaps more absurd than the history of the world, less solid than the ground upon which we build our cities? . This philosophical theme is translated into a relentless narrative pace which, moving from a traditional structure (reminiscent of a nineteenth-century novel), evolves into a succession of characters and events that overlap and intertwine across different temporal planes. The style likewise turns convulsive, composed of short, truncated sentences so as to manifest the author’s agitation and the absurdity or inherent lack of logic in the events and situations described. It is, however, a novel entirely folded in upon itself: there is effectively no plot to generate a shred of suspense or compel the reader onward; the characters seem devoid of genuine depth and individual character, almost marionettes in the hands of fate; the descriptions of settings are repetitive. It is, in fact, a tedious, intellectualistic novel that fails to give artistic form to the philosophical theme at its foundation. Confirmation of this lies in the fact that its most engaging and readable sections are precisely those that assume the character of an essay.

We are in Boston in 1919, at the close of the First World War. The novel's protagonists are Danny, a police officer from a traditional white family whose patriarch is a high-ranking official in the police department, and Luther, a Black man who could have been a formidable baseball player, but, because he is Black, must resign himself to menial jobs. This is, therefore, a deeply stratified American society, one in which the relations between social classes and different ethnic groups are clearly demarcated. Both protagonists feel ill at ease within this rigid social framework. Danny lives in the Italian neighborhood and is drawn to the social and ideological upheavals that characterize the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. At first, it is mere curiosity, but he soon finds himself increasingly involved. He is sent to infiltrate anarchist and Bolshevik groups as an informant, only to discover that they are simply demanding a more just society.. Meanwhile, he attends meetings of police officers demanding fairer wages and less grueling working conditions. He soon becomes their leader. Luther, in turn, is forced to flee his hometown—leaving behind a wife and child—after killing some criminals. He arrives in Boston and finds work with Danny’s father’s family: he is blackmailed by a corrupt cop who attempts to implicate him in fabricating evidence to frame the Black community for subversive activities. As this brief synopsis shows, the plot is remarkably intricate and packed with twists and turns, in the vein of the best American thrillers. It culminates dramatically with the Boston Police Strike of 1919, which leaves the city at the mercy of criminals, petty thugs, and subversives for two days. Danny emerges defeated: as the leader of the striking officers, he is accused of inciting his colleagues to abandon their posts (in reality, it was political machinations that left the city abandoned). At the beginning of the novel, Danny believes that this world belongs to men like his father (hierarchical, authoritarian, convinced that everyone must know their place), but he comes to realize that this is neither a genuine nor a just world. > - I'll tell you, Luther, it’s been a terrible year-. Luther thought back on his own year and it made him laugh, really laugh.- What-, Danny said, Luther gave him his hand:- you and me together- What do you think you do, Danny replied, when everything you have done in your life turns out to be a damn lie? Build a new life. I guess Luther replied. The most compelling aspect of the book is that a social issue—such as the great Boston Police Strike of 1919 and the birth of the American labor movement—is framed within the conventions of a thriller, making the narrative gripping and fast-paced. Like all American thrillers, it ultimately proves verbose, redundant, and even muddled. Many of its narrative threads get lost in the sheer mountain of pages, and the colloquial, distinctly American style fails to sustain the momentum, being far better suited to delivering plot twists than to exploring character and circumstance in depth. Everything is left far too unresolved. Why read it? The historical context is intriguing for us Europeans, who are unfamiliar with American history.

It is an insignificant book. It is set in Burma after 1886, when Britain transformed this vast kingdom into a province of British India, exiling its last sovereign. *The Glass Palace*, the novel’s title, is a metaphor for a world overtaken by imperialism and capitalism—forces to which one must adapt on pain of extinction or, at best, oblivion. The protagonist, Rajkumar, is a young boy, > a ragged Indian... with a sort of watchful determination.. there was no simplicity in his face, no innocence: his eyes were full of practicality, curiosity, appetite. He was as he was meant to be . Tradition, cultural roots, and ideal values can find no home when everything is upended and one must survive, and if possible, grow rich. Yet even in Rajkumar, already an adult when still a boy, there is room for bonds of affection and loyalty that are not > related to himself and his immediate needs, which was almost incomprehensible . It is precisely during the looting of the royal palace that the protagonist meets Dolly, the twelve-year-old handmaiden to the little princesses, daughters of the defeated and humiliated monarchs. A love is ignited that will never leave Rajkumar. The story unfolds along parallel tracks, allowing us to follow the protagonist’s social ascent alongside the life of the royal family, isolated and closely watched by the British. Amid the ruin of the ruling dynasty, Dolly matures into a reserved woman, seemingly timid, yet self-assured, cultivated, and independent. She marries Rajkumar, who has in the meantime become a wealthy businessman, young yet already portly. Yet does she do so for love, or simply because she wishes to escape a sort of gilded cloister? I cannot answer the question of whether the marriage of Rajkumar and Dolly is the fruit of true love, or merely the desire of both to trade the old for the new, tradition for the culture of dominant British imperialism. When I realized that after hours of tedious reading I was still only at 40% of the novel, I put the book aside, defeated by the flimsiness of the plot, the shallowness of the characters, and the pedestrian quality of the writing. Reading Ghosh’s book makes one want to reread Kipling’s *Kim*: a sinister bard of British imperialism, to be sure, but a writer of an entirely different caliber! Why not read it? It is tedious, pointless, banal.

In this novel, Tracy Chevalier, author of the bestseller *Girl with a Pearl Earring* (see the review on this site), measures herself against Venice, the “City of Water,” and one of its immortal treasures: Murano, the “Glass Island.” In the preface, Chevalier wonders > whether the artisans of the City of Water and the Glass Island seem to age more slowly than those in the outside world. (...) Painters, writers, carvers, knitters, weavers, and—why not?—glassmakers: creators often live in a suspended state that psychologists call flow, where hours pass without them noticing. An admiration for art led the author to devise a narrative that purports to trace Murano's history across the centuries, from a primal state of perfection and isolation to present-day reality, steeped in consumerism and craftsmanship alike. It is a grand historical fresco that prompts Chevalier to resort to a bold device: the story of Orsola and her family recurs through the centuries, with the same characters, passions, and vicissitudes, in an ever-shifting context. We begin in 1486, in a Venice still powerful and wealthy, moving to the early eighteenth century, when the decline of the Serenissima has become undeniable, and then on to the handover to Austria in 1797, when Venice lost its independence, up to the First World War and years closer to our own. A bold device, I said, because Orsola does not age at the pace of History, but much more slowly; and while this may symbolize Venice’s immobility, this literary expedient renders the narrative implausible. It is better, therefore, not to follow the author across the entire novel, but to linger on the first part, “Goblets, Beads, and Dolphins”: set in 1486, it encapsulates the essence of the book. Orsola is a girl, later a young woman, born into a family of Murano glassmakers. She yearns ardently to learn the craft. > Orsola’s life revolved around an endless pile of laundry, tending the vegetable garden, and cleaning chores, but whenever she could, she found ways to slip into the workshop under the pretext of delivering messages or bringing biscuits to the workmen. (...) Then she would have lingered to watch them fashioning vases or tumblers and decorating goblets. Secretly, she visits a rival family, seeking out a woman who is a renowned artisan and merchant. This woman teaches her how to make glass beads and advises her to work on them in the kitchen, away from the workshop. It seems like a minor subterfuge, but these beads will ultimately save the family financially upon the sudden death of Orsola’s father, taking with him much of the workshop’s masterly skill. Chevalier is adept at painting the setting and familial dynamics, explaining glassmaking techniques, and depicting the Venetian merchants who enrich themselves off the isolation to which Murano was condemned by the Republic’s regulations. The incompetence of the eldest brother, who has assumed the role of head of the family and fails to grasp the importance of commercial ties, forces Orsola to venture into Venice—to discover the “City of Water” with its canals and gondoliers, taverns and brothels, the magnificence of its palazzi, and its disreputable quarters. > It seemed as though every gondolier on the canal was cheerfully hurling insults, almost singing: > Buzaròn, Mona!, Magnamerda!, Visdecasso!, Cover your ears, Giacomo shouted, and she laughed at the vulgarities Together with the city and its merchants, Orsola also meets the handsome fisherman, with whom she falls in love, breaking once again the rigid rules of Muranese society, which dictated marrying within the same families to preserve the secrets of the trade and the island's isolation. Maliciously, perhaps, the handsome fisherman > gets hired as an apprentice in the workshop, learns the art of glassmaking, and then flees abroad, taking with him the closely guarded knowledge and skills. Was it love, then, that ended a monopoly ensuring wealth and prestige to Murano and Venice? We may well believe it; yet the fact remains that Orsola is left waiting for a longed-for love, whose sole token will be a glass dolphin > , sent to her across the centuries. We must admit that Chevalier is no Ken Follett, if we wish to frame her within the realm of historical thrillers: she lacks the ability to pace the narrative, to create surprises and plot twists (on this site, one can read reviews of Ken Follett’s *A Place Called Freedom* and *World Without End*). As with the English author, the characters lack psychological depth: for instance, the figure of Orsola, a tenacious yet unhappy heroine (what is this woman's mystery?), is not analyzed in her human and sociological dimensions. Yet how could she be, when the author traverses centuries as though a fifteenth-century artisan shared the exact same inner life as a woman of the eighteenth or twentieth century! Chevalier possesses an elegant style of writing, an enjoyable English with linear, limpid syntax; an extensive yet accessible vocabulary makes for effortless reading without diminishing its quality. Her attention to the Venetian vernacular, the precise environmental descriptions (such as the actual routes between the island and the city), and the explanations of glassmaking techniques and commercial mechanics all demonstrate how deeply the author immersed herself in the history, and above all in the “City of Water” itself. Ravaged by tourism and the abandonment of its inhabitants, Venice still retains an incredible allure, captivating and commanding love, even as we strive to destroy it. Why not read it? In the end, it is prolix and implausible.

For many of us, childhood was a source of suffering. > And each will rewrite this story forever, knowing the sorrow, imagining the plot, inventing its meaning, and forgetting its origin . Then one day we discover that > you accepted like a beast of burden the weight of an incomprehensible curse and the unjustified threat that binds you to wounds and leaves you with a fate; and you spend your life denying, even though that hateful word is only a fragile line drawn on a rock, quickly dissolved at any moment by the force of the sea . But what is this force? The author seems to suggest it may be love, attested by the birth of a child. Two young people meet by chance, each bearing a secret. Bride was born with skin of a “terrible color”: black. She repulsed her mother to such an extent that she never touched her, even though it was hardly the child’s fault, but rather the twenty percent Negro blood in her family. Still a young girl, in an effort to gain acceptance Bride commits a terrible act: through her testimony, she sends a woman to prison by accusing her of sexual molestation, knowing full well she is innocent. Booker is a brilliant young man and a talented musician; his life was shattered by the death of his brother, raped and tortured by a sexual predator. He wishes to live in memory and has run away from home, confronted by his family’s refusal to persist in perpetual commiseration. They spend six intense months together, marked by overwhelming passion and a profound communion of purpose and feelings; yet both keep their painful secrets hidden from one another. And then, one day, Booker walks out, simply saying: “you’re not the woman.” Did he do it, perhaps, because she is Black, despite being glamorous and wealthy? Can neither beauty nor success overcome racism? Is it still the ancient sin of being born with that skin color? Bride wants to know; she sets out in search of Booker, eventually finding him at an elderly aunt’s home. While searching for him, a strange phenomenon befalls her: she reverts to being a child, as though life were starting over from the beginning: > a child. New life, immune to evil or disease, protected from kidnapping, violence, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment, Error-free, All goodness. Angerless. Or so they believe . Through this inexplicable transformation, Bride frees herself from guilt and is ready to confess the terrible truth, as well as to embrace Booker’s suffering: she realizes he left her because he loves her, > so as not to overwhelm her with a grief so deep it would have broken her heart : > Now she is pregnant. Good luck. (...) Listen to me, You are about to find out what it takes, what the world is like, how it works and how it shifts when you are a parent. Good luck and God help the child . It is difficult to grasp the narrative line of this novel; too many themes overlap: violence against children, racism, liberation from suffering, and perhaps others besides. The plot is muddled, and the constant shifting of narrator (the mother, Bride, the friend, the third-person narrative) certainly does not help; on the contrary, it disorients the reader by forcing them to piece the overarching thread back together, without adding anything to the understanding of the story or the characters. What redeems the novel is the prose: even if weary when compared to the author’s other works, it still manages to enthrall with its elegant, muted syntactic construction, with words so evocative as to create expectations of meaning that nevertheless slip away and remain suspended. In short, one is left somewhat disappointed. Why read it? It is intense.

The narrative unfolds around an Indian family of the Greek-Syrian faith and takes place in a dimension that is, in some sense, timeless. The point of departure—and also of arrival—is the death of a young girl, Sophie Mol, who arrives in India with her mother to meet her father and drowns in the river during a boat trip with her cousins, the twins Rahel and Estha. This episode forms the watershed between an atmosphere of serenity and the devastation of the family, most notably the separation of the two twins. The almost symbiotic bond between Rahel and Estha is one of the book’s central themes, though more apparent than real. Indeed, none of the characters are analyzed or explored in depth; rather, they remain on the surface, at times in an exaggerated, almost caricatural form. The true protagonists of the book are “the things,” the environment surrounding the characters, in particular the river. The final chapter of the book is titled *The Cost of Living*: the anguish and precariousness that can be endured only through an attachment to small things: > Even later, on the thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things . The river, the flora, the insects, the birds, a boat, an abandoned house are the small things to cling to, shifting in shape and color according to one’s mood. In this sense, the small things do not reflect the human soul, its feelings and sensations; rather, they take on a life of their own in a dimension alien to Western culture, born as they are of despair. > He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it down to some sort of indifference, some sort of despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the roadside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he grew resilient and truly indifferent . The style and narrative rhythm oscillate between two extreme poles: a slow and at times muddled progression, with a lush prose occasionally reminiscent of Rushdie (without ever reaching that author’s almost D’Annunzian baroque); and sudden accelerations with a more concise sentence structure (especially in dialogue), as though conveying the author’s haste to make up for the time spent in the preceding pages. Is this style deliberate? It is difficult to say, but it undoubtedly leaves an impression of fragmentation and dispersion that weighs the book down and renders it less accessible, at least on a first reading. Undoubtedly splendid, however, are the descriptions of nature, especially for their attentiveness to its living elements: the insects and the birds.

The novel is set in Bangladesh during the brief yet bloody war of liberation from Pakistan, from March to December 1971. The author traces the events from the perspective of Rehana: a woman who wishes merely to be a wife and mother: > she had married a man she did not expect to love; she lived a life of composure, a life with few surprises. She had asked her father to find her a husband with few ambitions. Someone whose wealth would not suddenly dissolve . And yet the woman finds herself widowed, without an income. Fragile and defenseless, she lacks the strength to prevent her brother-in-law from taking away her two children, Sohail and Maya. The desperate longing to have them back leads her to commit an act inconceivable for her, a religious woman observant of traditional norms: she steals jewels from a blind man and manages to reclaim her children by proving she has sufficient income to raise them. Having allowed her children to be taken from her, even if only briefly, leaves a deep wound; it fosters a sense of guilt in Rehana that shapes her relationship with them. She is a widow; she has left the children fatherless, having chosen not to give them a new parent. When the people in revolt declare the independence of Bangladesh, Rehana > felt certain that everything would resolve itself: (...) the country would become her home, and the children would continue to be her babies. Suddenly the world would be righteous on its own, and they would go on living ordinary, unexceptional lives . Yet, > a war had come to find them. Whatever was going to happen had already happened; now they would have to live in its shadow. We might wish to live in peace, leading an existence made up of small things (cooking, tidying the house, tending the garden, raising children, delighting in their love), but war arrives, and nothing is ever the same again. The novel does not grapple with the grand theme of war and peace; rather, it chronicles the inner journey that leads a slight, thirty-five-year-old woman to take an active role in her people's struggle for freedom, against a cruel and ruthless repression. At first, Rehana does so for her son, who has joined the Resistance; later, she acts out of a commitment to fight for the independence of Bangladesh. Rehana allows the partisans to hide ammunition and dynamite in her garden, shelters an officer of the liberation army critically wounded in an attack, and finally, courageously frees a prisoner by showing up alone at the prison and bribing the guards. Why does she risk her life? > I want to do my part. Maybe it isn't for my son, maybe it is something else. You don't think I can love anything other than my children? I can, I can love other things. Along this journey there are two pivotal moments in which a sort of stripping away of her innermost essence takes place. At her daughter's request, she decides to use her most precious fabrics to make blankets for the partisans: > the saris lay before Rehana like images in a photo album, evocative, a little accusatory Yet why not do it, if Maya dressed in white (the color of widowhood) to signify her contempt for luxury, and perhaps also an everlasting mourning for her father? > We are at war, (...) To prove that I belong here. That is why I am doing something . She severs ancestral ties as well. At the war's end, she visits her brother-in-law in prison—he who had fought and tortured partisans, and who now appeals to family ties in asking her to secure his release. > She is about to utter the obvious, expected words—“out of respect for my husband”—but then the sight of all of them, Joy and Aref and Mrs Sengupta, appeared before her. Yet even so, she might have forgiven him, but then she remembered the look on Maya's face when she learned of Sharmeen (her daughter's best friend, raped and slaughtered), and those first days of the war when she realized she would not emerge from it with her entire world intact And she said: > I cannot forgive you, brother. For my daughter's sake, I cannot forgive you. It is an intense book, in certain passages rich in action, which lends pace and suspense to the narrative. The author skillfully navigates two planes: family relationships and grand History, which, as is often the case, is compressed into a few months. The pivot around which the tale revolves is the mother-daughter relationship. For Rehana, it is taken for granted that Sohail will commit to the struggle, even if she is overwhelmed by fear for his life. She does not accept Maya's behavior. Toward her daughter, social prejudices and difficulties in communication and mutual understanding converge. When Maya leaves her mother to cross the border, intending to fight from there for the revolutionary cause, Rehana expresses her anguish and urges her to be careful. Yet her daughter tells her that it is she who is always worried about her mother. > Rehana was surprised to hear these words, but she understood that it had to be true, (...) a small window into her daughter's sealed heart. It was not that she was distrustful; she was burdened. Burdened by her beloved father, by the one who was gone, by her own widowed mother . It is a pity that this splendid book falters in its ending, which is muddled, rushed, and in certain respects implausible. The book is sustained by an elegant style, simple and effective syntax, and vocabulary that is refined in English while simultaneously enriched by words and idioms native to Bengali. Here we encounter that long-awaited blending of English with the local tongue, rare among writers of the Indian subcontinent. Why read it? A magnificent read, which transcends the specific history of Bangladesh to become a tale of all wars of liberation.

It is the mid-1950s in England. Anna is a writer living off the royalties of her successful novel, set in Africa during the Second World War. Divorced after a brief, loveless marriage, she is the mother of a young daughter and a friend to Molly, who is likewise divorced from an immensely wealthy man and the mother of a twenty-year-old son. "Free women," independent, shouldering the burden of raising their children, yet destined for loneliness and relationships with men incapable of meeting women's needs: > women's emotions are still geared to a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, the truest ones, are about my relationships with men. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. I ought to be like a man, care more for work than for people; I ought to put my work before everything, and take men as they come, or find an ordinary but well-off man for financial support, but I won't do it, I can't be like that . Anna can no longer write and turns to a psychoanalyst, who advises her to keep a diary. *The Golden Notebook* consists of four notebooks: the black one, concerning Anna the writer; the red, for politics (Anna is a member of the British Communist Party); the yellow, for stories outside of real experience; and the blue, which attempts to be a genuine diary. A spiral unfolds in which reality blurs with imagination, a sort of descent into the depths of consciousness. It all unfolds unexpectedly, because > the things that are important in life advance furtively, by surprise; one doesn't expect them, they take no shape in the mind. They are recognized when they appear, that is how it is . The book becomes a sort of box which, when opened, > instead of beautiful things, there is a mass of fragments and pieces. Not a whole thing, broken into fragments, but little pieces from everywhere, from all over the world.... seeing the mass of horrible fragments was so painful that I could not look, and I closed the box . But what is so terrible within consciousness? The dissolution of human bonds, the pain that inexorably marks relationships between individuals, the chaos of a world hurtling toward destruction, and hence loneliness within chaos, from which the only possible remedy seems to be the aridification of emotion—erecting a defense against the destruction of human relationships, against their reduction purely to the forces "of property, money, and power." Anna’s is an existential and cosmic suffering that cannot but lead to madness. Yet at the end of the journey, Anna realizes that salvation is anchored in the deepest bonds: those of affection and care. At the climax of a deeply fraught passage, a simple sentence offers the alternative to death: "I can hear Janet (Anna’s daughter) coming up the stairs." It is a highly complex novel, philosophically as well, open to many readings: the exhaustion of hope for the future, of the grand ideologies; the culmination of a political and literary trajectory asserting female independence—one that began with Jane Austen's heroines and ends in Anna's profound solitude, where, in a passage unquestionably shocking for the era in which the book was written, she declares that she prefers masturbation to sex with men incapable of love; the theme of psychoanalysis and thus the discovery of one's unconscious; literature as imagination, but also as a search for self, as memory and nostalgia. What makes the book timely is its reflection on the repercussions of a world in destruction upon individual consciousness, the author’s ability to grasp how the absence of a broader hope has a devastating impact on human relationships themselves: one cannot be saved by retreating into the domestic sphere, nor, however, can one rely on outworn ideologies. The narrative is sustained by an elegant prose style, pleasurable to read. The multi-layered structure of the tale would have required a tremendous ability to maintain a compact narrative architecture, which instead fragmented and dissolved. That very intellectual richness, while often offering compelling food for thought, does not favor the frugality and concision of the narrative. Why not read it? A few pages hold up well, but the overall reading proves ponderous and prolix.

*Gomorrah* is a book about the Camorra—that is, about what is known as the "System." Yet in reality, it does not merely recount criminal affairs; it investigates the deep entanglement between economy and crime, and the awakening of a consciousness toward a corrupt world against which one must rebel, first and foremost through information and denunciation. The book opens and concludes with this nexus between economics and criminality. The apparel industry, waste collection and disposal, and the building trade are all "legitimate" sectors in which major corporate groups exploit the Camorra to turn a profit and circumvent market regulations and the law. A large portion of the book is then devoted to the unprecedented, ruthless violence of the gangs and Camorra families: an unbridled war that strikes enemies and innocents alike. Now and then, isolated voices courageously emerge: a priest, a young schoolteacher, a magistrate, and so forth. The book can be read as a journey of mounting awareness regarding the state of abandonment in which Campania has been left—a condition of which all its inhabitants seem to be victims, from ordinary citizens to the criminal foot soldiers, up to the bosses themselves, whose fate appears sealed: either to be murdered or to end up behind bars, condemned to life imprisonment. Yet why does all this happen? Why has this region been turned into the cesspool for all the country’s toxic waste with the acquiescence of local elites? To these questions, Saviano seems to offer a definitive answer: > a looted wealth, painstakingly seized by someone and dragged into their own hole . This sentence encapsulates Neapolitan society, yet it holds a broader truth that concerns the entire country. The total absence of any sense of community, save for that of the clan; the cultural dependence on stereotypes (Camorra bosses imitate cinema, not the other way around); and the myth of violence are all cultural premises of a society that readily allows itself to be subjugated by dominant economic interests. In this sense, the Camorra bosses are destined to pay the price for those pulling the strings in the shadows: > the bosses who decide not to repent live off a metaphysical, almost imaginary power but > bosses always pay, they cannot not pay. They kill, they command military squads, they are the first link in the extraction of illegal capital, and this will always render their crimes identifiable, never diaphanous like the economic crimes of their white-collar counterparts . Against this state of affairs, Saviano, and a rare few others, rebel. Standing before Pasolini’s grave, the author feels he is "less alone." > And there I began to mutter my rage, fists clenched so tight that my nails dug into the flesh of my palms. I began to articulate my *I know*. The *I know* of my time... I know where the pages of economics textbooks vanish, mutating their fractals into matter, things, iron, time, and contracts. I know . And thus rises the cry of revolt: > let us not permit, men, that our lands become places of the Camorra, that they become one great Gomorrah to be destroyed . Yet can such a cry find an answer in an Italy as hidebound and stagnant as that of today?

The book is the saga of a Chinese peasant family who, from a state of abject poverty, becomes exceedingly wealthy following the discovery of a hoard of jewels, all of which are invested in the purchase of land. The protagonist is Wang Lung, an impoverished peasant who marries the maidservant of a great and powerful family. The bride, O-lan, is a plain, taciturn woman, yet tenacious and a tireless worker. She proves to be the peasant's true fortune, as much for her capacity for labor as for her wisdom and common sense. Forced to abandon their land following a severe famine, the couple moves to the city, where they lead a life of bitter hardship. During an uprising, O-lan, drawing on her experience as a servant, uncovers a hidden cache of jewels and gives them to her husband, keeping only two pearls for herself. Thus begins the fortune of Wang Lung, who betrays his wife by taking a new bride and relegating the woman to a subordinate status. O-lan’s illness and subsequent death bring home to her husband her profound importance, leaving him to feel her absence deeply. The book closes somberly with the sons’ decision to sell the land, bringing to an end a family cycle that had made the earth its steadfast anchor. The true subject of the book is the land, and consequently the quintessential peasant yearning to possess as much of it as possible. Another central figure is O-lan, who embodies the traditional role of women, along with their familial and social function. And it is precisely the examination of this character—who never mounts any genuine rebellion against her husband—that exposes the author’s conservative outlook, revealing her inability to offer a realistic, unvarnished reading of the female condition in Chinese society, or to chart a path toward emancipation that could nonetheless have been identified, even if at the cost of some strain on historical reality. Likewise, the other characters, both male and female, operate entirely within established social conventions, with the sole exception of one son who chooses the path of revolution over the quiet life of a landowner. There is no aspiration toward change, and everything is reduced to a complacently sentimental fatalism. The most compelling pages of the book are the opening ones (Wang Lung going to claim his bride-to-be from the powerful household) and the depiction of urban life, with the contrast between city and countryside, the impact of early social revolutions, and the presence of foreigners. Thereafter, the narrative turns maudlin, submerged in an often cloying pietism. While the opening seems driven by an ambition to provide a portrait—however raw and realistic—of rural Chinese life (with faint echoes of Zola’s *Earth*), this subsequently dissolves into an apologetic approach that relegates the Chinese setting to mere backdrop. The pacing of the book remains consistently effective, making for a swift and effortless read; the language is rich at the outset, drawing on the lexicon proper to peasant existence, only to thin out into an increasingly impersonal and detached English. The prose thus accentuates the drift toward a narrative that grows steadily less incisive and alive.

The novel is set in New York and chronicles the life of Bruna, an Italian political science professor who relocated to the United States to follow her husband Tom, an Italian-American physician. The mother of two children, Minerva and Mario, she falls in love with one of her African-American students, Yunus, who will later go on to fight for ISIS and die in the defense of Mosul. This alone would offer plenty of themes, yet the author piles on far more: the decline of America, racial and social rifts, the integration of diverse cultures, terrorism, and Islamophobia. In the notes at the end of the book, Farinelli attempts to provide a unifying interpretive thread, locating it in identity and its multifaceted aspects: religious, political, class-based, sexual orientation, and generational conflict. > I believe that beyond national borders and the ethnic, cultural, and religious differences that define and often divide us, we are first and foremost citizens of the world, and I hope that one day we will also be citizens of the same cosmopolitan democracy . Bravo, Professor! But where is Bruna? In spite of everything, the novel is not a political treatise; it is the tale of the protagonist's life. So let us start with Bruna. The narrative opens at the end: Bruna has just learned that her student lover is an ISIS fighter; it is the day of Trump's victory; to put little Mario to sleep, Bruna has recited an episode from the Quran, the moment Yunus was cast into the belly of the whale and saved by God because he was a righteous man. Why does God not save every man, as the Black American slaves once sang? She ought to answer her son, but > the words choke in her throat. (...) With her fist, she keeps clutching the scrap of black silk as if trying to crush that darkness. Mario then takes her face in his hands and softly strokes her cheeks, right where tears have begun to fall, carving pale rivulets through the heavy makeup...(...) I lied to everyone . Her life is in shambles; convinced she could make it on her own, she clashed with Tom's Italian-American family, fighting their prejudices and their meddling—she could have been more conciliatory and submissive; she tried to make Tom into a strong, self-reliant man, refusing to accept his nature as an eternal child; she lacked ambition and a competitive edge, abandoning her academic career; and then Yunus arrived and left; she could have told him she was pregnant, but > silence had swallowed all words, perhaps because nothing they might have wished to say had the power to change the course of their lives. (...) We can smooth the surface, soften the roughness, fill in a few cracks, but change—no, not even for love . And yet, there is an anchor in this desolate resignation. Minerva > slips her cold hands under her mother's nightgown. She rests them on her warm belly, as if to feel. (...) Don't worry about anything, I'll help you . And the fragile Mario, who had become Maria, > had embraced her and then laid her head on her lap, her face pressed against her womb . Dear cosmopolitan professor, in the end it is our very own Italian familism that saves us! The novel is a missed opportunity. The great theme of love remains in the background. We catch a glimpse of how difficult it is to love when so many idealisms engulf us and we remain suspended, unfulfilled, incapable of bringing clarity to the relationships with the people in our lives. Swept away by events and sudden shifts, Bruna could have delved into the reasons behind her presumed failures, perhaps discovering that she had gained a deeper understanding of herself, of what she was and what she had wished to be. Driven by lofty political aims, the author failed to explore what truly mattered in the story, what would have made it compelling. And so Bruna's life slips away like pebbles down a slope; as the poet wrote, > nothing changed within your life / the years that slip so easily into shade / when a single torch suffices in the dusk / and the descent is almost an ascent . (Marino Moretti, “La Madonna del Sassoferrato” from *Poesie Scritte col lapis*, 1919). The narrative is further compromised by the writing and style. The prose unfolds hesitantly; initially marked by short sentences and heavy punctuation, it later grows more expansive, yet remains stubbornly banal, lackluster, and pedestrian. The narrative pace is sluggish, burdened with lengthy ideological lectures and the frequent repetition of a handful of actions, hardly enough to inject dynamism and suspense into the novel. The characterization is flimsy: the characters undergo no evolution over the course of the book; everything feels predictable, thoroughly worn out. Why not read it? Prolix and pointless.

Georgette Heyer was one of the most popular twentieth-century English writers. *The Grand Sophy*, recently translated into Italian, chronicles the intrusion of an independent, daring, and willful young woman into a traditional family of the English upper nobility at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The novel opens with Sir Horace’s unexpected request to his sister, the mild-mannered Lady Ombersley, to host his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sophy, for several months. The reader is immediately introduced to the cast of characters and to the circumstances from which the narrative unfolds: the two eldest children, the authoritarian and short-tempered Charles and the “so typically English” Cecilia, a female figure straight out of Jane Austen; the family’s financial ruin following Lord Ombersley’s gambling debts; and the providential inheritance bequeathed to Charles, which has cast him in the role of head of the family, fostering an atmosphere of subservience and reverent dread among his brothers and numerous sisters. Then there are the impending marriages. Charles has engaged himself to Miss Wraxton, unquestionably of high breeding and moral standing, yet detested by the Ombersleys for her patent intention to impose order on a household management she considers far too lax and permissive. Cecilia has accepted Lord Charlbury’s suit, yet has become infatuated with a handsome, penniless young poet. Lady Ombersley’s anxieties are thus manifold; she initially attempts to resist her brother’s insistent pleas, but ultimately agrees to take Sophy in, expecting a timid adolescent eager to be welcomed into the warmth of a home, having been orphaned of her mother as a young child and raised by a father, Sir Horace, who was perpetually on the road. She is consequently left stunned and somewhat alarmed when, accompanied by a mountain of luggage, a greyhound, a small monkey, and a splendid black horse, there appears an imposing girl—not pretty, but > built on generous lines, tall, with a fine bosom, an intensely lively countenance, and a wealth of rich brown hair under one of the most dashing hats her cousins (the numerous young Ombersleys) had ever seen . Her appearance reveals the girl’s character: impatient of rules, stubborn, capricious, and generous all at once, but above all > Sophy could not see anyone in trouble without instantly wishing to discover the cause, and, if possible, to set it right . This attitude cannot fail to bring her into conflict with Charles, by now accustomed to commanding. The girl causes a scandal (driving unchaperoned through London in a racing carriage!), flouts his directives, and openly challenges his betrothed, a sanctimonious busybody. Above all, however, Sophy schemes to make people happy, brushing aside the dictates and conventions of polite society. Yet, as so often happens, strong personalities relish encountering minds capable of defying them, and gradually Charles falls in love with Sophy. Could it be that the girl had been maneuvering from the very outset to conquer her sullen and difficult cousin? The plot is the novel’s greatest strength: unexpected twists, brisk dialogue, and Sophy’s subtle machinations coming to fruition in the teeth of adversity, malicious gossip, and the opposition of Miss Wraxton—virtually the only character who makes a pitiful attempt to thwart her. One senses that quintessential self-critical complacency of English culture, which views itself as rigid and conventional in contrast to Continental culture, imagined conversely as nonconformist and free. It is a trope reflected in the overly schematic portrait of Sophy—monotonously self-consistent, far too assured and mature for her years—and in the profiling of the other characters, so formal and predictable. Cecilia and Charles are the exceptions. The former asserts her complete independence—unprompted, in this instance, by her exuberant cousin—the moment she declares that she does not love Charlbury, but intends to marry the dreamy, handsome poet. Yet it will ultimately be Sophy who plays precisely upon the girl’s ingrained English values—her regard for propriety and respectability—to lead her back to desiring her original betrothed. Charles, on the other hand, represents the synthesis. While it is true that he is mindful of society’s rules and conventions, there resides within him that Elizabethan vigor that underpinned the British Empire. He is, after all, the hero, and one is left to wonder whether it will be he who changes Sophy, molding her into the noblewoman her rank naturally calls her to be. The scene in which Charles and Sophy declare their love is so thoroughly dominated by him that it raises the apprehension that Sophy’s future may simply be to yield to the conformism that surrounds her. Why read it? The plot is full of twists—somewhat predictable, perhaps, but thoroughly entertaining.

Crimson City > had only a single dusty street that branched off at one point into a single dusty crossroads. A church, a laundry, a post office, a general store, a bank, a hotel, a saloon. Everything had a rundown, filthy appearance, bleached by the sun, as if the surrounding desert were trying to swallow the town one bite at a time, (...) as if into the space of twenty houses and three streets they had crammed an assortment of wreckage and remnants of a real city, one with a plan, an intention, a future. Roy had arrived a few years ago. > He's a good kid, the sheriff said hastily. > Just think: he stepped off the train all by himself eight years ago, and he’s been here ever since. (...) He works hard, never a complaint. He’s become one of our own. One day, two people arrived from the desert: a man, whom everyone took to be the famous Sheriff Pickett, and a half-breed girl, who introduced herself as his sister. Piper > was so swaggering, tough, sleek, with two pistols strapped to her thighs, slender bones, spring-loaded muscles, and a devilish glint shining in her eyes. They had received a letter from the sole survivor of the Gordon brothers' outlaw gang—men cut down by Sheriff Pickett, evidently all except one, who was now seeking vengeance in a duel, right in this miniature town. While the townsfolk, trembling yet thrilled, awaited the killer's arrival, love blossomed between Roy and Piper: the boy seemed timid and apprehensive before the brazen, weapon-savvy gunslinger; Piper began to be drawn to Roy’s gentleness and naivety, apparently fragile and defenseless. Are we facing the classic tale of a romantic boy who falls for a mysterious, strange, and stunning girl waiting to be rescued by a knight? Will Roy realize that passion alone is not enough to save his beloved? Much like what occurs in Fabio Geda and Marco Mugnone’s *Il lato oscuro della Luna* (see the review of the novel on this site). Then, suddenly, we discover that Roy is far different from who we believed him to be. The boy is the sole survivor of the Gordon brothers, and he has come to Crimson City to slaughter those who destroyed his family: Sheriff Pickett and his daughter. Will love prove stronger than vengeance, or will Roy press on toward his goal, seeking Piper’s life as well? I leave it to the readers to choose their preference. For my part, I would have welcomed an ending akin to *Il Corsaro Nero*, who fell in love with his enemy's daughter yet pursued his revenge, abandoning his beloved in a boat adrift at sea. > Amid the moans of the wind and the roar of the waves, muffled sobs could be heard at intervals... Look up there! The Black Corsair is weeping! (you can read the review of Emilio Salgari’s novel on this site). Are we certain Roy came to Crimson City merely for revenge, or did he harbor other motives? The plot is well-constructed. In the first part, the premise of a miniature town cut off from everything—where the sole link to the civilized world is a train passing every two weeks—is compelling: an insular community governed by its own dynamics, waiting for unlikely change. Still, the narrative proves somewhat tedious and flat. Then comes an unexpected twist, and the novella turns into a suspense-laden thriller. Perhaps the resolution should have been less cloying; instead, it lapses into a Hollywood-style "happily ever after." The prose is very simple, perhaps overly so, even for a novel aimed at young adults; the narrative framework relies predominantly on dialogue and action, to the detriment of vivid descriptions and nuanced psychological depth, leaving the characters' choices and motives rather thinly drawn. Why read it? It becomes genuinely gripping after a sluggish start.

The Sertão is a vast region in northeastern Brazil: an expanse of low plateaus characterized by brief, intense rains that give rise to alternating periods of drought and flood, ruining crops and bringing famine to an impoverished population historically exploited by large landowners. At the end of the nineteenth century, widespread banditry developed, blending rebellion, brigandage, and confused social demands. In this setting, where "the criminal lives as he pleases," Guimarães Rosa composed an epic poem, a kind of *Iliad*, with its heroes and its battles (see the review of the *Iliad* on this site). Furthermore, the author recounted an unhappy and enchanting love story, a seemingly impossible, extraordinary passion reminiscent of that for the Pisana in Ippolito Nievo's *Confessions of an Italian* (see review on this site). Riobaldo is the son of a wealthy landowner; he could live in comfort and marry a wealthy, beautiful woman of his own social class, yet he chose instead to go fight alongside the rebels: > the Sertão produced me, then swallowed me, then spat me out from the heat of its mouth . Among the rebels, he met a splendid, delicate youth with whom he fell in love. > I felt the need to place my fingers, light, very light, upon those tender eyes of his. (...) My treasure, if only it were broad daylight, and I could see the color of your eyes...; so I said, lost in oblivion, as if I were only thinking aloud, almost reciting a line of verse. Diadorim stepped back, frightened. (...) And he laughed wickedly. We are not in ancient Greece, where homosexual relations were customary and Achilles could love Patroclus; here, in the Sertão, Riobaldo and Diadorim can only be friends, and Riobaldo’s advances a mere "mocking jest." Diadorim is the son of the most prominent gang leader, who is murdered by a cruel, bloodthirsty rival, "the man without a face"—perhaps the Devil himself. The vendetta begins. Several bands under Riobaldo’s command pursue their enemies in ceaseless clashes amidst great rivers, swamps, and scrublands, magnificent wild beasts, impoverished peasants, and wealthy landowners—stealing, raping women, looting, and dying of disease and in battle. The Great Sertão profoundly transforms Riobaldo: from a reflective, insecure youth he becomes a ruthless leader, shrewd and resolute. With his feminine sensitivity, Diadorim gently reproaches him: "what is changing within you is the task of the soul, not the duty of command." Did Riobaldo make a pact with the Devil? To be sure, he sought a pact on a stormy night, but the Devil never appeared. At last, we arrive at the final, decisive battle. Diadorim slays "the man without a face," avenging his father, but dies fighting. And when the pious women wash the corpse, as was the custom in the *Iliad*, they discover that Diadorim is a girl! > She was, such that she thus disenchanted herself, in so terrible an enchantment. (...) I howled. (...) Diadorim was a woman, she was a woman as the sun does not kindle the water of the river Urucuia, as I sobbed out my despair . The novel is not merely a love story. There are at least two other narrative strands. First and foremost, Guimarães Rosa tells of the vanished world of the "jagunços" and their natural and social environment: hardened men whose fate is sealed from birth and who know they will be defeated, yet continue to live in the Great Sertão, singing their songs: > life is a most perilous lot/in the duty of loyalty:/every night a river downstream, /every day is darkness... Another theme is the metaphysical one: does the Devil exist, and where is God? If by the end of the novel we cannot find an answer to the first question, we nevertheless understand quite clearly that God, if He exists, is like the Great Sertão—pervasive yet exceedingly distant, indifferent to the plight of human beings. As the translator notes, Guimarães Rosa’s narrative and lyrical world > blends regional terminology, structures, and inflections with the boldest innovations and the distinctiveness of the natural and human world from which it springs. Much is perhaps lost in translation, yet the magical sense of the narrative remains, sweeping the reader into a dreamlike and fascinating tale. Riobaldo, at the end of his life, narrates his Sertão to an unidentified person, addressed only as Vossignoria"; in this way Guimarães Rosa gives momentum to the novel, alternating brief colloquial phrases with detailed, intense descriptions, melding reality and imagination. It is a pity that Feltrinelli ruined this masterpiece by using a tiny typeface that is exhausting to read: perhaps to save paper and ink! Why read it? Arduous, but magnificent.

We find ourselves inside a major publishing house, in the department tasked with compiling dictionaries. Despite being a profitable business, the staff is remarkably small, not least because preparing a new dictionary is an exceptional endeavor—a difficult, complex undertaking that does not happen every year; between an old dictionary and a new one lies a process of continuous revision, which nevertheless does not overhaul the entire structure of the work. We learn how a dictionary must be exhaustive, up-to-date yet concise, especially since it is compressed into pages where each headword (as the individual entries are called) must occupy a space calibrated so as not to disrupt the balance with the other entries. For example, how does one describe a great poet from around the year 1000 (samurai, monk, and poet), whom tradition named Saigyō—a term laden with meanings, from “immortal” to “wandering pilgrim,” and even “freshwater snail”? Should some of the poet's verses be quoted? Is it right to state that every Japanese person “cannot help but be moved” by Saigyō's poetry? A dictionary ought to be precise and objective, eschewing value judgments. Another challenge is the paper: it must be extraordinarily thin, yet prevent ink from bleeding through to the reverse side. It is hardly surprising that such peculiar work requires individuals so engrossed in the secrets of words as to think of nothing else. Compulsively, > they studied and analyzed them with extreme detachment, almost as if vivisecting them. There was something vindictive about their obsession, as though they were hunting down a hated enemy, gathering information to catch it red-handed and make it pay . Our story begins when the department head retires and seeks someone to replace him. In the office, there is a seasoned colleague, but he suffers from a fatal flaw: he lacks the meticulous obsession required for lexicographical work. Over in sales works a young man, a fellow with “madman's hair who never sheds those hideous black sleeve protectors.” His very name intrigues the department head: Majime is an unusual word, apparently meaning “horse supplier.” When, over lunch, the young man describes his favorite pastime (watching people ride the escalator), the department head knows he has found his man. Just as people queue two by two in a harmony that is “fabulous, elusive,” an enthusiastic Majime exclaims, so too an astonishing tide of words arriving from all quarters can be classified, arranged into columns, and set in immaculate order across the pages of a dictionary: it is within this order that the lexicographer's pleasure resides. Majime gradually settles into his new responsibilities, falls in love, and marries a brilliant young chef. They seem an improbable match, yet they are bound by the same meticulousness and quest for order: Majime in his obsessive exploration of words, and she in the impeccable preparation of traditional Japanese dishes. The publisher decides to embark on a major new dictionary, titled *The Great Passage*. Time is of the essence; they must outpace the competition, which is also working on a new lexicon. The staff needs reinforcing, and an employee from the Marketing Department arrives. Incredulous and intimidated by Majime's “ardent, almost devilish expression,” Kishibe feels she lacks both the competence and the passion; she stands before “a steep, jagged wall impossible to scale.” Yet she gradually comes to realize that this new dictionary—to be published as quickly as possible, concise and precise as any good lexicon must be—is for her a true passage. > She had carried on with her life and career without ever pausing to reflect. (...) Becoming aware of the power of words—the power not to harm others, but to respect them, to communicate, and to forge healthy interpersonal relationships—had taught her to know herself better and to understand the thoughts and feelings of others . All of us, avid readers that we are, believe that words have the power to change people, or at least to offer a deeper understanding of oneself and others. To develop such a compelling and poignant thesis, however, the characters needed greater psychological depth. Instead, Majime is a monolith, fated from the outset to harbor a morbid obsession with minutiae; Kishibe is more complex as a personality, yet she attains self-knowledge through sheer grit and determined labor, without our ever understanding where she comes from or where she truly wishes to go. At times, the author seems eager to inject a suspenseful, quasi-thriller tone into the narrative: will our heroes manage to complete the dictionary against a thousand obstacles and setbacks, despite the skepticism of corporate executives? Yet the plot is sluggish and devoid of surprises, lapsing at times into melodrama and superfluous detail. Why read it? It is pleasantly written and opens a window onto the world of dictionaries.

> In the dust there were little craters where the rain had fallen, and there were clean spots on the corn, and that was all. (...) The dust-filled air hung over everything with a softer sound than fog had. (...) The men were silent and did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men—to see whether this time the men would break. Faced with the destruction of the harvest, the farmers and their families stand struck dumb and resigned: an inexorable fate against which, nonetheless, one must fight. The evocative, intense opening foreshadows the novel's two levels: a political manifesto calling workers to unity, organization, and struggle; and a family engulfed by economic crisis yet determined to pursue a dream, setting out toward the promised land, California. > The stars disappeared, little by little, toward the west. And still the family lingered like dreaming wanderers, their eyes cast upon the whole, not seeing the details, but the entire dawn, the entire earth, the complete weave of the countryside, in a single glance. In this review, I will follow the exodus of this family, for this is the very heart of the novel. We can divide the plot into four movements: the abandonment, the journey, the camps and the work, and the final catastrophe. The first, from chapter one to chapter ten, serves as a sort of preamble: with great power, it depicts the despair, the looming and violent eviction with bulldozers crushing the home, the hurried decision to leave, the frantic sale of their few possessions, the slaughter of the pig and chickens to secure the necessary provisions for the trip, and finally the waiting before departure, amid mingled feelings of dread and hope. “The abandonment” allows the author to introduce the characters: the elderly, stubborn and frail all at once; the head of the family, already struggling to fully assume his role; the uncle, constantly on the verge of collapse from guilt (he let his wife die); the numerous offspring (four sons and two daughters, one of whom is pregnant); and a strange preacher who has decided to pray no longer because it serves no purpose (“all this holiness, everything I didn't understand”). Then there is Ma: a tragic, towering heroine. > She was heavy, but not fat. (...) Her strong, sun-browned arms were bare to the elbow, and her hands were round and delicate, like those of a plump child. Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, with kindness. Her hazel eyes seemed to have lived through every possible tragedy and to have borne them with pain and suffering as passages toward an infinite serenity and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, accept, and gladly assume her role: the citadel of the family, an impregnable stronghold. And it is she who will emerge as a pillar during the “journey,” the great exodus (chapters 11 to 18). > The people in motion, searching, were migrants now. These families who had lived on a little piece of land, who had lived and died on forty acres, who had eaten or starved to death on forty acres, had now the whole West to traverse. On the road, an anthropological transformation takes place: not everyone is able to confront the change; one son flees, the pregnant daughter’s husband abandons her, the old folks die and are buried far from their land, wretchedly like all the poor who no longer have a homeland; the eldest sons, Tom and Al, react differently, the former yearning for rebellion and the latter chasing girls, as if nothing were happening. It becomes increasingly difficult for Ma to hold the family together, yet she fights on, indomitable and indestructible, even as she is often submerged by memories. > I go back to the sad things—that night Granpa died and we buried him. I was all set on the road, and struggling and moving, and it wasn’t so bad. But now I’m here. And Granma—and Noah walking off like that! (...) I can remember how the mountains looked, sharp like old teeth beside the creek where Noah went. I can remember how the weeds looked where Granpa lies. I can remember the chopping block by the front door with the feather stuck in it, all scarred with cuts, and black with chicken blood. At last, the family reaches California. “The camps and the work” (chapters 19 to 29) are far removed from what the migrants expected: the camps where wagons are parked are squalid, putrid, unlivable; work is scarce, wages are starvation-level, and all attempts by the workers to organize are crushed. People literally starve to death; Ma fights desperately to support the family and keep it together, driven by a deep conviction: > woman carries all of life in her arms. (...) Woman is all one flow, like a river, a few rocks, a few waterfalls, but the river keeps on going in the right direction. Woman looks at it that way. We aren’t going to disappear. The people keep on going—changing a little, maybe, but keeping right on in the right direction. The determination and endurance of the proletariat are personified in Ma, who reflects through her own strength that of all women. And finally, we arrive at the catastrophe (chapter 30). It is no longer man who oppresses, but nature, unleashing all its fury upon the most vulnerable, upon those living in camps exposed to the rising waters. A torrential downpour, an outright flood, engulfs the camp where the destitute migrants have settled. An attempt is made to build a dyke, only for it to be swept away by timber carried in the torrent. It is the end for the family; in despair, they scramble for safety along the road and seek shelter. They enter a barn, but as they step into the dark, an emaciated boy steps forward, crying out that his father is starving to death. And then the daughter, who had just lost the child she was carrying, approaches the dying man. > Then slowly she lay down beside him. (...) She bared her breast. (...) She moved closer and pulled his head toward her. “There,” she said, “there.” Her hand moved behind the man’s head to support it. Her fingers gently stroked his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together in a mysterious smile. Medea, Antigone, Cornelia: all the great women of tragedy come to mind while reading this intense novel. Certainly, the social theme is central; we are presented with a fresco of 1930s America, of the proletariat and migration, analyzing with great clarity the mechanisms of class exploitation: the concentration of wealth, mechanization and the displacement of labor, the creation of a desperate reserve army to drive down wages and impose harsh working and living conditions, police brutality, racism. Many viewpoints are possible; I offer my own particular interpretation: the family’s tragic story reflects an underlying, dark pessimism, redeemed only because the woman stands fast like a “rock,” fighting without ever yielding. The ending—so magical and mysterious, in which the daughter, whiny throughout the narrative, takes charge of a dying man—reveals the novel as “a hymn to the female heroine.” Is this an overly naive and simplistic reading? Perhaps; for me, this is precisely where the novel’s power lies. Steinbeck adopts “the language of the speakers,” to borrow a phrase from Pasolini. This makes translation difficult, as one must immerse oneself in an idiom undeniably far removed from classical English. On the other hand, the author’s very aim was to give voice to rural America, in contrast to the language of the upper bourgeoisie. It is a revolutionary novel in its prose as well: a pity, then, that it is weighed down by an essayistic vein that is in many respects declamatory and redundant. Some critics have suggested that the novel’s structure resembles that of *Moby-Dick*, in which long digressions on whaling complement the story of Ishmael and Ahab. I disagree: in *The Grapes of Wrath*, the essayistic strand is superfluous, whereas the novel would have been far more powerful had it remained confined to the family’s saga, making it compact and less sprawling. Why read it? Intense, magical, and realistic all at once—an innovative feat of writing.

*The Grass Harp* is a coming-of-age novel, but it must be read as an assonance of wondrous images and extraordinary sounds, “a harp of voices telling a story.” And all that is left for us is to listen. As was already seen in Salvatore Satta's *The Day of Judgment*, remembrance is not a succession of events, a sequence of situations and characters; it is instead like closing one's eyes > to fix their image, (...) a series of ripples, rings that do not evolve with the freedom of a spiral: for me, passing from one to the next was a leap, not a gradual change . In this case, the one remembering is an adolescent: Collin. Orphaned of both parents, he is taken in at his aunts' house in a small country town. Verena, the younger of the two sisters, is an authoritarian woman, shrewd in business, always ready to impose rules and restrictions. Dolly, the other sister, is eccentric, with the eyes of > a person endowed with a natural talent, gentle, transparent eyes, of a luminous green color, like crème de menthe . And then there is Dolly's only friend, Catherine. > They were always together, and everything they had to say they said to each other: resting my ear against a beam, I could listen to the fascinating tremor of their voices flowing like a hum between the old wooden partitions. (...) I know: Dolly, they said, was Verena's cross. (...) Perhaps it was so. But those were happy years. (...) If some sprite wanted to give me a gift, he would have to give me a bottle filled with the voices of that kitchen, the ha-ha-has and the whispers of the stove, a bottle brimming with the smells of baking, of butter and sweets, even if Catherine smelled like a sow in heat . Verena, ever greedy for profit, wants her sister to agree to commercialize her natural herbal recipes, for which Dolly is famous, but also justifiably protective. For the first time, the two sisters clash, and Dolly, so fragile and docile, reveals all her stubbornness: she decides to leave, taking Collin and Catherine with her, and chooses a tree as their dwelling: > spacious, sturdy, (...) it was like a raft floating on a sea of branches, (...) Dolly knew, and made sure I knew, that it was a ship, that being in it was sailing along the cloudy shores of every dream, (...) we belonged to it, just as the sunlit branches belonged to it, a nest for night birds. It is a scandal, clearly a revolt—against Verena and against the whole town. And indeed, several times the sheriff, the reverend, and the townsfolk gather beneath the tree to convince Dolly to come down. The situation becomes even more awkward when an old retired judge joins the “revolutionaries,” who in turn allow a strange and large family of wanderers to camp near the tree. The orderly life of the town is disrupted. Things escalate to physical confrontation, to forceful action; Catherine is arrested. In the end, Dolly will be the one to decide: her wisdom, and her affection for her sister, for Collin, and for Catherine, convince her to come down, not least because Verena has realized she was in the wrong. The story concludes with Dolly’s prolonged illness and her death. It is time for Collin to leave. What does the tree symbolize? Many things: freedom, dreams, nature, and especially a bond so powerful as to outlast death: that between Collin and Dolly. > I would have invented someone, a story to find her again, because she seemed to be moving forward into the future, while I was unable to follow her in my monotonous stillness . Yet as I went on writing > we flowed together again like a stream of water that an island had divided for an instant . As had already been seen in *The Great Gatsby*, the eye of the young narrator—an adolescent—illuminates through imagination the figure of a modest provincial woman and an ordinary treehouse built by other boys at play. Imagination is the most powerful means (the only one?) to transfigure reality and make us happy. The first chapter is splendid; after that, the narrative proceeds slowly, devoid of rhythm, bogged down by too many digressions and the entrance of an excessive, redundant cast of characters. In short, the writer drags things out, failing to develop the ingenious premise of the treehouse as a refuge and a realm of dreams and freedom. Perhaps it was detrimental to insist on constructing a plot rather than surrendering to the mysterious atmosphere of the woods: too much prose, too little poetry! Why read it? It is worth reading for the first chapter alone.

As I set out to read this novel, my mind raced at once to another great book: *Reading Lolita in Tehran* by Azar Nafisi. The author imagines *The Great Gatsby* being put on trial; it stands accused of being the emblematic expression of bourgeois society, of a vacuous and amoral world in which all that matters is self-fulfillment. Over the course of the imaginary trial, one comes to understand that the true theme of Fitzgerald’s novel is entirely different: it speaks of the failure of a dream. Nafisi writes: > dreams.... they are perfect, ideal, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, and incomplete reality? (...) Gatsby wanted to fulfill a dream by retracing the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a disgrace, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had imposed itself in the name of our collective past and destroyed our lives in the name of a dream? These are considerations that would lead us far afield; it is better to turn to the narrative itself. In the rampant New York society of the 1920s, a young man mysteriously appears: seemingly wealthy, he lives in a splendid mansion where he hosts magnificent, crowded receptions; his conversation and his manners are exquisite and formal, so much so that he is thought to have studied at Oxford. Who is he? Where does he come from? What is the source of so much wealth? The most disparate, fantastical rumors spread about him, all imbued with a suspicious fascination with his past. Only the young Nick, the narrator of the great Gatsby’s story, grows fond of the man, because > it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a readiness for love, such as I had never found in any other person and likely never will . One arrives at an acquaintance with Gatsby leisurely, during a party that, in the sum of its constituent elements (narrative pace, dialogue, situations, characters), recalls the volume *The Guermantes Way* from Proust’s masterpiece, *In Search of Lost Time*; but when we suddenly meet Gatsby, the prevailing mediocrity vanishes in an instant. > He smiled understandingly. (...) It was one of those rare smiles that possess a quality of eternal reassurance. (...) It faced, or seemed to face, the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible benevolence toward you. It understood you as you wished to be understood, believed in you as you would have liked to believe in yourself. Could the true theme of the novel not be a great friendship—that between Nick and Gatsby? Slowly the story unfolds. Gatsby once had a love affair with Daisy; he left her to fight in the Great War, and also because he was poor and knew he could not aspire to a wealthy young woman. He returned after five years, determined to find his old love again; he is convinced he can win her back, not least because he now has the money to do so. > No amount of fire or ice can challenge what a man has kept hidden in the mysteries of his own heart . Nick’s words, filtered through affection and imagination, lead us to the encounter between Gatsby and Daisy. > He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever bound his unswerving visions to Daisy’s perishable breath, his soul would never again waver like the mind of God. So he waited, (...) then kissed her. At the touch of his lips she blossomed for him like a flower and the union was complete. (...) I was reminded of something, an elusive rhythm, a fragment of whispers heard somewhere long ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape and my lips parted like a mute’s, as though there were no more breath in them than a startled wisp of air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was incommunicable forever . Such romantic love cannot have a happy ending! Daisy is a shallow young woman; after viewing Gatsby’s vast wardrobe, she begins to weep bitterly: > they are such magnificent shirts, (...) I’ve never seen such beautiful ones before . Gatsby must pay > a high price for living too long with a single dream . He is killed in his garden: > a new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted aimlessly about... like those white, fantastic figures gliding toward him through formless trees . To understand the great Gatsby, one must begin with the narrator. In his “more vulnerable years,” the young Nick received this advice from his father: > whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, remember that not everyone has had the advantages that you’ve had . Nick interpreted this guidance as a reason to avoid passing judgment, to be merely a spectator; yet he is, in fact, an impassioned young man in search of an ideal; and thus the great Gatsby is the personification of the dream of a young man, reserved by nature, visionary in heart. Through the great Gatsby, he elevates himself above mediocrity, committing himself to the very end in a bond with someone and something. The great Gatsby is a myth, he is the future, he is what we long to be. If the great Gatsby is the product of Nick’s imagination, it is only fitting that the narrative should not be a mere chronicle, but rather rest upon an evanescent, unreal, evocative prose. The plot is mundane, the dialogues are elegant yet often predictable, the characters are stereotypes, serving solely to throw Gatsby into relief. Why, then, such fascination? What captivates us in reading, what leads us into the mysteries of our own hearts and allows us to dream, is the narrative style, the words, the architecture of the sentences: a literary masterpiece. Why read it? Splendid!

> I wake in the darkness before dawn, flailing among the agonized shreds of dreams that still linger in my consciousness, searching for a burning sense of anticipation. (...) In every part of my body, I perceive separately the distinct weights of flesh and bone, sensations that coalesce into a dull ache within my consciousness, reluctant to resurface into the light. (...) I have slept with my arms and legs curled to the side, in the posture of one unwilling to recall his own nature or the circumstances in which he finds himself. This is the novel’s opening; it encapsulates the essential traits of a narrative that is oneiric yet deeply rooted in reality: the refuge of dreams to flee suffering—the latter manifested through bodies often described in grotesque terms; memory as a prison enclosing a human destiny already doomed; the ambiguity of familial and social ties, thickened by resigned silences and unspeakable memories. We find ourselves before a stream of consciousness set against a backdrop portrayed both naturalistically and like a dark fable. Mitsui, the first-person narrator, is shattered by the tragicomic suicide of a friend. His life is already scarred by his son’s monstrous disability and his wife’s alcoholism; furthermore, tragic family events weigh upon him, their recollection repressed yet ever-present in his consciousness. Perhaps to effect a turning point in his life, he accepts the invitation of his brother Taka to return to the village at the edge of the “mighty” forest, where the family home stood and where they grew up as children. It is a return to the past: for Mitsui, a desperate hope for change that translates into the definitive awareness of his estrangement from the world; for Taka, a desire for self-punishment enacted by retracing dramatic events that engulfed their family. In 1860, upon the fall of the Shogunate, their great-grandfather’s brother led a peasant uprising, later bloodily suppressed; at the end of the Second World War, in the very same village, a brother died in a clash between Japanese and Koreans, the latter prisoners of war. Seeking to retrace the deeds of his uncle and brother, Taka decides to lead the villagers in pillaging the local supermarket, owned by a Korean known as “The Emperor” (perhaps to confer upon him a sacred aura, Korean as he is!). Mitsui remains aloof from the events, curling further into his stupor, while Taka emerges as a vigorous and cunning leader; yet it is all a charade through which Taka seeks to punish himself for a grave sin: as a youth, he raped his disabled sister, driving her to suicide. Taka confesses to a murder he did not commit and then, disbelieved by Mitsui, kills himself. > He looked like a life-size plaster dummy, entirely red and dressed only in trousers. shouts the wife to Mitsui, who tries to justify himself. > You reject people and let them die, and the only thing you can do to make amends is cry out in your sleep: “I have abandoned you!” (...) In the deep gloom of the cellar, stirred by swirling eddies of wind, I saw the eyes of a dying cat. (...) As I contemplated them in the darkness, the eyes of my cat, a companion of many years, became the eyes of Taka, the eyes of the great-grandfather’s brother I had never known, and the eyes of my wife, red as plums; and they all merged into a luminous circle that was rapidly asserting itself as an undeniable part of my being. (...) And I would survive in an agony of shame, beneath the light of those stars, peering with my single eye and the timidity of a mouse into a vague, dark outside world... The setting is similar to that of *The Water Forest* (see the review on this site), and certain historical references are analogous, such as the peasant uprisings of 1860, but the narrative structure is profoundly different. Unlike in *The Water Forest*, here the first-person narrator is redundant, just as the familial relationships are intricate, unfolding along two axes: the bond between Mitsui and Taka, a mixture of affection and revulsion, and the former's relationship with his wife, which seemingly remains in the background. > Remaining silent for a moment and then staring at me with eyes full of desperate hostility, this time red from tears rather than whisky, my wife said to me: > When the time comes when, as you say, we must acknowledge that there is no turning back, perhaps then we will be a little kinder to each other! . Despite the complex interplay of themes and narrative layers, perhaps the unifying meaning of the novel lies in the acceptance of the disabled child—the sole possibility for rebuilding a relationship torn apart by merciless fate. The narrative unfolds slowly, with numerous references and digressions, as if the author were wary of uncovering the depths of consciousness too quickly. One is captivated by the spell of the words, rich in psychological and social resonance; yet an oppressive sense of claustrophobia looms over everything, offering no glimpse of development or resolution, so that reading becomes burdensome and one reaches the novel's end with difficulty. Why read it? Splendid prose, and the haunting allure of pain and death.

> How was it possible that there, at the end of the world.... something different ordered things, men, time, death, something that it would be unjust to call madness and too broad to call faith and superstition . Such are the reflections of one of the protagonists of an incredible, and in some respects indecipherable, book. Vargas Llosa recounts an actual event that took place in Brazil in 1889, during the transition from empire to republic. A multitude of the disinherited had gathered around a holy man and, in a kind of messianic and religious fervor, had founded a utopian place, free from exploitation. The government of the young republic dispatched a mighty army against them, which, after a bloody battle, carried out a chilling and ruthless massacre. The episode had been recounted many times before, yet Vargas Llosa crafts a complex narrative from it, weaving social and political themes with spiritual and psychological ones. The novel can be divided into three parts. In the first, the author relates the background to the uprising: a strange figure wanders through the *sertão*, followed by a handful of disciples, to rebuild abandoned churches and thus bring a religious sign to a people forsaken by everyone, even their own priests. Then, an ever-growing crowd gathers around him, as the holy man manages to convert the most disparate figures: gang leaders, bloodthirsty killers, merchants, fallen women, hunchbacks, and the wretched. All are drawn by a quest for redemption and peace. In the second part, the utopian enclave of Canudos is created out of nothing; its renown draws yet more people, but it also attracts the attention of monarchist landowners, who hope to exploit the revolt for anti-republican ends, and the interest of socialists and revolutionaries, who interpret through European lenses events that defy the frameworks of Marxist and anarchist ideologies. The first expeditions sent to quell the uprising fail miserably: Canudos's survival is a threat, not because the poor intend to stage a revolution, but because it bears witness to a utopian society. A distinctly Brazilian alternative to exploitation exists, and this is unacceptable to monarchists and republicans alike: the two political factions join forces, and a massive army is dispatched. And here begins the third part, the most extraordinary in the entire book. With exceptional narrative skill, Vargas Llosa describes the siege of Canudos across two hundred pages: a continuous alternation of martial descriptions with the personal chronicles of the various characters. There are four central figures whose stories unify a narrative that would otherwise have been fragmentary. First, a trio composed of a dwarf, a peasant woman, and a journalist who is virtually blind because he has lost his glasses. His blurred eyes take in the terrible scenes through an out-of-focus perspective, lending an air of unreality to the entire narrative (an exceptional literary device). Far from the battlefield, in the aftermath of events, there unfolds a dialogue between this same journalist and one of the monarchist leaders, a baron whose wife was driven mad by the sight of her home torched by the rebels. Reason, the great organizer of the world, has dissolved in the face of the horrific events of Canudos: the rules no longer make sense; the world is turned upside down. > Love, pleasure, thought the baron, bewildered. It seemed to him a sacrilege that those beautiful, forgotten words should appear on the lips of that ridiculous creature, huddled like a heron in the armchair. Was it not comical, grotesque that a mongrel bitch from the sertão should make a man who was, despite everything, cultivated, speak of love and pleasure? But in the world, truth and happiness may be found in the most improbable things, such as in a bond of love and affection between a journalist, a peasant woman, and a dwarf, or in the lesbian love of the baron's wife for her maid, in which the baron himself might have taken part had he realized earlier that it would have pleased his wife. And so it might be that the baron could see that > the people in the boats were not fishing but throwing flowers into the sea, scattering petals, corollas, bouquets upon the water, and crossing themselves, and, though he could not hear it, his chest pounded hard, he was certain that those people were also praying and perhaps singing . It is extraordinarily difficult to give a single interpretation to the book. It can certainly be read in many ways: an indictment of a ruling class ruthless in defending its own interests, a critique of a left wing often vainglorious and far from understanding the specific reality, a cruel depiction of the violence of war as well as the ignorance of the masses. I believe, rather, that the unifying thread is confusion—a crowding of voices and images, a firework display that lasts only a few minutes but illuminates the sky in points of light, without any discernible meaning. Why read it? The narrative style is splendid and sustains a book that is undoubtedly long and fragmentary.

The book deals with the Napoleonic Wars, and in particular the French invasion of Russia, the sacking of Moscow, and the defeat of Napoleon. In the early parts of the novel, war is something distant, a matter for the powerful and their diplomatic games, whereas > life, the real life of men, with its fundamental necessities concerning health, illness, work, rest... , proceeded, as always, independently and outside political friendship and hostility toward Napoleon Bonaparte, and beyond all possible reforms . There exist, therefore, several narrative planes: the great political and military events, the battles and political rivalries, through the narration of which Tolstoy articulates from the outset one of the book’s fundamental themes. His philosophy of history is that everything is accomplished in accordance with an end that man is not granted to understand, being the work of Divine Providence. This philosophical conception contrasts, then, with the stark depiction of war as destruction, suffering, and death—a catastrophe that spares neither the vanquished nor the victors; the vacuous life of the court and the aristocrats, enclosed in their web of relations, their petty worldly pleasures, and their intrigues: behaviors that persist even during the sacking of Moscow itself, heedless of the danger looming over the country; the search for a meaning to existence, embodied by Pierre (Freemasonry and the ideals of French democracy), by the inner torments of Prince Andrei (who perceives the absurdity of war from the start and recoils in horror), and by Princess Marya’s steadfast religious faith; the domestic life of the Rostovs, woven of small, genuine occurrences, Natasha’s awakening to love, Sonya’s unrequited devotion to Nikolai, first infatuations, balls, and receptions. This structure of the novel shatters with the French invasion, when war intrudes into civil life. As Prince Andrei observes, > my father, too, was building at Lysye Gory and thought that was his place, his land, his air, his peasants; but Napoleon came and, without even knowing of his existence, struck him aside, casting him like a splinter out of the road, and Lysye Gory and his entire life collapsed . War reshuffles the novel’s distinct narrative planes and upends the lives of the protagonists, opening paths that once seemed impossible, yet are made viable by suffering, necessity, and the authenticity demanded by extraordinary events. Marya is rescued by Nikolai and falls in love with him; Pierre, in captivity, through close contact with privation, death, and simple souls, comes to understand the true roots of serenity and happiness; Natasha discovers love while nursing Andrei, grasping the genuine, deeper dimensions of romantic devotion, thereby preparing herself to embrace Pierre’s affection. Everything culminates in the discovery of fundamental values (family, marriage, the pleasures of country life and good stewardship, religion) in a “hosanna” to tradition and the good. The heavy religious and philosophical imprint comes at the expense of the depth and complexity of the characters and the events narrated. The protagonists are stereotypes of social and familial roles, devoid of genuine torment, substantive evolution, or change. The pace of the narrative is brisk, if one sets aside the philosophical digressions, but this is due to a sequence of episodes that, in certain instances, degenerate into impromptu snapshots, paradoxically mirroring the structure of a modern television drama. A few pages are redeemed: Nikolai’s visit to the military hospital with the vision of the sick in appalling hygienic conditions, the Battle of Borodino, the mingling of Russian soldiers and French prisoners reduced to a single shared destiny, Andrei’s death, and the grief of Marya and Natasha. From this standpoint, one cannot share the opinion expressed in the *Enciclopedia Treccani*, which casts in a positive light what is, in truth, the work’s most profound limitation. > What struck and continues to strike the reader most in this epic of recurring yet ever-new motifs is the total absence of any artistic arbitrariness, the seamless fusion of art with life. Sustained by a prose of pure substance, without a shadow of embellishment, the diverse threads of the narrative knot and unravel with absolute spontaneity. Life and death are celebrated within it with the same devotion, both humble and solemn. From the protagonists to the minor extras, all possess an unmistakable individuality, and all, in turn, are as if absorbed by a humanity that resides within them and above them. Only toward the end of the novel does one sense the presence of an author who has a thesis to defend and to preach. And this presence would indeed be grating, were it not to bring us back to the very essence of the work: man creates nothing, commands nothing; he merely follows the inevitable march of events unfolding before his eyes . The contemporary relevance of the novel lies in its agonizing portrayal of war, in its devastating repercussions on soldiers and civil society alike. In this sense, the dichotomous theme of war as a cluster of remote occurrences that do not touch individual conscience, versus war as a violent intrusion into daily existence, offers a line of reflection equally valid for today’s political landscape. Tolstoy does not condemn war in itself (his appreciation of partisan warfare and his romantic conception of war as an emancipator of authentic values are readily apparent); rather, he seems above all to condemn war as a diplomatic and political “game” that disregards the toll of suffering and grief inflicted upon the people.

It is a book for children aged 9–10. Guglielmo is a young boy who finds a gold coin and discovers that people, even good ones, turn false and wicked out of greed. The only bonds left to him are those with his dog and a vagrant, a former soldier. In the end, Guglielmo realizes that, if > a man is free, has friends, has honest work, cares for people, well, perhaps he has something more than one gold coin, or a hundred. Therefore he is rich . The book is pleasant, but it strikes me as somewhat dated, overly simple, and lacking that touch of suspense needed to keep the reading from being entirely predictable.

Mohamed emigrated from Morocco to France to work in a factory, a harsh life that enabled him to raise five children. They are now estranged from him because they are integrated into French society, whereas he has remained tied to his traditions, feeling Moroccan rather than French. The daily grind of an intense working life allowed him to conceal, first and foremost from his own conscience, the discomfort with a culture he does not share and his refusal to integrate, to resign himself to Western ways. Retirement age arrives, however, and he can no longer escape a sense of unease he has always harbored: that of being “someone who never found his place.” Most of the short novel is the narrative of an inner journey. Mohamed tries by every means to give meaning to life as a French pensioner, but he would have to spend his days at the café, > drink beer? Out of the question. Watch TV, follow the race results, fantasize about those half-naked girls who populate American TV shows? Or take the advice of a fellow countryman: move back to his home village and take a pretty girl as a second wife. Neither solution is possible. The bond with his own tradition, religion, land, and the customs of his Morocco is too strong within him. His rectitude and sense of family duty do not allow him, either, to offend his wife or set himself at odds with his children. > Mohamed set off, his fists clenched in his pockets. He thought of his children and had the feeling of having lost them. He felt himself plummeting into the void, hurled into nothingness like a sack of rubble. A sack full of things that are no longer of any use. In this sack lay a rat, long dead. And from it emanated an unbearable stench. He told himself: I am the sack and the rat, I am the stones and the rusted iron, I am the creature that nobody loves... Mohamed no longer exists. No one thinks of him anymore, no one calls for his presence. It is over, he has reached the end of the long road . And so Mohamed reacts to this anguish in the only way imaginable for him, an emigrant and a stranger to his new homeland: returning to his country, building a large house capable of accommodating his whole family. Yet, as a shadow that appeared before him told him, this building will be > a place of penance for lost souls like you, strangers who no longer know who they are or where they come from . The final part of the novel is, precisely, the account of this journey, which cannot but end in a solitary death, seated in an armchair that > sank deeper every day... only the head stuck out (until) on the fortieth day the earth swallowed the head.. (and) in a few days the grave was covered with lush green grass . It is as if Morocco were taking him back after a lifetime of exile: a dark yet beautiful image. The novel addresses some traditional themes of the immigrant condition, balanced between the land of origin and the host country. Retirement is the catalyst for men who found in work a way to hide from themselves that deep existential unease, which derives from a condition increasingly isolated from, if not in conflict with, the new generations. It is very interesting that the entire narrative revolves around the intergenerational relationship, rather than tackling predictable cultural and sociological issues. The distinctive element of the novel is the figure of Mohamed. He seeks no loopholes or half-measures, but stubbornly and wretchedly confronts his estrangement from French society and the dream of returning to his own culture. But to whom, then, does the author refer with that *Lei* of the title: to the nostalgia for his homeland that killed him, or rather to Mohamed's own rectitude, which forbids him from accepting compromises? Very well written, it is nevertheless a pity that an intellectualized imprint can be felt, which deprives the narrative of sincerity. The leap between the bulk of the book, made of psychological introspections, and the oneiric, surreal final section is too stark. Why read it? It is very well written; yet the author loses himself in the psychological mechanisms of the protagonist.

The book is set in Nigeria between 1960 and 1970 and is divided into two parts: the early 1960s in a Nigeria newly emerged from British colonial rule, marked by an apparent social tranquility; the late 1960s in Biafra (in southeastern Nigeria), where the predominantly Catholic Igbo fought an ill-fated war of independence against northern Nigeria, dominated by other ethnic groups that were predominantly Muslim. The narrative opens with the arrival of one of the protagonists, Ugwu, at the home of Odenigbo, a mathematics professor harboring fiery revolutionary ideas, anti-Western sentiments, and an impassioned defense of African identity. Ugwu is still a boy, yet he displays a keen intellectual ambition and deep devotion to his master. Two sisters then enter the scene, Olanna and Kainene, daughters of a wealthy and powerful family, strikingly different from one another: the former gorgeous, educated, and irremediably in love with Odenigbo, captivated by his intellect and culture; the latter pragmatic and entrepreneurial, who soon falls in love with Richard, a young Englishman who has arrived in Nigeria to write a book on African society. The novel is skillfully constructed around the impact of dramatic events (war, violence, and famine) on the relationships among the various characters and on their struggle to survive and salvage a sense of normalcy in their lives. The first part of the novel frames the characters' experiences within a society intensely stratified in social terms and still dominated by British culture. The two sisters, educated in London, react differently to the corruption of their milieu. Olanna moves in with Odenigbo into the academic world, brimming with ideals and often inconclusive debates about the country's future and its independence from the Western world. Kainene, on the other hand, embraces the rules of the business world, embarking on an entrepreneurial career with cynical boldness. A severe rift opens between the two sisters. Olanna discovers that Odenigbo has slept with another woman, fathering a daughter with her, and out of fury has a brief affair with Richard. The estrangement between the sisters is subsequently accompanied by Olanna's decision—both incomprehensible and courageous—to adopt the child born of the union between her husband and the other woman. The second part of the novel follows the protagonists amidst a war that grows more cruel and violent with each passing day. Gradually, poverty and destitution take hold, family structures shatter, the baseline of respect that ought to govern human relations dissolves, and everything—even body and soul—becomes currency for sheer survival. The protagonists themselves take part in episodes of extreme violence: Olanna is caught in a massacre, narrowly escaping only to discover during her flight that a woman is carrying her own daughter's severed head; Ugwu, conscripted into the army, is drawn into a gang rape; Odenigbo collapses psychologically, turning to alcohol and betraying his wife. Kainene and Richard, who seem more insulated from the terror of the war, watch powerlessly as one of their servants is slaughtered: the decapitated body stumbles forward before collapsing to the ground. The protagonists do not truly live; rather, life sweeps them along, and in the end they find themselves as though > in a candlelit room, where things are seen in shadow, only by half-glimmers of light . It is difficult to summarize the events of the book's second half, as the narrative often seems to lose its central thread, fracturing into distinct episodes and a multitude of characters. What remains striking, however, is the contrast between the dramatic gravity of the events and the serenity of the narration. It is as though the protagonists were moving through a dream, a nightmare from which they are certain they will awaken, returning to the world that dissolved with the war. The violence that engulfed them leads them to repress the horrific episodes they experienced, driving them to forgive even transgressions, mutual betrayals, abandonments, and acts of cowardice. “There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.” Bonds are formed that shatter traditional social stratifications, such as the deep friendship between Olanna and Ugwu. Certainties dissolve, as do Odenigbo's; new allegiances are forged, such as Richard's devotion to the Igbo people; the struggle persists through entrepreneurial drive placed at the service of the community, as in the case of Kainene, who meets her death trying to secure vital food and medicine for her refugee camp. This sense of impermanence, of incredulity, stems not so much from the plot and dialogue as from the prose itself—never overwrought or emphatic, but consistently quiet, composed, and measured. The author's gaze is fundamentally introspective, reflecting how the protagonists witness and experience external events. In this light, the tragedy of Biafra becomes a universal one, which could be set anywhere people are overtaken by war and violence: Bosnia, Rwanda, and today the Horn of Africa and Pakistan. Can one remain oneself in the face of collective catastrophe? The novel offers no simple affirmative answer, but points instead to the resilience of each individual and the conditions in which each must endure the tragedy. Despite its length, the book is a deeply compelling read, both for its prose style and the emotional depth it explores: there is no forced psychological inquiry or striving for dramatic effect; the author simply describes, leaving it to the words, the characters, and the events to convey the tragedy of an entire people. A certain fragmentation nonetheless emerges, stemming from the overlapping of events and characters. Why read it? Because it depicts a tragedy that could unfold anywhere in the world: it portrays how easily one can be consumed by violence.

Harry Potter lives with his aunt and uncle, a prosaic bourgeois family who hate, above all, that > anyone speak of anything that shouldn't be, no matter if it is in a dream or even a cartoon, (...) it might be a dangerous idea . As in the fairy tale of Cinderella, Harry is treated dreadfully by his aunt and uncle, the butt of his cousin's stupid and brutal pranks; in short, he is a victim, orphaned by parents considered eccentric and better left unmentioned. Strange letters begin to arrive: they invite Harry to a boarding school for witches and wizards. His uncle destroys the mail, but it keeps on coming; he then flees with the family to unreachable places; all in vain, as mysteriously the mail arrives everywhere. He must accept that his nephew has been admitted to a school where they teach "what shouldn't be"; he must even accompany him to platform "nine and three-quarters," the track that isn't there. The first part of the book is built entirely on paradox, between what is real and what could be, what we often wish were so and experience through fantasy. It is the best part of the novel. From that point on, we follow Harry to his peculiar school, where the magical arts and the secrets of witches are taught, but where the mechanisms of any boarding school are at work: rivalries, friendships, discipline and how to break it, strict teachers, indulgent ones, the likable and the unlikable. The boarding school, a dark castle, conceals a mystery: a three-headed dog guards a Philosopher's Stone, the possession of which grants immortality and bestows powers capable of conquering the world. Harry suspects that a teacher wants to seize it to hand it over to Voldemort, the Lord of Evil, whose name no one dares utter, so great is the fear. Adventures, perils, and acts of courage test Harry and his circle of friends; in the end, there is a twist, with a direct confrontation between Harry and Voldemort. How did the boy manage to resist the force of evil? > If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He did not understand that love as powerful as your mother's for you would leave its own mark , giving Harry protection forever. And again, > only one who wanted to find the Stone, find it, but not use it, would be able to get it . The author skillfully blends magical and adventurous elements with an environment familiar to adolescents, namely school. The narrative pace is not as intense and surprising as one would expect, not least because one remains aware that the danger is merely apparent and will always resolve for the best. The salvific role of the super-wizard Dumbledore flattens Harry's autonomy, excessively aided by forces and figures far above him. The book fails to fully become a *Bildungsroman*, in that the young protagonist never fully matures into adulthood. If one compares *Harry Potter* with *Treasure Island*, the difference between Jim and Harry is striking: the setting is always exceptional, but the former emerges a man, while the latter remains an adolescent, subordinate to the adults. Is this perhaps why youngsters read *Harry Potter* and not Stevenson's great book? Because they can cling to the illusion that someone or something will always help them in life? The chief virtue of Rowling's novel is the writing: elegant, clear, effective, grammatically flawless. The book could easily be used to teach the most demanding forms of the English language. Why read it? Beautiful English

What an ordeal! It is an extremely tedious book, so steeped in intellectualisms as to make one lose both the sense and the direction of the reading. Herzog, a scholar of Romanticism, has been left by his second wife. He enters a phase of physical and psychological delirium, wanders between New York and Chicago, and imagines carrying on a correspondence with figures from his life, as well as with scholars and men of letters. In the end, he retreats to his country house and lapses into absolute silence: “at this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.” The book’s final sentence encapsulates its profound meaning: a verbosity that conceals the loss of meaning. For 340 pages (for 13. 600 lines) the author sustains an entirely fragmented narrative, devoid of narrative rhythm, yet brimming with adjectives and “parentheses.” Postmodernism engulfs both the philosophical and the personal plane of the book: everything is muddled, and there is neither a metaphysics nor a certainty to anchor oneself to. It is not marriage, which is a source of betrayal and misery (the figure of Madeleine); it is not romantic relationships outside marriage (Ramona, who nevertheless expects an ongoing relationship); it is not cities, by now reduced to mere rendezvous spots and places of rest; above all, it is not philosophy and literature, which often constitute a useless ornament and a cumbersome superstructure. Perhaps children and the family of origin are the only bonds that matter in a world confused and fractured in its unity. > The drama of this stage of human evolution seems to be... the age of a special comedy....perhaps the revenge taken by numbers, by the species on our impulses of narcissism (as well as on our demand for freedom) is inevitable. In this realm of multitudes, self-consciousness tends to reveal us to ourselves as monsters . In the preface to the book, Malcolm Bradbury underscores two important aspects of *Herzog*. The book was published in 1964, and its narrative style and sentence syntax opened a literary strand that is dominant today: the dissolution of the novel's structure. Many modern writers (think of Paul Auster himself) are deeply influenced by Saul Bellow. The novel no longer possesses completeness and unity, but is instead an assemblage of “zig-zags” reflecting the fragmentation and contradiction that dominate the individual, self-consciousness, and society. With the novel, one does not seek to provide a verisimilar representation of the world, but pursues, as Saul Bellow said in his Stockholm Nobel lecture, “a hut in which the spirit takes shelter.” The second aspect is the philosophical one. Herzog quarrels with modern thought and moves through the realm of ideas. His internal turmoil is primarily due to an existential anguish that finds no answer in a world dominated by metropolises, the masses, science, and organized power.

Unlike the more accomplished *Appuntamento a Istanbul*, in this novel it is unclear what the author is driving at: a mystery, a novel of local color, or the story of an endearing forty-something woman still searching for herself? What we know for certain is that the protagonist and first-person narrator runs a bookshop specializing in noir fiction, loves spending her time out and about in Istanbul's myriad establishments (take note, anyone planning to visit the city!), and above all dreams of printing on her business card: > Kati Hirschel bookseller - detective, homicide squad consultant . Triggering the story and shaking the listless Kati awake is the arrival of Petra, a childhood friend who soon finds herself implicated as a suspect in the murder of the director of the film in which she is acting. Was it the friend, driven by jealousy or some secret from her past? Was it someone from the crew, perhaps looking to take the director’s place? Or was the man involved in criminal racketeering and taken out by the Turkish mafia? Kati's investigation proceeds slowly and listlessly, with the pieces of the crime never falling into place along any logical trajectory. Surprise twists are lacking as well. The resolution simply arrives in the end, by chance. Instead, the reader is overwhelmed by a whirlwind of characters to whom the protagonist stubbornly and monotonously puts the very same questions. A few erotic scenes clumsily spice up the narrative. Frankly, it is a bad novel. One struggles to find a single redeeming quality. It is not a good noir, because it has no plot. Kati’s personal life is sketched superficially, and we never truly understand who this German woman, infatuated with Istanbul, actually is. The city's atmosphere remains relegated to the background. The observations are indeed trite and cliché, along the lines of: > out of ten million people, it seems no one ever goes home. The streets teem with people and cars at all hours of the day and night . How many metropolises wouldn't fit this description? Only the narrator's mild irony redeems itself, but it is not enough to make the narrative enjoyable. Why not read it? It is boring: a waste of time.

The book depicts a parallel narrative set across different historical periods. The protagonist inherits a house that once belonged to an Elizabethan-era alchemist (the setting is London). The story of this figure is thus evoked, overlapping with the narrative of the protagonist's gradual discovery of the house (or of himself). The style is verbose and tedious, devoid of the slightest narrative pace..

The theme of sleep purports to be the book’s unifying thread, to the point that the novel is divided into parts corresponding to the various stages of sleep. In reality, it is a device—perhaps overly intellectual—to tell the story of the love between Robert and Sarah. We find ourselves in a university hall of residence. Sarah suffers from a sleep disorder that leads her to confuse dreams with reality. At their first meeting, Robert tells her he has just lost a cat to which he was deeply attached. Sarah dreams that Robert has lost a twin sister, Cleo, who does not actually exist. And it is upon this misunderstanding, originating in Sarah’s secret—her sleep disorder—that their relationship takes root: > as she left, they looked directly into each other's eyes for the first time; and something happened then, some connection was made, just for a moment . Their relationship is built on confidences, which > ranged freely over feelings, friendship, families and gender, shared intimacies and self-revelations which became deeper and more frequent as the objects themselves grew larger and more complex . The relationship between Robert and Sarah cannot, however, develop into a true romantic affair, partly because Sarah is a lesbian and partly due to Robert’s inability to translate his feelings into romantic advances. Their story remains in limbo until Sarah’s and Robert’s paths diverge: their university years come to an end, and when Sarah terminates a relationship with a woman, Robert realizes he is incapable of seizing this opportunity to translate his affection for his friend into a sexual relationship. At this point, the plot (in truth, the narrative constantly jumps between past and present, complicating the reading experience) shifts into the future, when the university residence has been converted into a sleep clinic—as it turns out, run by Sarah’s first lover, a paranoid man convinced that his mission in life is to find a way not to sleep. This is the least convincing section of the book, which seems to slide into a thriller, peppered with superficial musings on psychological science and references to analogies between dreams, fantasy, and cinema. The finest pages are those chronicling the life of Sarah, now a schoolteacher, in some way haunted by her sleep disorder—with which she has come to terms—and ever waiting for Robert, the only person with whom she knows she is truly in tune. Only towards the end of the novel is it revealed that Robert has undergone gender reassignment (because he understood his true nature, or out of love for Sarah?), becoming Cleo, a physician specializing in sleep disorders. And, like any thriller, everything is resolved, and Cleo can finally reveal herself to Sarah. The book’s primary virtue is the prose: pleasant, brilliant, and fluid. Its chief flaw is the inconclusiveness of the events and the characters: everything remains superficial, creating a palpable disconnect between the narrative structure of a thriller and the unmistakable ambition to deliver something more. What, exactly? It is impossible to say. Why read it? The individual pages read exceptionally well; the story as a whole disappoints.

The novel presents itself in the form of a manual. The author envisions teaching how to become rich in Asia, a continent in profound transformation. > Why persist in reading the much-lauded, yet so tedious, foreign novels... if not out of a desire to understand those distant countries that, because of globalization, increasingly affect your life? What is this desire of yours, in its essence, if not a quest for self-learning? . The chapter titles and their sequence mirror the crucial stages of an ascent up the social ladder. For each of which the author offers the proper instructions: leave the countryside and move to the city, get an education even at the expense of family members, avoid falling in love and pursuing ideals, learn the ropes of business from a master and then discard him without scruple, be prepared for violence, make deals with criminality, bribe bureaucrats and the military, resort to debt without fear. > Going into debt is a way for the small to become big, for the big to become enormous, a glorious abstraction, the promise of tomorrow today, yes, a liberation from time..... going into debt is to be immortal . A splendid definition of rampant capitalism! In short, it takes a great deal of work, but one must also be ruthless, open to fraud. It is equally true that at each of these stages there are alternatives. Life is a constant fork in the road between what one has become and what one might have been. For instance, one could have helped one’s parents and siblings more by giving up an education; one could have followed the girl one went on to love, vainly, for an entire lifetime; or one could have stayed closer to one’s wife and son so as not to lose them, not to let them become strangers. A gently ironic and seemingly light style guides the reader along the protagonist’s peregrinations as he marches toward wealth with resolve yet with an inward sorrow, as if compelled by destiny, by an irresistible force. This is Asia—tumultuous, violent, and ripe with opportunity: either play the game, or succumb. > Through the windows of your office you see your city altering around you, any urban zoning and planning constraints slipping away, deep foundations and skeletons of buildings occupying the land that just a few years ago an aerial photograph would have shown frothing with opulent baroque villas . As often happens, success is followed by a fall from grace—in this case, illness and bankruptcy. The advice is to “focus on the fundamentals”: cut expenses, keep as low a profile as possible, accept defeat. And so our protagonist does, and we expect a decline unto death, in utter solitude. This does not happen, however, because our author provides an exit strategy—unhoped-for, if implausible. Our protagonist meets the girl he loved in his youth, who in turn has attained success only to find herself sorrowfully alone. The long-yearned-for love becomes reality in old age, and both realize that true happiness lies in giving oneself to the other, in wishing for the other “not to be alone.” Is the whole thing then reduced to a fairy tale? On the other hand, > all of us are in flight from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to escape from our status as fugitives... there was a time when everything was possible. And there will be a time when nothing is possible. But in between, we can create . The novel is a fresco of one of many possible lives. We could conceive of others, and thus it is fitting that the author offers us a happy and tender ending. Why should it not be possible to imagine one? Reading the book in English brings to light the distinctiveness of the writing—rich in uncommon vocabulary, though free of neologisms, and characterized by a complex syntactic structure, at times difficult to follow. Mohsin is undoubtedly a refined writer, possessing a stylistic imprint all his own. He ought, however, to return it to greater sobriety. He, too, stands before a fork in the road. Why read it? It is deeply enjoyable.

In the final years of his life, Immanuel Kant suffered from dementia: expelled from the university, isolated from society, the great philosopher penned thousands of pages in a delirious attempt to arrive at the truth of reality, rather than stop at its interpretation. With an inspired intuition, the author imagines that “Herr Professor”—as he was called by his children and students—met the same fate as Kant: losing his cognitive faculties and sliding into dementia after years of rigorous, frigid teaching of history and philosophy, strictly within the rigid, rational frameworks of Marxism. To care for his ailing father, the son leaves Rome to return to Viareggio; among his father's papers, he discovers a manuscript recounting, in the form of a novel, the “Three Days of Viareggio,” a violent popular uprising in May 1920 that was bloodily suppressed by the Italian government. These are notes written in a muddled hand, forcing the son into an arduous transcription. What comes as a surprise, given the father's unyielding Marxism, is the exaltation of anarchism and the title of the narrative: “*indifeso fervore*”—a celebrated verse by Sandro Penna, a poet whose transgressive poetry was worlds apart from the moral outlook of “Herr Professor” as his son had known him. Who truly was “Herr Professor”? This father forever poised to disapprove of his son, from the way he played tennis (more concerned with keeping his hair tidy than moving on the court) to his decision to drop out of his Philosophy degree to become a translator—and, to make matters worse, from English, a language his father despised. It could have been the occasion to turn Dementia—the cognitive and physical decline of a man—into an opportunity to rediscover his figure and his life, to know him better, and even to finally decipher oneself within one of the fundamental relationships of our existence. Instead, as the author states in the afterword: “I cannot help putting the bookish before the real. May reality not hold it against me if it always comes in second.” The father’s illness, the return to Viareggio, and the departure from Rome serve merely as pretexts for witty dialogue between characters, for subtle ironies regarding the social and cultural dynamics of our society, and for digressions—at times interesting, but more often useless and redundant. A grating, overly intellectualized framework pervades the entire narrative, stripping it of psychological depth and rendering it prolix and rambling. The novel can serve as a starting point for a broader reflection on Italian literature. We often witness authors who enjoy considerable visibility and garner favorable reviews from critics and avid readers alike. *L'idiota di famiglia*, for instance, was featured on *Petrarca*, a prominent television program dedicated to culture and books in particular. One might think of novels vastly different from one another yet consistently showered with accolades, such as *Alma* by Federica Manzon, *Almarina* by Valeria Parrella, *La Ferocia* by Nicola Lagioia, or *Con le peggiori intenzioni* by Alessandro Piperno (see the reviews of the cited books on this site): all acclaimed, yet fragile in plot and prose, and above all trapped within pre-established literary formulas that neither reflect Italian sociological reality nor genuinely probe the feelings and psychology of their characters. An oscillation between nostalgia and pessimism prevails, the plots are frequently insubstantial, and the characters easily slip into stereotypes. One has to wonder whether, in these assessments, membership in certain publishing circles takes precedence over genuine narrative quality. By dint of such “niche” novels, there is a risk that our literature will drift toward irrelevance, dragging the language down with it. Why avoid it? This novel is irritating.

It is singular to review this novel immediately after reading Emilio Salgari's *La perla sanguinosa* (see the review on this site): a curious coincidence, almost as if pearls were inherently the bearers of adventure and misfortune. And indeed, when Sally Jones and the Chief find a pearl necklace hidden in a secret compartment within their ship’s steering wheel, Sally, with the wisdom of an intelligent ape, experiences > an unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach. (...) The pearls of the necklace (...) seemed to emanate a faint, mysterious light from within. Unlike Salgari’s fantastical setting, here the pearls lead us into the "underworld" of seafaring cities: violent and perilous slums for our ape, seemingly fragile and defenseless. The narrative resumes from the point where we left it in the previous novel (see the review of *The Murderer’s Ape* on this site); yet here the element of surprise is missing because we already know Sally, and we are deprived of both the charm of a seafaring, piratical Lisbon and the savor of noir intrigue. The story unfolds in Glasgow. Sally and the Chief set off in search of the pearls' presumed owner, the orphan Rose, abandoned as a child by her father, who wished to bequeath the jewel to her as a form of redemption. They find themselves plunged into the underworld of the English city: the Chief is forced to captain a ship smuggling alcohol to America, while Sally is held hostage by a criminal gang. Harassment, clashes between underworld syndicates, violent nightlife, and even boxing bouts follow in rapid succession, sweeping up the poor, frightened Sally, who becomes an object of curiosity, derision, and exploitation. Sally is guarded by Bernie the Butcher: a hulking, rather dim-witted young man notorious for his sudden, uncontrollable rages, himself the victim of mockery and abuse at the hands of the other criminals, and even his own sister. It is the friendship between Sally and Bernie that forms the crux of the story. Sally has numerous opportunities to escape, yet she stays to help poor Bernie, not wanting to leave him alone, determined to defend and save him. Faced with the blaze consuming the house in which his sister might perish, Bernie gathered momentum to throw himself into the fire as well, and then > I wrapped my long arms around him, (...) immediately took him by the arm and led him back onto the bridge, away from the burning building. The wise and gentle Sally discovers herself no longer fragile, but a mother figure to the hulking Bernie. How far removed we are from the mysterious and melancholic atmosphere of *The Murderer’s Ape*! All the enchantment of the previous novel has dissolved into a verbose plot, where the twists fail to lend rhythm to the narrative. One plods along, hoping to recover the characters, the drama, and the writing that had once held us so spellbound. It is a futile quest; only the friendship between Sally and Bernie rescues the work from utter disappointment, yet it is a relationship merely sketched, lacking in depth, that fails to truly engage. Why not read it? It is boring.

>. If one wishes to attempt to understand this tale, delirious in so many ways, it is best to go to YouTube to watch and listen to Bach's *Goldberg Variations*, played on the piano by the "legendary" Glenn Gould. One must do so because Bernhard speaks of "genius" and of what happens to anyone who encounters a personality unreachable in artistic stature: one cannot help but be a "loser." >. The first-person narrator, Wertheimer, and Glenn find themselves in Salzburg as pupils of a renowned piano teacher. The first two are young virtuoso pianists who could have enjoyed successful concert careers; yet the encounter with genius proves fatal, for both realize they can never measure up to the "legendary" Glenn, that they would never be capable of playing the *Goldberg Variations* as their friend does. Both—the narrator and Wertheimer—abandon music: the former even gives away his splendid Steinway and retreats to Madrid to write about Glenn, caught in a frantic and inconclusive revision of the great pianist's work; the latter shuts himself away in a solitary hunting lodge, strumming an out-of-tune piano. Upon hearing of Glenn's sudden death, Wertheimer kills himself. The narrator seeks to understand the deeper reasons behind his friend's suicide. Had he always been unhappy, like those depressives who carry within themselves the "pain of living"? Is it the fate of "losers"—>? Or was >? To fathom the mystery behind his friend's suicide, the narrator has Wertheimer's final dwelling opened—the place where he had holed up—and discovers a worthless grand piano, >, upon which rests the sheet music for the *Goldberg Variations*; and the narrator, too, longs to return to the piano after years away, to measure himself against genius, and perhaps he as well will lose himself in the attempt to emulate the legendary Glenn. After reading this tale, one might exclaim: "Long live mediocrity!" What suffering lies in every artist who cannot emulate genius! Perhaps Francesco Petrarch's depression stemmed from his jealousy of Dante, as his friend Boccaccio affectionately pointed out to him; and for this reason he attempted, with the *Triumphs* and *Africa*, to write two epic poems that would rival the supremacy of the *Divine Comedy*—and dramatically failed. And what of Dante, who in Canto XXV of the *Inferno* hurls a challenge at Ovid, claiming his own superiority in the poetic invention of metamorphoses: "Let Ovid now be silent of Cadmus and Arethusa, / for if him into a serpent and her into a fountain / he turns in verse, I envy him not" (lines 97–99). To console ourselves, nothing remains but to cage great men >. For the legendary Glenn, the sentence is a YouTube video: having fled the concert stage for an isolated country house, he will be condemned to be listened to for eternity as a pianist "imprisoned" by his own renown; we, mediocre men, shall be truly free because we are anonymous. The plot of the tale is non-existent; it resembles a soliloquy, with a fluid yet at times nonsensical syntax, marked by a cadence reminiscent of theatre rather than prose: everything has unraveled, nothing makes sense, one can only recount the recurrence of thoughts and memories—even then with profound doubts, under the rhetorical refrain "so he said, I thought." Why not read it? It is tremendously exhausting. It can sit nicely on a bookshelf to make a fine show of our culture.

Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is a respected civil servant. Dostoevsky introduces him in his tidy and modest dwelling on a morning brimming with expectations for our "hero": > the dingy, smoke-grimed greenish walls of his little room, the mahogany chest of drawers, the Turkish-style divan of red oilcloth with greenish little flowers, looked upon him with familiarity. In front of the mirror, on this exceptional day for him, > it would really be a fine thing," Golyadkin said under his breath, "it would really be a fine thing if I weren't in proper order today, if, let's say, some novelty had cropped up, a nice, completely untimely pimple, for instance. Our hero must be flawless; he is invited—or believes himself to be—to the birthday of the only daughter of State Councillor Berendeyev. Yet amidst this prevailing euphoria, Dostoevsky immediately gives us several signs that something is amiss: as he steps into *a light-blue carriage for hire*, his servant exchanges > knowing glances with the coachman and several loafers, (...) barely suppressing the coarsest laughter; having climbed into the carriage, our hero > shuddered (...) and hastily, almost terror-stricken, shrank into the darkest corner of the carriage; finally, we discover that Golyadkin, the staid civil servant, is in the care of a doctor who urges him not to shun a carefree life, not to be an *enemy of the bottle*. We are therefore hardly surprised when our hero is turned away by the doorman and denied entry to the birthday of the powerful councillor's daughter. He is not a welcome guest! Through a subterfuge, Golyadkin manages to slip into the reception, where, in a state of delirium, he behaves so unseemly that he is shown the door. But is it reality or a hallucination born of an already diseased mind? This serves as the prelude to the entrance of a new character: the double, the slimy, disgusting, cunning Golyadkin number two. At first, the double displays a humble attitude toward "number one," *hanging on his every glance*, but soon grows increasingly arrogant, currying favor with our hero's superiors. What is more, he mocks him in front of their younger colleagues. > After tickling him a little, (...) causing great amusement among the young people surrounding them, Mr. Golyadkin number two, with disgusting brazenness, decisively gave a tap to the protruding belly of Mr. Golyadkin number one, accompanying the gesture with the most venomous and suggestive of smiles, saying: "having fun, little brother?" What is the double referring to? As Dostoevsky will make explicit in *Notes from Underground* (see the review on this site), there is within us, deep in our soul, a malice that leads us to commit wicked acts, and which can also drive us to madness. Only in a dream does our hero manage to glimpse a petty act, > a piece of cowardice seen, heard, or committed by himself not long before, an unbecoming behavior: > a well-known young lady, (...) a little German girl, to whom the double can freely allude, > wheedling around Golyadkin, smiling at him affably, and displaying, in that way, false cordiality toward him. For our hero, it comes as a relief when he sees the doctor arrive: > tears streamed from Mr. Golyadkin's eyes. "in that case I am ready... I submit entirely and entrust my fate (to the doctor)," (...) a tremendous and deafening cry of joy burst from the chests of all those surrounding him and, with the cruellest resonance, rippled through the waiting crowd. (...) The slimy twin of Mr. Golyadkin (...) blew little kisses to Mr. Golyadkin; but then he began to show signs of flagging and appeared less and less frequently, until he disappeared completely. A psychiatrist might say that we are confronted with a schizophrenic personality in a state of mounting impairment, with a splitting of the self. A psychoanalyst, long before Freud, might discern the ego's fear of meeting its double, of uncovering the evil harbored within, behind the veneer of bourgeois respectability—a rejection of the cogs of the Russian Empire's oppressive bureaucracy. And so Golyadkin's madness, the conjuring of his disgusting, slimy double, is nothing less than a desperate act of revolt, one that can only lead to the asylum, deviant as it is from the reigning norms. And Dostoevsky is the bard of Petersburg society. > Oh, if only I were a poet! A poet, naturally, equal to Homer and Pushkin, for with a less sublime talent it is impossible to step forward. Could it be that for us contemporaries, too, nothing remains but madness in the face of such a suffocating world—yet where is a Dostoevsky? The pace is brisk and lively, calling to mind for the reader the splendid *The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants* (see the review on this site). Already a great writer, Dostoevsky leads us by the hand through the tale of the protagonist's madness—at first incredulous, with gentle, ironic touches, then in an increasingly overt manner. To be sure, the narration of madness coils in upon itself, and how could it be otherwise, given that only through the repetition of events and emotional states can one dig deep beneath the surface? The concept of the double is brilliant because it establishes another point of view, a perspective both external and internal at once—a truly innovative narrative device found in few novels, such as Natsume Soseki's *I Am a Cat* (see the review on this site), though undeniably with a vastly different rhythm. Why read it? Intense and disquieting at once.

The first-person narrator is a young man living in Petersburg > with nothing to do, (...) convinced that in short order (he would) accomplish truly remarkable, even grandiose things. He is supported by an uncle, a wealthy landowner in distant Stepanchikovo. Their correspondence is sparse, but of late the young man has been urged to join his uncle through rambling, incoherent letters, beneath which lies an entreaty to marry the young governess—an unhappy, beautiful, and educated girl. Our young man decides to comply with these requests, out of a blend of curiosity and affection. He finds himself amidst a > bizarre collection of characters, a tight-knit community revolving around a shrewd, charismatic manipulator—what we would call today a "guru"; hence the modern resonance of the tale. Foma Fomich > was short, fair-haired and grizzled, with a hook on his nose and fine wrinkles all over his face. (...) He would read aloud books on the salvation of the soul, speak with eloquent tears of the various Christian virtues, (...) recount his life and his exploits, (...) and was a master at passing judgment on his neighbor. Having lived in squalor, all his life he had been forced to wander from one landowner’s estate to another, playing "the buffoon." In Stepanchikovo, at long last, he was able to practice his arts as a fabulist, indulge his vanity, and redeem himself from the humiliations suffered for so long. His technique consists in exploiting the weaknesses of others, shifting from an aggrieved, haughty victimhood to sermons extolling his own virtues while decrying the depravities of others. Suffice it to say, he finds fertile ground. The uncle, a former hussar colonel, is good-natured, honest, and trusting, yet he is carrying on an affair with the young, destitute governess: he wishes to marry her off to his nephew in order to continue the liaison. The girl’s father displays a dignified indifference, but in truth aims to marry his daughter to the aging, wealthy landowner. Then there is Tatiana, a wealthy, somewhat nymphomaniacal spinster; the household hopes she will marry the uncle to unite their fortunes, but a few dandies are scheming to abduct her to get their hands on her money. Then there is the general's widow, with her entourage of devout and venomous young ladies: hysterical fits, fainting spells, and seizures occur whenever Foma’s position is called into question, whereupon, deeply offended, he declares he is leaving, going into exile. Naturally, he never will. > Foma occupies two large, splendid rooms. (...) Absolute comfort surrounded the great man. The fresh, colorful wallpapers, the shimmering silk curtains at the windows, the rugs, the pier glass, (...) everything bore witness to the tender solicitude of the master and mistress of the house toward Foma Fomich. And what of our young man? He postures as a "scientist," "philosopher," "know-it-all": he observes the dynamics of these human beings, growing indignant only in fits and starts when he sees his uncle trampled by this rogue. The narrative moves swiftly, paced like a theatrical play: brisk dialogue, sharp humor, caricatures, stereotypical "masks" of human pettiness. One senses a disdain for the provinces and for the peasant world in particular—exemplified by that poor serf, constantly abused by Foma because he keeps dreaming of "a white bull" rather than "refined ladies and gentlemen taking tea." In a crescendo worthy of a comedy of errors, Foma seems on the verge of losing his grip, yet with a dramatic reversal the sly, adept manipulator reasserts his dominion over the inhabitants of Stepanchikovo. It is the fate of great authors that their broader oeuvre is overshadowed by their undisputed masterpieces. When Dostoevsky is mentioned, one immediately turns to works such as *Crime and Punishment*, *The Idiot*, and *The Brothers Karamazov* (see the review of *The Idiot* on this site). Across the Russian writer’s vast output there is much else of enduring worth. Consider *The Adolescent*, so strikingly contemporary in its scrutiny of the protagonist's relationship with his father (see the review on this site). *The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants* is unanimously labeled a comic work, thereby missing the novel's distinctive qualities. It is a study of Power, and of the profound motivations that underpin it: it is not money (Foma rejects a handsome offer to quit the estate), nor is it even the taste for raw dominion or the authority to make critical decisions (on the contrary, Power evades decision-making). What drives Foma is sheer vanity—a narcissistic hunger to occupy center stage, to revel in his own rhetoric, to be revered and flattered. Its contemporary relevance is glaring in an age of Power that seeks only to generate talk about itself in a media frenzy. The inhabitants of Stepanchikovo may be an isolated community in the Russian countryside, but they speak volumes about sycophancy and the vacuity of the human soul. The writing and plot are effervescent, departing stylistically from the major novels: there is no psychological introspection, nor are the relationships between characters probed in depth. It is without question a coming-of-age novel, in which the great writer hones his craft in dialogue construction, paying scant attention to setting, and above all neglecting the narrator, behind whom Dostoevsky himself lurks. Why read it? It is entertaining and profound.

*The Iliad* unfolds over a brief period of time, yet it captures the most salient events of the Trojan War. The incipit is the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles over the possession of an enslaved woman, yet in truth, Achilles is calling Agamemnon’s authority into question. The hero resolves to withdraw from the fighting, triggering a sequence of clashes that, despite alternating fortunes, steadily tilt toward the defeat of the Achaeans, culminating in the Trojans setting fire to one of the Greek ships. The assembly of Achaean chieftains repeatedly dispatches embassies to Achilles urging him to rejoin the fray; instead, Patroclus, the hero’s dearest companion, enters the combat and is slain by Hector. Achilles rejoins the war to avenge Patroclus, unleashes wholesale slaughter, and kills Hector. Priam nevertheless succeeds in assuaging Achilles’ wrath and recovering Hector’s body to grant him a proper burial. The plot is relatively simple, yet it is complicated by the presence of multiple narrative tiers: each theme develops across three planes: the community of the gods, the community of men, and individual emotions, the latter perpetually subordinated to the will and unyielding codes of the community, even before the dictates of divinity. The first theme is the struggle for the governance of the community, and consequently, for power. The epic opens precisely with the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles, yet the striving for the assertion of authority remains a constant. One need only consider Hector's decision not to withdraw behind the walls of Troy and instead fight on open ground solely to assert his authority against Polydamas, who was counseling him to do so: > now, while the son of devious-plotting Cronus has granted me to win glory by the ships, driving the Achaeans back to the sea, fool, you must not utter such advice among the people; no Trojan will obey you, I will not allow it . Yet this very clash for power is equally present among the gods: Poseidon remarks to Hera, who is fearful that Achilles might succumb to a god, > let us go and sit apart, rather, upon the lookout... if then Ares begins the strife, or Phoebus Apollo, or if they hold Achilles back, straightway then from our side will a clash of war arise; and very soon, methinks, beaten, they will return to Olympus, back among the other gods, vanquished by force beneath our hands . The same theme of power emerges distinctly in the assembly of Book XIX, wherein Achilles wishes to rejoin the battle immediately to avenge Patroclus and grant him a worthy burial, while the other chieftains insist that Achilles formally accept Agamemnon’s gifts, thereby affirming the latter’s authority. The second theme is, naturally, war: the most predictable and indeed the most tedious of themes, save for the battle among the gods, which reaches conspicuous peaks of comedy and mockery of the divinities. The martial accounts fragment and seem designed merely to exalt the stature of the heroes and the fallen. The third theme is composed of familial sentiments: affection for friends, filial love, reverence for elders, the grief over the loss of loved ones. This is the theme closest to modern sensibilities, where the epic modulates into pathos in certain passages: the exchange between Hector and Andromache, Thetis’s love for Achilles, and the latter’s agony over Patroclus: Hector > placed his son in his wife's arms: and she drew him to her fragrant bosom, smiling through her tears; her husband was moved to pity as he beheld her, and caressed her with his hand ... yet the community's laws hold greater sway than individual sentiments, > go now, return home, and attend to your own tasks, the loom and the distaff; and bid the handmaidens set about their work; for war shall be the business of men, of all men and of me above all, as many as were born in Ilium (Book VI). Into these themes interweave other narrative threads (parentheses within the epic), such as the magnificent Book XVIII (the forging of Achilles’ armor) and Book XXI, particularly the defense of the Trojans by the river Xanthus and its defeat by fire. On the whole, the epic is tedious and fragmented, and certainly falls short of the *Odyssey*.

From 1975 to 2005, Spain was deceived by a great impostor. Enric Marco, the obscure owner of an auto repair shop, fabricated a past as an anti-Francoist, claiming he had been deported for it to the Flossenbürg concentration camp alongside eight thousand other Spanish Republicans sent to Germany to die in the extermination camps. Capitalizing on the halo bestowed upon him by his forged past, Marco served first as secretary general of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, and later as president of the Amical de Mauthausen. Thanks to an obscure historian, Marco's colossal lie was uncovered just days before he was due to speak at a ceremony in Mauthausen before the Spanish prime minister. Vargas Llosa dubbed Marco «appalling and brilliant». When Cercas meets the man for the first time, he cannot help but cry out > a horror! A genuine horror!. What held him back from writing a book about him were not merely the outrages committed by Marco, from the grief inflicted on other deportees and their relatives to the countless young people who had listened to him, captivated and trembling; Cercas feared becoming ensnared in the tentacles of the sublime liar, wondering whether he was willing > to write a book about Enric Marco without making a pact with the devil. (...) why not attempt to redeem the great impostor and the great damned soul, that consummate scoundrel who has already been condemned more than enough?. Those who have read *Soldiers of Salamis* (see the review on this site) know that Cercas tends to exploit these hesitations of his about excavating the «truth». Here too, Cercas overcomes his moral scruples, easily forgetting what Primo Levi once said—that to understand is already to justify; with the usual dedication of an investigative journalist, he sets out to reconstruct the murky events and insidious deceptions that led Marco to dominate the national stage during the post-Franco years. We leave it to the reader to delve into the details of a convoluted story that traverses Spain's recent history. Let us simply say that Cercas traces the root of Marco's success to a blend of small truths, historical facts, personal charisma, and brazen lies. It is true! Marco was indeed a villain; yet just as Limonov was for Carrère and Don Quixote for Don Alonso Quijano (see the reviews of both books on this site), Marco > gave himself (...) a new identity and a new, heroic life, (...) having passed the zenith of life, he wants to go on living when it is no longer his turn to live, or rather he wants to live on, against everything and everyone, all that he had not lived until then. Is he not like a writer permitted to lie in order to tell the truth? Poor Cercas! Little does he know that this indulgence toward deceit is a breach into which Marco will ruthlessly wedge himself, recalling that the final character in *Soldiers of Salamis*, the obscure soldier-hero, was merely a fiction of the writer; a fiction with which Cercas deceived countless readers who, after reading the novel, wrote to the nursing home in Dijon where the author had claimed the obscure hero lived. And therefore Cercas, too, is an impostor: > you are a player and a liar, possessing all my flaws and none of my virtues, and I am your reflection in a dream, or in a mirror. (...) This is the truth, Javier. The truth is that you are me. The novel's focal point is the interview that the author declares to be imaginary, for once. In a lengthy dialogue between Marco and Cercas, the latter's certainties crumble before the relentless arguments of the impostor, intoxicated by the role of inquisitor assigned to him by the Spanish author. The only explicitly fictional pages seem to upend the entire narrative. Where lies the boundary between invention and truth in historical memory? And why should lies not be accepted if they serve to illuminate the dark chapters of history, forging conscientious minds? But in doing so, as in *The Brothers Karamazov*, are we left merely to bow before the mystery of the past, hoping it to be a just and righteous mystery? (see the review of *The Brothers Karamazov* on this site). The novel's fundamental merit lies precisely in Marco's story, which tells itself, so incredible it is. Cercas layers over it a meandering and prolix plot, one that often turns in on itself, weighed down by digressions that make for heavy reading. Offsetting the narrative's convolutions is the author's characteristically fluid, lucid phrasing: a prose style that smacks perhaps a bit too much of journalism. Why read it? The story is intriguing.

Eight years have passed since the end of the Portuguese Colonial War, which devastated Angola between 1961 and 1975: Salazar’s Portugal on one side, and the Angolan liberation movements on the other. The protagonist, who is also the first-person narrator, meets a woman in a bar, just as he has done so many times before, > when the bar is a shipwrecked Titanic, (...) a submerged Spanish galleon, populated by the drifting corpses of the crew, illuminated obliquely by a sublunary glow, corpses floating without clinging to their chairs, in mid-water, waving boneless arms in a calm of seaweed . We know little of this woman, but she undoubtedly knows how to listen, for our protagonist begins recounting his twenty-seven months of war, in «the ass-end of the world», dying > not from the death of war, which suddenly deprives us of our brains with a flash of an explosion and leaves in its wake a disjointed desert of moans and a chaos of panic and gunfire, but from the slow, afflicted, agonizing torment of waiting: the waiting of months, the waiting for landmines along the track, the waiting for malaria, (...) the waiting for the secret police jeep that passed by every week, (...) bringing along three or four prisoners who dug their own graves, huddled inside them, closed their eyes, and collapsed beneath the bullets as a soufflé collapses in the oven, with a red flower whose petals bloomed upon their foreheads ; a war that made one vomit and reply in > a child’s gentle voice Don’t waste your time on me because I am so tired of this war that not even bombs will get me out of here ; a war impossible to forget, so much so that > the moment her knees softly part, her elbows clutch my ribs, and her reddish pubis unfurls its fleshy petals with the moist surrender of warm, soft valves, I will enter her, do you understand?, like a humble, mangy cur dozing in a stairwell, in search of an impossible comfort on the hard wood of the steps, because the soldier of Mangando and all the soldiers of Mangando and Marimbanguengo and Cessa and Musuma and Ninda and Chiume will leap to their feet inside me in their lead coffins, wrapped in fluttering, bloody bandages, demanding from me, with the resigned lamentations of the dead, what fear kept me from giving them: the cry of revolt... The protagonist thus recounts his experience, yet we should not expect a mere report or an indictment: the cruel and cowardly devastation of war lays bare the poverty of our soul, its cowardice, its ideological and emotional void, while simultaneously revealing the futility of so many words, uttered by those who have never felt upon their own skin «the furious and piercing fear of dying», by those who can afford to > be competent, serious, wise, social-democratic, sardonic, carrying in their suitcase along with their books the facile cunning of the latest paper truth . The experience of war is a rupture between before and after, a descent into the depths of the soul, a spiritual death that strips away our capacity to love. Nothing remains but fleeting moments of tenderness, through which two lonely beings conjure up «a diaphanous peace of childhood». To be appreciated to the fullest, this book ought to be read aloud, like a long poem. If one had the patience to do so, one would discover the masterful cadence of the words and their evocative power, finding oneself in an oneiric yet terribly real world, where sensuality, nostalgia, despair, and death intertwine, unearthing the monsters of our childhood and our existential solitude. > Were we, for example, anteaters, you and I, (...) perhaps we could understand each other in a complicity of restless snouts sniffing together along the concrete for the nostalgias of nonexistent insects; perhaps we would unite, under cover of darkness, in couplings as bleak as Lisbon nights. (...) Perhaps, after feeling myself all over, I will find that I am suddenly a unicorn, perhaps I will embrace her, and perhaps she will flutter her astonished arms like a butterfly pinned to a needle, thick with tenderness. (...) And in this way we would have recovered something of childhood that belongs to neither of us and insists on sliding down the chute in a laughter whose muffled echo reaches us, now and then, in a kind of rage . Why read it? It is a great book, about war and human solitude.

Kapuscinski is a great reporter who has written numerous travel books. In this case, he recounts how he became a reporter and describes some of his journeys to China, India, and Africa. Above all, however, he speaks of his great literary love, Herodotus. Whenever he travels, he carries Herodotus’s *Histories* with him. Kapuscinski’s travels are simultaneously real journeys and voyages into the world of Herodotus, to the point that it becomes difficult to distinguish present reality from that of Herodotus’s era. > The more time I spent reading Herodotus, the more I felt a sense of friendship and almost affection toward him. It became increasingly difficult for me to do without not so much the book as its author . He fascinates him > for his way of being and relating to others: a person who, wherever he goes, immediately becomes a gathering point . What does Herodotus say to the modern world? > For Herodotus, the world’s cultural plurality is a living, pulsating fabric where nothing is given or established once and for all, but is continually transformed, creating new relationships and contexts . And then > a journey does not begin at the moment we set out, nor does it end when we reach our destination. In reality, it begins much earlier and never truly ends, since the reel of memories continues to play inside us even after we have stopped . > History is an uninterrupted succession of presents, and therefore the world is not the exclusive property of the living, in which the dead hold no market shares . Reading Herodotus allows the author to express his feelings about the world and about history: diversity; travel not as escapism, but as a means of knowing and listening to others; history not as a description of past events discarded in the trash, but as an immanent presence «so that the deeds of men may not be forgotten in time».

This is a book about memory, which is like > a place, a sequence of columns, cornices, porticoes. The body inside the mind, going from one place to another, and the sound of our footsteps as we walk, moving from one place to the next . The occasion to address memory arises from the death of the author’s father (the first part of the book): a man who had always lived a solitary life, not physically, but because he was somehow detached from everything taking place around him. The writer recounts his father’s life, evoking various episodes and tracing back as far as the murder of his grandfather by his father’s mother. What emerges is how memory constitutes an assemblage of fragments and images one strives to preserve: “the anecdote as a form of knowledge.” Can writing about a loved one bring them back to memory, enabling us to know them better and to know ourselves better? The book is also the search for a father never truly known to the depths of his being, the chronicle of a profound nostalgia, but also of a discovery. > The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. I understand now that each fact is cancelled out by another fact, that each thought brings with it another and opposite thought. Impossible to say anything without reservation . Like all of Auster’s books, it is written in an elegant and lucid English, set within a paradoxical context that delves deep into emotions and states of mind, verging on philosophy.

> All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. It took a long time and great, painful disappointments of my expectations to realize... that I am nobody but myself! But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man! . The protagonist is a young Black man from the American South. Intelligent and brilliant, he wins a scholarship to a college funded by philanthropists of the respectable white bourgeoisie, where the future leaders of the Black class are educated. The points of reference are, therefore, white values and a social hierarchy that consistently relegates Black people to a subordinate position. The protagonist yearns to integrate, even as he carries within him the last words—still incomprehensible to him, yet prophetic—spoken by his grandfather on his deathbed: "live with your head in the lion's mouth." One day, while chauffeuring a wealthy donor of the college, the protagonist gets lost in the town's outskirts and inadvertently embroils his powerful guest in a sequence of encounters that lay bare the hypocrisy of a social peace between whites and Blacks that cannot exist so long as squalor and segregation prevail. In the novel's finest pages, both in rhythm and irony, the wealthy white benefactor finds himself face-to-face first with a Black man who has raped his own daughter, and then with a cast of bizarre characters in a brothel. And then comes another prophecy, one that ought to shake the young protagonist: an old Black man, speaking to the rich white man, reveals to the youth that he is precisely what whites desire: > you see he has eyes, ears, and a broad African nose, but he doesn't understand the simple facts of life. Already he has learned to repress not only his emotions, but his humanity as well. He is invisible, the living personification of the Negative, the most perfect realization of your dreams, sir. The mechanical man! . The incident leads to the young man's expulsion from college, prompting him to move North, to Harlem. There he finds employment at a paint factory and is forced to witness firsthand the deep fractures within Black society, between petty departmental foremen who wield their authority with spite and a labor union that views the young Southerner as a scab driving down wages for the Northern working class. Following an industrial accident, the young man is dismissed and taken in by a Black woman. The account of the factory episodes and the discovery of Harlem are likewise magnificent pages, strikingly powerful. The protagonist is a gifted orator, and as he wanders through Harlem, he draws the attention of a political group, the Brotherhood, which recruits him into its ranks to harness his talents. It would seem the young man has finally found a compass. Yet he remains merely what others—in this case, the party—want him to be. The initial signs of conflict between his individuality and the organization's discipline emerge in the reprimands he receives from the Brotherhood's steering committee regarding his speeches, which are nonetheless wildly successful: they are deemed insufficiently scientific, overly impassioned and stirring, unaligned with party prescriptions, and liable to inflame the masses. The friction culminates when the killing of a former Brotherhood militant by a policeman ignites an uprising among Harlem's Black populace. Indeed, at the victim's funeral, the protagonist delivers a brilliant speech that is severely condemned by the steering committee. The riot degenerates into violence, looting, and clashes; the young man takes refuge in a subterranean recess of the city, where he realizes that the Brotherhood deliberately orchestrated the revolt to prove that only a "scientific"—and de facto accommodationist—approach with whites is viable. The protagonist understands that he has been exploited by the party and that, once again, "I had simply been a material, a natural resource to be used." With one departure from the past: > I now recognized my invisibility. I believed in hard work, progress, and action, but now, after having been for society and then against it, I no longer assign myself a role or a limit, and such an attitude is strongly against the trend of the times. Yet my world has become one of infinite possibilities. Do I speak for you? . The book is one of the classics of American literature. It is anchored in its historical context—the emancipation of Black people—with references drawn unambiguously from African American culture: the novel can be read as a literary extension of the blues, marked as it is by numerous poetic passages of unmistakable musicality. The theme of invisibility, however, remains universal: which of us is truly visible to those who look upon us? The book is magnificent and enthralling in its first part, up to the events involving the Brotherhood: the writer's mastery in depicting the diverse episodes and figures, shifting from a "learned" style to vernacular African American speech, yields miniature masterpieces that foreshadow subsequent authors such as Fante and Morrison. The second part is prolix, overly encumbered by political concerns (the critique of the party), and consequently slow, repetitive, and given to philosophizing. Why read it? For two reasons: the theme of invisibility as an existential condition of modern man, and its literary style—a classical English that is simultaneously rooted in its specific context, that of African American society.

The novel revisits the theme of the author's previous book: the squalor of the domestic and social environment set against the innocence of childhood. Michele lives in a small village, and during an outing with friends, he discovers a child who has been kidnapped and imprisoned by a group that includes his own father. A spiritual and psychological journey thus unfolds, throughout which Michele achieves autonomy from his parents, culminating in a desperate dash to save the abducted child from the threat of murder by his captors. He manages to save him, but is shot by his father, and «now it was dark again and there was Papa and there was me». Unlike in the previous book, the contradiction between familial and clan ties (ever defined by affection and protection) and the immorality of the kidnapping—a collective act implicating the entire village—becomes far more evident. It falls upon a young boy, Michele, to reorder his hierarchy of values, even at the expense of family bonds. It is thus a portrait of Italian society that transcends its immediate setting (the small village) to become emblematic of a broader cultural climate. The sun-drenched landscape and vast horizons, paired with the claustrophobic confinement of the spaces (splendidly rendered by the author), are an integral part of the narrative, articulating the contrast between a closed, desolate world and the yearning for greater freedom and clarity of emotion and values. It acutely reflects a society, and its individuals, poised between a hollow present and a future of greater substance. With this novel, the writer has achieved a greater tightness of style and narrative rhythm, producing a work that is deeply evocative as well as a compelling read. It is undoubtedly a novel of exceptional narrative and thematic caliber.

> She sees herself sitting in her lovely living room, in the lovely villa Olof inherited, with the lovely furniture she bought because he earns well. (...) The plaid skirt turns into a striped prisoner's dress, the stockings vanish and her shoes slide into nothingness, the parquet floor beneath her feet suddenly becomes raw concrete, (...) and Miriam screams, screams and hears herself screaming, clapping her hands over her mouth to force herself silent. It is not merely that memories of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz continually resurface; Miriam carries the weight of a lie, and of betrayal. To everyone, even her son and granddaughter, Miriam is a Jewish woman who found refuge within hospitable, orderly Swedish society; in reality, she assumed the identity of a dead girl who bore a brand similar to that of Malika, her young Romani self; no one would have welcomed the deportee Malika, belonging as she did to a people considered the lowest among all the world's pariahs (thieves, perjurers, child-abductors, violent, and so forth). She is eighty-five years old when she is gifted a bracelet—a piece of Gypsy craftsmanship. > Tears well up in her eyes, forcing her to blink them away, and words flash through her mind, (...) then she lets those words rise to her lips. The truth, instantly retracted, sets in motion a narrative that unfolds along two parallel strands: the long walk with her granddaughter, who seeks to probe what lies behind her grandmother’s cryptic declaration, and the inhumanity of the concentration camps, which must be banished from the soul if one is not to be overwhelmed. > You cannot talk about everything! (Miriam cries) You have to understand that. Not if you are eighty-five years old and belong to the wrong race, (...) Do you understand or not? It really happened. It was all real. It was another world, and I do not want to go back there. And so Auschwitz bursts into her mind—where her cousin was murdered immediately, where her little brother was used as a human guinea pig, and where the Romani people revolted, only to be exterminated en masse in the gas chambers; then the Ravensbrück labor camp, where, alongside the ruthlessness of the female guards, she—so mistrustful—encountered friendship and solidarity. Yet the dead always return; they stand behind doors easily pushed open. > All right, then. Let them come. She may be old, but she is still capable of slaying a few ghosts of the past. (...) Yes, it is her, it really is Anuscha (the murdered cousin). She is ten years old and nothing bad has happened yet. (...) When she reaches for the handle her hand moves clumsily and tears lurk in her throat, but then the door opens, swings wide, and Else appears (her friend from the concentration camp). She is still tall and thin as a rake, but she looks healthy and full, wearing clothes that are intact. (...) We are destined to lose everything, even the people who matter most to us. And so she no longer tries to hold back her weeping; reaching toward the fifth door, she lets the tears flow. Inside, Didi awaits her (the little brother reduced to a guinea pig). (...) She is a traitor. (...). Hence her shame. She betrayed the dead. She betrayed her people and her language. (...) On one side are them. Yet on the other remain those she never betrayed. Anuscha. And Didi. (...) I still miss you, every single day. As Elsa Morante writes in *Menzogna e sortilegio* (see the review on this site), > the past and the future are two realms of mist and vertigo, which the living can explore only through imagination and memory. What purpose is served by plumbing this palace of death? > No, said her father in a voice that came from a distant place. No, do not remember. Forget and look forward. To do this, one must deceive and betray. And Morante once more: > a lucid insomnia takes hold of me, and in this hushed, depopulated room, from now on I shall interrogate nothing but my true memory. Keeping her secret her entire life, shrinking from the temptation to reveal the truth, is the only way to safeguard her grief: the immense suffering born of the loss of her loved ones, and, bound up with them, her belonging to a people—the Romani—despised and trampled upon. The narrative structure follows a circular arc: the author returns repeatedly to the same themes, situations, and characters, pursuing a social and introspective investigation through successive approximations. The section dealing with life in the concentration camps relies on documentary sources and often takes on the qualities of a chronicle; perhaps it could not have been otherwise, given that the author is not recounting a true story, nor did she experience the camps firsthand. Interviews with survivors allow her to lend depth to the narrative, particularly when depicting the daily lives of the female inmates and the relationships woven among them. Elsewhere, as in the depiction of the Romani uprising, the prose falls flat and predictable. By contrast, the section concerning Miriam’s life in Sweden strikes a different chord: fiction grants the storytelling room to breathe, taking on color and substance because the author knows this social and cultural landscape intimately. A subtle irony emerges regarding Swedish customs, brought into relief by Miriam’s mimetic gifts: a young woman adept at reading body language, vocal inflections, and the behavior of a people—the Swedes—otherwise so utterly foreign to her. What causes disarray is the relentless shuttling between present and past, between reality and remembrance; perhaps a more linear narrative structure would have served the reader better. Why read it? An important, groundbreaking book that reaches far beyond the conventional history of the Holocaust.

> Wars end. Hate lasts forever. Hatred harbored for years had driven a man to litter a city with bombs. Hatred had driven another to detonate them . The consequences of that insane game that is war provide the ideal backdrop for a thriller. The novel’s premise is the return of a Vietnam veteran, surviving yet monstrously disfigured by napalm, the incendiary weapon widely used by the Americans during the war. As one would say today in polite terms, it was "friendly fire" that reduced the man to the horrific state in which he finds himself: taken prisoner by the Viet Cong and used as a human shield, he was struck by units of his own army, despite their having clearly recognized him. Hatred and vengeance are unleashed against his own fellow citizens, as he confides to his only friend: > I believe it would take the lives of many men to feel the pain I felt in those few months in the hospital . Many years must pass until a series of explosions strikes New York, claiming numerous victims. The investigation is assigned to a young detective, Vivien, who is partnered with Russell, a failed writer from a wealthy family who has come into possession of information crucial to identifying the culprit. As is typical in thrillers, the novel unfolds along two parallel narrative threads: the unraveling of the police investigation, full of plot twists and intricate developments, and the personal lives of the two protagonists, who ultimately fall in love. Among the story’s many offshoots, there is also a priest who reportedly took the killer's confession regarding the murders: the conditional mood is necessary here, as this very confession is the novel's pivotal juncture, one that might allow an attentive reader (certainly not the undersigned, who failed to grasp it) to deduce the killer's identity. The novel is undoubtedly the finest Faletti has written: the story is well-constructed, the plot rich with incidents and characters that nonetheless weave smoothly into the overarching narrative. The prose is even and composed, simple yet effective at the same time. If a criticism must be made, it concerns the novel’s finale, which, as is often the case with thrillers, is insufficiently developed and arrives devoid of tension and suspense. Perhaps the author should have devoted greater care to the conclusion, even at the expense of trimming some of the book’s redundant passages. Why read it? It reads exceedingly well, and the narrative commands the reader's attention.

The protagonist and narrator of this novel is a cat: a stray taken into the home of a teacher, unloved yet tolerated out of sheer inertia. This is how our hero defines himself: > I do not grow fat because I eat no delicacies, but I am in passable condition and get by day after day without limping . Like all of his kind, our cat’s stillness and indolence conceal great wisdom, a profound capacity for reflection on the events of the human world. And this is why whoever were to read > the book distractedly, convinced that it was a work of little value, will suddenly realize they are faced with something very different, something that seems facile but is as profound as the doctrine of Buddha, and will no longer dare read it sprawled on the tatami with legs askew, skipping lines . We are in Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century, during the war with Russia, which would end in the resounding victory of the nascent Japanese empire. It is a long transitional phase, from the traditional, insular culture of the shoguns to an opening toward the Western world, its literature, and its science. Gathered at the teacher’s house in endless, pointless chatter are various intellectuals: the skeptic, witty and superficial; the young physicist, lost in scientific research whose purpose eludes comprehension; the Zen philosopher, yearning for a spirituality no longer truly felt; and finally, the young businessman, eager to strike it rich. At the center is the teacher: misanthropic, closed like «an oyster», selfish, spending all his time in his study, officially to read the countless books he purchases by squandering his modest teacher’s salary > But what is he doing, lying face down on this blanket with a long past, his chin resting on his hands, a cigarette between his fingers? Nothing, he just lies there idling. It is possible that in his dandruff-sprinkled head reflections on the grand schemes of things turn like a wheel of fire, but observing him from the outside, you would never tell. Yet, the cat is immensely grateful to the teacher, for he allows him to witness an emblematic cross-section of human society; a gathering of fabulists, to be sure, but one that provides our hero with «a thousand experiences», and us readers with pearls of wisdom. For instance, the cat visits a public bathhouse, where all men appear equal in their nudity, and suddenly there emerges a > a giant. Nietzsche’s superman. The king of demons, The commander-in-chief of brutes. (...) And on my way, I reflect. Among those men naked as worms, who in their effort to become all equal stripped off their trousers, haori, and hakama, an equally naked hero emerged who imposed his authority upon the others. I deduce from this that human beings may strip down as much as they like, they will never achieve equality . And what of narcissism? Observing the teacher looking in the mirror and lamenting his face, so disagreeable, the cat reflects that > when one is dissatisfied with oneself, when in the grip of discouragement, there is no more effective remedy than looking in the mirror. One gains an immediate and clear perception of beauty and ugliness. One marvels at having lived up to that moment showing such a face to the world. And this sudden awareness is a precious moment in a person’s life. Nothing is more useful to the human being than the perception of their own stupidity . We all know that cats are very patient; but everything has its limits! In the face of senseless babble, the vacuity of words, the poverty of feelings, and a background noise in which traditional philosophies (Buddhism and Confucianism) as well as Western thought dissolve, even a feline can take no more; and so he gets drunk and lets himself die. > Enough now, let it go as it will. I am tired of fighting... (...) Little by little I feel better. (...) Where I am. what I am doing, is completely indifferent to me. I only know that I feel good. (...) I sweep away sun and moon, pulverize heaven and earth and enter the mystery of eternal peace, I am dying, And dying I achieve peace. (...) I give thanks. I give thanks . At a certain point in this long novel, a doubt arises, at once fascinating and unsettling: could the cat and the teacher be parts of the very same person? The sage and the dullard? The engaged and the indifferent? And could this tale, written not long before his death, be Soseki’s spiritual testament? If this were the case, the book takes on an extremely modern, almost psychoanalytic mantle, a fresco of the complexity and ambivalence of the human soul, a precursor to those ambiguous and evanescent traits that would accompany great Japanese literature. The book is decidedly boring. There is no plot; the characters are stereotypes, the dialogues are protracted and serve merely as pretexts for musings; the cat’s digressions are more compelling, yet to be grasped in their fullness they would require a profound knowledge of Japanese history and culture. The translation is of a very high caliber, elevating the prose, which is the novel’s sole redeeming feature; the explanatory notes are meticulous and exhaustive, enriching our knowledge of Japanese society and inviting us to study it. Why not read it? It is boring.

The novel concerns a string of murders committed in Monte Carlo by a psychopath who slaughters a series of celebrities in the grip of a vengeful delirium, seeking to restore a face to his brother, born ill-fated and murdered by their father. An American agent finds himself heading the investigation amidst a tangle of subplots and plot twists. It is a quintessential genre novel, echoing the style and narrative pace of books by Ludlum, Le Carré, and the like: a detective story that relies neither on setting (here reduced to the bare essentials) nor on in-depth character development, nor, ultimately, on suspense. Instead, it relies on narrative velocity and, in this case, on pleasant, lucid prose. It is a good book, perhaps overly long (as novels of this genre tend to be), redundant (for instance, from the discovery of the killer’s identity up to his apprehension), hurried (in how the protagonist uncovers the killer’s identity), and ultimately rather implausible regarding the final confrontation between the protagonist and the “villainous” general. Other passages firmly capture the reader's interest and attention: the initial murder aboard the boat, the phone calls to the radio station, the French commissaire’s search in Aix-en-Provence, and, finally, the killer's capture. At last, Italian literature too has entered a literary genre that has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—immense success both abroad and in Italy.

> Many years ago, on a tiny island in an Italian lake, lived several people whom the present story concerns . Carla > already had hair turned very grey, in this nineteen-thirty, but her face was sweetly fresh, youthful, and getting to know her explained the style of her novels . Her father, old Antonio, often reprimanded her because he disapproved of his daughter's books, despite their great success; he also criticized his son Celestino, “too tall and big and strong.” > You are all intellect, just as famous tenors are all voice. As for the rest, you have nothing; you lack even common sense. There were other guests as well: a cousin and his wife, Jole and Vittorio, poor and young relatives, Giovanni the caretaker and two maids, and the dog Pangloss, whom Celestino desperately tried to teach to recognize numbers. Nothing ever happened. > It was a land, exceedingly rare, devoid of events. One merely lived, and that was already much; (...) yet this story would not exist had a certain event not occurred, beginning on a certain May evening of that year. Two petty rascals arrive on the island seeking refuge, having lived off hotel thefts, gambling, and small-time scams. Guido and Beatrice make no secret of being pursued by the police; yet Celestino decides to welcome them, partly already intrigued by the woman—of a soft, serene, and at times coarse sweetness—and partly because he has an objective: to teach the pair to be honest. Celestino devises a scientific curriculum; after all, as old Antonio remarks, > here things are taken too seriously. Eternity, truth, infinity, mathematics . As was to be expected, the program fails miserably: Guido and Beatrice steal money and jewelry, then, once discovered, depart to resume their usual life. “A year has passed, everything seems as before: but it is not true.” The island is quarantined due to scarlet fever, brought by a young orphan taken in by the family; Guido and Beatrice reappear on the island, but struck by a tone markedly different from the previous time. > The clothes they wore immediately revealed their decline, their misfortune. They must have gone through a truly bad stretch, and they stood before him (Celestino), without shame, but also without bravado. Their manners were no longer as easy as before; they stood almost awkward and conscious of their awkwardness, yet without any will to resist their dejection . This time, Celestino's program seems easier: before him are two pupils, humble, resigned, willing to learn moral values and an honest trade. There is something more: the generosity of Carla and Celestino turns first into compassion, then affection, and ultimately love—Carla for Guido and Celestino for Beatrice. And so we might say that it is neither science nor virtue that transforms humanity, but love. It would make for a fine ending, romantic and reassuring, were it not for another occurrence: Jole and Vittorio, who have spent four years on the island, have systematically stolen from the family that took them in; once discovered, they abandon the island with the stolen goods only to betray everyone, denouncing Guido and Beatrice to the police and plunging old Antonio into legal trouble for having harbored two fugitives. I refuse to reveal the ending. It is a fable, written with elegant lightness, which conveys three important messages: it is futile to retreat into an island of mediocre security, for events are larger than we are and sweep us away; scoundrels hide behind respectable and friendly figures, in a kind of “inverted world”; and finally, without empathy (pity, solidarity, fellow-feeling), one gets nowhere. These are timely messages: I leave it to the reader to judge. The novel bears the date 1942; in truth, it was never published, although it was likely commissioned by the *Corriere della Sera*. This partly explains the fragility of the plot, slender and predictable, and the superficiality of the characters, merely sketched and more stereotypical than fully realized figures (Celestino above all); the narrative also marks a watershed between the numerous stories published up to 1940 (romance fiction bearing the imprint of the fascist climate) and the great postwar detective novels: the author is on his way toward a new, more incisive style. Why read it? Elegant, steeped in sweet melancholy.

> I know that my inspiration draws strength from my attachment to the same house, the same street, the same view, and the same city... this bond of mine with Istanbul means that the fate of a city can become a person’s character . In this book, Pamuk recounts how he became a writer, yet in doing so he cannot help but speak of his Istanbul—the city of the 1950s and 60s, in full decline, not by chance narrated and photographed in black and white. So tight is the interweaving of the city’s history, enshrined in the “details of the past,” and the history of his own identity as a writer and an individual, that it becomes evident how the convulsive transformation of Istanbul has inexorably aged Pamuk himself, leaving him no longer an interpreter of the contemporary era. The novel has no plot in the strict sense, but is rather an assemblage of microcosms, episodes, reflections, and impressions. To give a general coherence to the narrative, three narrative threads can be identified. First and foremost, the biographical thread speaks of childhood and adolescence, of the extended Pamuk family, of the houses, and of the parents’ marital crisis. Pamuk’s formative journey does not involve the written page. There are neither reckless, childish attempts at writing nor great books that “changed a life.” The books read and reread by the young Pamuk are “the collection of facts and curiosities,” preferably enriched with drawings and photographs, that form > a seductive, terrible, and at times disgusting compendium of curiosities, events, and bizarre characters . From here, the transition to painting is natural: it allows one to contemplate and depict the panorama of Istanbul, initially “unanimously deemed beautiful,” later marked by the signs of decline. > I would draw the small mosques, the ruined walls, the Byzantine arches of which only a part remained visible, the overhanging wooden houses, and the modest dwellings . In painting, Pamuk discovers the pleasure of artistic creation. > Only now did I realize, through a more complex and astute spiritual leap, the desire to escape from myself.... sometimes I lost control of the drawing... and something would sweep me along impetuously, lifting me pleasantly: only when it ended, like a wave that dissolves as it breaks against the rocks, after freeing myself from wonder and sadness, could I rest a little . To understand why Pamuk decides to become a writer, abandoning the faculty of architecture and his passion for painting, one must turn to the second narrative thread: the survey of the great Turkish and Western writers who wrote about Istanbul. It is necessary to know this literature to appreciate the pages dedicated to it. One grasps, nonetheless, how Pamuk looks at his city through the words of Western observers, to the extent that the latter’s descriptions of Istanbul seem like > a personal memory. Naturally, this is also aided by the fact that Istanbul’s population has tenfold increased in the meantime, and certain avenues and squares, despite remaining entirely unchanged, now seem like completely different places due to the crowds. I always feel nostalgia for the years when the city was solitary and empty . One always returns to Istanbul, to > this mingling of history with ruins, of ruins with life, and of life with history . The third narrative thread consists of the description of the city, the contemplation of the Bosphorus, and wanderings among > the remnants of the old urban fabric made of wood and stone . Whoever has had the opportunity to lose themselves in the Armenian and Greek quarters or to walk down from Taksim toward the shores of the Bosphorus can appreciate what Pamuk writes and understand that > perhaps we love the place where we live only because we have no other choice, just as with family. Yet we must discover where and why to love it . It is futile to hope to find in the book a guide for a stay in Istanbul. Too distant and confined is Pamuk’s city compared to today’s—multiform, youthful, dynamic, and gigantic. The book speaks of the profound bond we all share with the places of our lives, which we often take for granted, as an obvious given. It is a reciprocal relationship, one that must be defended and built day by day, sustained by the daily effort to > attune one’s state of mind to the panoramas the city offers. And such an endeavor, if undertaken with naturalness and sincerity, leads one to unite, within memory, the city’s images with one’s deepest and most sincere feelings—with sorrow, with sadness, and from time to time with happiness, the joy of living, and optimism. If we learn to look at a city this way, and if we live in it long enough to find the opportunity to forge a lasting bond between its views and our truest, deepest feelings, after a while... the streets, the images, the landscapes of our city are transformed, one after the other, into realities that evoke certain feelings and states of mind within us . Why read it? Let us set Istanbul aside; let us speak of the bond with our own city, and of memories, and of feelings.

The daily newspaper *La Stampa* offered alongside the paper a series of noir short stories: Macchiavelli, De Silva, Fois, Lucarelli, Manzini, Carlotto, Simi, Robecchi, Malvaldi, Fantini and Pariani, Cassar Scalia, Pastor, Recami, de Giovanni, De Cataldo, and Savatteri. It was an excellent initiative: it provided a survey of the principal Italian writers of the genre. What emerges is that Italian noir is setting-driven, the setting constructed around a character, generally a police inspector; the plot remains in the background and is often predictable. Among Northern authors, the context is realistically raw, a mirror of an amoral Italy devoid of prospects; where the South is concerned, the setting is transfigured into a fantasy of escape from the desolation of Southern society—an aspiration rendered dreamlike by the coquettish use of dialect, in the style of Camilleri. I shall focus on a few of these stories. Maurizio de Giovanni's *La febbre* takes us to Naples, and its very title recalls Matilde Serao's *Il Paese di Cuccagna* (see review on this site). The fever is the lottery game, and the victim is the *assistito*, the medium who provides numbers received from the beyond. One cannot help but feel sympathy for an inspector so intimately affected by the victim’s fate. > In the image that presented itself to my soul's gaze, and whose suffering my soul shared, the blood ran down like a long, unbroken tear, staining the cheek, the neck, and the front of the dressing gown . The story is steeped in Neapolitan spirit: airy, refined in language and syntax, with a well-constructed plot, the brief tale of the *assistito* invites us to explore further works by de Giovanni. In *Romanzo Criminale* (see review on this site), Giancarlo De Cataldo had offered a bleak, resigned fresco of Italy and of Rome in particular, leaving the characters in the background as mere criminal stereotypes. In the story bearing the emblematic title of *Medusa*, the protagonist is the heart of the narrative. Now an elderly, retired teacher renowned for her strictness, Professor Blasi spent her life in a peculiar relationship with a homosexual baron. And when the latter was murdered, > at the Caffè Centrale they spoke of nothing else. And they spoke of it in the Salento manner, with little or no pity , but while > the baron, deep down, could be forgiven anything: he was born that way, and that was how he was bound to end up. But as for her, oh no, that pointless obstinacy of hers would be held against her for eternity . It must be acknowledged: De Cataldo is a cut above other Italian noir authors, in both style and substance. Imagine an elderly man in a Milan "with that yellow sky that boded no good"—what can he possibly think when his doorbell rings? In this little gem, *Ottobre in giallo a Milano*, Francesco Recami weaves a surreal yet plausible tale. The elderly pensioner strikes an intruder, who claims to be a police inspector, with a monkey wrench; gripped by panic over what he has done, rather than turning to law enforcement as a dutiful citizen should, he dumps the bleeding, unconscious body in front of the emergency room with the help of a rogue acquaintance, and then takes refuge in the underbelly of society aided by a scoundrel nephew—part pusher, wholly greedy. What will become of our old man in a Milan, > where it looked as though a nuclear bomb had gone off, or at least that's how they color post-atomic skies in the movies ? I had first encountered Recami in another story, *Progresso-Audace 3-22* (see review on this site under *Il Calcio in giallo*), and had appreciated his elegant depiction of our era's disturbing paradoxes: I believe it would be worthwhile to explore this author through full-length novels. How I enjoy Gaetano Savatteri! The plot is insubstantial, but there is irony to spare! As in *La segreta alchimia* (see review on this site under *Viaggiare in giallo*), the protagonist is an unemployed journalist, relentlessly teased by a devoted friend and an architect who might be his girlfriend, enraptured by works of art, splendid and superfluous. The town is Gibellina, where the Belice earthquake produced a reconstruction made of rationalist urban planning and monuments by celebrated artists; a pity that the landscape is a desert, a surreal abandonment, left behind by inhabitants fleeing to the North and abroad. The subtle irony, the affectionate depiction of the setting, the rhetoric of institutional rituals—the annual conference, the buffet, and the museum visit—the characters confined to their roles: these are all the foundation of a social and political critique, presented with a light touch and therefore never banal. It is a story well worth reading. Why read these stories? They are compelling and thoroughly enjoyable.

The book charts the emotional and existential journey of a young girl, Jane. An orphan, she lives first with her aunt, who later sends her to a grim, austere school where she navigates adolescence to become a young teacher. On her own initiative, she secures a position as a governess to a young girl in the household of a wealthy landowner. He is a restless figure, constantly traveling, self-absorbed and eccentric. Meanwhile, Jane has grown into an unexceptional-looking, diminutive, and seemingly fragile young woman, yet one possessed of a formidable strength of character. A mutual attraction develops between Jane and the wealthy landowner, who asks for her hand in marriage. At the wedding, however, it is revealed that the man is already married to a madwoman. Jane then refuses any compromise and flees penniless into the countryside. She is taken in at the home of a clergyman and his two sisters, becoming a schoolmistress in a school for the poor. The clergyman, struck by Jane’s resolve and abilities, asks her to become his wife and accompany him on his mission. Jane realizes this is not true love and decides to leave the home, returning to the wealthy landowner's estate to discover what has transpired. The story concludes happily: the landowner’s wife has died, allowing the two to marry and live happily ever after. Another theme that emerges is the critique of men who are ostensibly devout and pious, yet in reality hypocritical and cruel. And then, in the background, lies nature, rich in atmospheric power, alongside the realm of uncanny premonitions and phantoms: the child’s terror, the sense of the unknown, the voice beckoning toward destiny. The author demonstrates great skill in her descriptions and in the psychological examination of her characters, yet the sheer length and banality of the dialogue render the reading experience ponderous and tedious.

The novel is, in a sense, the continuation of *The Black Corsair*. Jolanda, the pirate’s daughter, returns to the Caribbean to reclaim her mother’s inheritance. Here, she is repeatedly abducted by the Count of Medina, her grandfather’s natural son, who seeks to seize Jolanda’s fortune and, above all, avenge the killing of his father—Jolanda’s grandfather—at the hands of the Black Corsair. Morgan, the pirate friend of the Black Corsair, fights to free Jolanda, culminating in the slaying of the Count of Medina and his marriage to Jolanda, who in the meantime has fallen in love with him. The plot provides the occasion for a series of adventures that unfold across the Caribbean Sea, Venezuela, and Central America, through a succession of naval battles, sieges of Spanish cities, and tempests. The style remains characteristically Salgari’s—brisk and fast-paced in depicting martial engagements—though it must be noted that the narrative suffers from a slackening rhythm and a repetitiveness that at times makes for tedious reading. The finest part of the book is the account of Jolanda and Morgan in the Venezuelan jungle. With the pirate gravely wounded, the young woman is swiftly forced to contend with an astonishing and hostile wilderness, the threat of wild beasts, and attacks by savages. This unfolds as a form of initiation open to multiple interpretations: the exaltation of a heroic figure—here embodied by a woman—the portrayal of an exotic natural world (Salgari’s hallmark exoticism), the passage from youth to adulthood, and the confrontation between the resolve of the will and an antagonistic external environment. As with the story of *The Black Corsair*, a psychoanalytic and autobiographical interpretation of the tale is possible, focusing specifically on Jolanda’s trials in the forest.

> I was about to enter the ruthless world of adults, and there I had to survive on my own. Dovevo diventare più duro di chiunque altro / I had to become tougher than anyone else . First and foremost, the book is a bildungsroman, taking its cue from a short story by a major figure of Japanese literature: Natsume Soseki. He recounts the story of a student who runs away from home to work in a mine, undergoing an "experience of life and death" before returning to his former world. The singularity of Soseki's text lies in the fact that it never reveals whether the young man has changed. Reading it, one has the impression of "not understanding what it is meant to signify." Similarly, fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura, one of the two protagonists of Haruki's novel, flees his hated paternal home to escape the pain of having been abandoned by his mother. He is weighed down by a tremendous spiritual wound, one that can only be overcome by accepting his mother's rejection without expecting explanations. He simply has to forgive her. It is an arduous existential passage, not least because doing so would bring him definitively into maturity, to the realization that all of us are like a mask in a Greek tragedy: > light and shadow, hope and despair, laughter and sorrow, trust and solitude . It is no coincidence that in a book steeped in metaphor, the library and the forest are the most crucial symbolic constructs of Tamura's inner journey. Having run away from home, Tamura finds shelter in a private library, where he befriends the clerk—a sort of philosopher, part man and part woman—and, above all, meets the woman who might be his mother, Miss Saeki, with whom he makes love. Yet the library is the symbol of the orderly arrangement of memories, without which we could not survive. > We all keep continually losing so many important things... living means this too, but each of us has a little room inside our head where we can keep all these things in the form of memories . Walking in the forest, on the other hand, symbolizes the search for a world apart, motionless, serene because it is devoid of memory. And indeed Tamura ventures ever deeper into the woods to reach > a particular place in my being, the luminous source where darkness is spawned and soundless echoes are born . There, in an unreal village, he may find that inner peace which constantly eludes him because he unceasingly wonders: > why didn't she love me? If my mother didn't love me, could it not have been because of some grave, fundamental flaw of my own? . Yet how did Tamura manage to enter this world, > where time is no longer needed and (therefore) memories are not needed either ? Here enters the parallel storyline running alongside Tamura's journey. Nakata has suffered the effects of a mysterious phenomenon that occurred during the Second World War. Still a child, he fell into a coma for several days and then, upon regaining consciousness, lost all memory, forgetting everything—even how to read and write. Ever since, he has remained somewhat impaired, endowed with strange and seemingly useless powers: for instance, he can speak with cats, as he knows the language of all living beings. Here, too, the author draws upon an ancient Japanese legend according to which there exist "living spirits" that possess the prerogative of leaving the body, traveling to faraway places, and dwelling at the edges of the world. Well, Nakata seems to possess these very qualities. His quiet life as an elderly man, somewhat odd yet harmless, is abruptly shattered because he is forced to kill a person who beheads cats (a man who is none other than Tamura's father). Nakata sets off on a journey partly because he feels he must carry out a mission: to seek the entrance stone, that is, to allow Tamura to enter the timeless world. And this is crucial for the boy, because transcending the boundaries of the real world allows him to meet his mother, forgive her, and accept coming of age. > I find myself trapped between one void and another. I cannot tell right from wrong. I do not even know what I am looking for..... yet from somewhere Miss Saeki's voice reaches me, saying in a firm tone: it doesn't matter, you have to go back anyway. I am the one who wants it. For you to be there . Narrating events and circumstances on the brink of the absurd allows the author to dispense with the criteria of verisimilitude and transport us into an oneiric world, belonging to dream rather than reality. At the outset, the narrative is structured like a classical novel; then, as one proceeds, the reader is no longer astonished by the events and characters, growing convinced that the author is recounting a dream, a journey through consciousness in which the different levels—rational and irrational—somehow merge and achieve a unified conception. One is in the presence of a book bearing strong philosophical undertones, with frequent recourse to symbolism and words laden with manifold meanings. It is a pity. Poised between psychological inquiry and fantastical tale, all too often inclined toward philosophical digressions, the story loses concision; the narrative's forward momentum dissolves, remaining in the end suspended without a definitive resolution. One is left with the sensation of having read something fascinating yet evanescent, > like water lingering in a small hollow in the ground on a summer morning before evaporating in the sun . Why read it? It is well worth reading, but one should expect neither an easy read nor a clear conclusion.

For Giuseppe Ungaretti, there is a mystery within us, unknowable and unspeakable, and the purpose of poetry is not to unveil it but to allow us to strike a balance, as the protagonist of this story, Momokushi, puts it, > between that which is shown to the world and that which is kept hidden; between what is apparent and what is intimate and real. Grappling with this mystery is, ultimately, what all artists pursue; if for some, like Javier Marías, this means venturing into the labyrinth of contemporary relationships, as in *Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me* (see the review on this site), Linda Lercari has chosen instead to investigate the secrets of the soul within a setting both dear and familiar to her: medieval Japan. The setting is the end of the Kamakura period, in 1330; following the Mongol attempts to invade Japan, the country is racked by endless warfare among rival feudal lords. Momokushi is a powerful castellan and warrior, with numerous samurai in his service. The story begins with the death in battle of Haka, the samurai closest to him in courage, prowess in combat, and loyalty. On his deathbed, Haka confesses something to him that throws Momokushi into turmoil. Deftly, the author does not reveal what his friend told him: it is a secret that Momokushi, and we alongside him, must slowly uncover. A sort of mystery novel unfolds in a setting that strikes us as fairytale-like, yet is rendered plausible through tangible details revealing Lercari’s deep knowledge of medieval Japan. Momokushi visits Haka’s concubine to ask if she knows anything, and is given a small chest containing his friend's belongings. Inside, he finds a poem of evocative yet obscure words ( > a thousand seasons / winter of the soul, / the heart dies. He discovers a *tsuba*, a small metal disc designed to protect the hand, which he realizes once belonged to him by its dragonfly motif: bewildered, he also notices that the engraving of a carp has been added, undoubtedly at his friend’s initiative. In Japanese culture, the carp symbolizes the freedom to follow one’s own path and the strength to overcome adversity. Alongside these physical clues, disordered memories of his life with Haka surface in Momokushi’s mind, particularly one episode: the two friends had walked away from the other samurai when Haka > suddenly grasped his hand and pressed it to his heart. His face scarlet red, redder than the cherry blossoms illuminated by the lanterns. In the memory > a faint pang of guilt stirred within Momokushi. Had he been more attentive, perhaps he could have divined what torment was corroding his friend’s soul, but he feared knowing the answer, and for that reason had always remained aloof. It will be the almond blossoms decorating his friend’s sword that reveal to him the secret of their life together and the words uttered by Haka on his deathbed. It is too late! As in the finale of João Guimarães Rosa's *Grande Sertão* (see the review on this site), nothing remains but the painful sense of loss for what never came to be. > Upon this meadow / among ancient trees / a sip of wine, / a song, a pillow, / no sounds / of fire and storm, / no threat, / illusion of feast. The story moves with the slow pace of a prose poem. One senses a melancholy sweetness, alternating between martial episodes, evocative descriptions of nature and the samurai milieu, and the whispers surrounding a bond as intense as that between Momokushi and Haka. The castellan Momokushi stands out in solitude: he is the proud, suffering protagonist. He scandalized the court by adopting Haka as a child, nurtured his intimacy with his friend despite the slander, and endured his grief, slowly becoming aware of what lay hidden behind their relationship—one only superficially akin to that between warriors. While the details are rich in evocative power, the plot is often redundant; frequent flashbacks confuse and weigh down the narrative flow to the detriment of rhythm. A leaner, more essential structure would undoubtedly have benefited the novel. The writing is elegant and pleasant: a remarkable mastery is evident in the descriptions of Japanese nature and society. Attention to detail lends verisimilitude to the entire narrative, steering clear of common clichés about Japan. Perhaps a deeper exploration of Haka’s character and his life choices would have been beneficial. Why read it? An engaging story, beautifully depicted settings.

The novel is set in the late seventeenth century, during the reign of Louis XIV, and recounts the exploits of a Frenchman, Poncet, who journeys to Abyssinia on an expedition mounted by the Jesuits to restore ties with the empire fifty years after the expulsion of Catholic priests. The protagonist is an adventurous young man who commits himself to this enterprise out of love for the daughter of the French consul in Cairo. He thus finds himself entangled in a web of intrigue between rival religious orders (the Capuchins against the Jesuits) and competing factions within the court of the French king. The story predictably features a happy ending, with the two lovers managing to wed after numerous adventures. The work reads like a cross between *The Three Musketeers* (the great French novel) and the tales of Maalouf, yet it completely lacks historical atmosphere, narrative momentum, and character analysis. For instance, the transformation of the consul’s young daughter from a devout maiden into an adventuress unfolds so flatly as to render it entirely implausible.

Maigret returns to the village where he grew up, as an elderly countess has died and he suspects she was murdered. All the figures of a potentially sordid affair are present: the countess’s young lover, the playboy son living the high life, a young parish priest who perhaps knows more than he lets on, and so forth. What emerges is a portrait of a provincial milieu, sketched, in truth, in a superficial and unengaging manner. The characters, too, emerge flat, devoid of any genuine analysis of the motivations underpinning their actions and the events. The detective element is virtually nonexistent, and Maigret feels more like an extra than a police superintendent capable of steering and managing the investigation. Perhaps I am simply unlucky, as I cannot seem to read a book by Simenon that I truly enjoy.

Emilio Salgari was exceptionally swift at fashioning stories around events that gripped the public imagination; he did so by blending a certain exoticism with wars and romantic intrigues. Such had been the case with *La capitana del Yucatan* and *Le Stragi delle Filippine* (see the reviews on this site), and so it is in this novel, published under a pseudonym in 1904. The backdrop is the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, in which > "little Japan," as the Russians contemptuously called it, confronted and defeated the vast Russian Empire. The setting is Port Arthur, the gateway to the conquest of Korea and at the time in Russian hands. The narrative opens with a scene of simultaneous splendor and decay: a *daimyo* (that is, a feudal lord) passes through the crowd alongside his stunning daughter, Shima. > She was barely sixteen, (...) not tall, exquisitely proportioned, with deep black eyes that bore no trace of slant, (...) skin with alabaster hues, (...) with a lovely little mouth, its somewhat thin lips hinting at an extraordinary resolve. A lavish reception is set to take place at the daimyo’s residence to celebrate Shima's betrothal to Boris, a Russian officer. The prospective groom fails to appear: he is having an affair with a geisha and knows that war with Japan is imminent, rendering marriage to a Japanese woman impossible. The city is steeped in an atmosphere of tense anticipation, which allows the two women to face one another: Shima, > with blazing eyes and an inflamed countenance, demands to know whether the geisha truly loves Boris; the other implores her to let her keep her love, > why wrest from me, a poor geisha, the love of a single man—the only one who has ever truly loved me, and whom I love? I am a wretched flower cast to the mercy of the wind, destined to wither unless someone gathers me and exposes me to the dew and the sun. Never in his numerous novels had Salgari chronicled a conflict of such passion and social resonance, pitting a beautiful, wealthy aristocrat against a destitute prostitute in love. In a writer so attuned to public sentiment, one detects echoes of Gabriele D'Annunzio, Guido Gozzano, Gian Pietro Lucini, and French *poètes maudits* such as Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire. Regrettably, this social and romantic conflict fails to evolve, cut short by the outbreak of war; upon both women falls a single, overriding duty: to serve the homeland, Japan. > The homeland!, exclaimed the geisha, in a sudden burst of fervor, (...) The danger facing our homeland in this solemn hour unites the common people and the nobility for the supreme defense of the country, bridging the abysses that divide them, Shima said in a solemn voice. She drew her into her arms and kissed her on the forehead, saying: for the homeland! And we are no longer in distant Port Arthur; it is as if we were commemorating the martyrs of Dogali and Adwa, the heroes who defended the Nation against the fierce Ethiopians! Salgari extols a nationalist, colonialist, and irredentist Italy, which would march exultantly into Libya and later to liberate Trento and Trieste in the catastrophic slaughter of the First World War. "Little" Japan becomes the mirror of modern Italy: its war dead the future martyrs, the two women the archetypes of all the mothers, wives, and daughters who will sacrifice their personal affections for the Motherland. A keen reader of war correspondence, Salgari displays a remarkable grasp of the dynamics of the naval clash unfolding at Port Arthur, where the formidable Japanese fleet, deftly commanded and equipped, pinned the Russian vessels inside the harbor before closing the city in a pincer movement from sea and land. Yet it is precisely the sheer scale and protracted duration of the battle that make it difficult for Salgari to provide overall clarity and highlight the dramatic turns of events. The author operates far better when only a few ships clash, making it easy to focus the reader’s gaze on the pivotal locations of the action. In the same vein, Salgari abandons his customary narrative blueprint of a central figure supported by secondary characters. Here that role might have belonged to Shima, but the "heroine" is overwhelmed by events, struggling to coexist with the minor figures. And where is the enemy, the traitor Boris? This incomplete and ill-defined system of characters stands as the novel's primary weakness. Why read it? For a fleeting spell, one conjures up the Salgari of *Il Corsaro Nero* (see the review on this site).

The novel pivots on the figure of Prince Myshkin, who returns to Russia after an extended stay in Switzerland, where he was treated for "idiocy"—that is, mental illness. The protagonist’s trajectory unfolds within a setting crowded with characters, from the somber Rogozhin (virtually the personification of evil) to a succession of opportunists and nihilists, through to two female characters (Nastasya and Aglaya) who, albeit in different ways, vie for Myshkin’s love. The clash between the two women, Nastasya’s flight from Myshkin (who intended to marry her out of pity rather than love), and Rogozhin’s murder of Nastasya ultimately drive Myshkin back into madness. The novel’s central theme is Myshkin’s innocence within a false, devious, and ambiguous world that the protagonist does not comprehend, and whose conventions and rules he tends rather to disrupt through spontaneous and sincere behavior. Myshkin constitutes a disruptive element to which society fails to respond, bewildered and taken aback as it is. The dilemma is the one voiced by Aglaya’s parents: > There was something strange about the matter, and just how strange, exactly? Or was there, rather, nothing strange at all? . Naturally, the parents seek an answer in the opinion of society and its most prominent figures, arranging a reception at which Myshkin will astonish (and partly mesmerize) everyone with his disconcerting behavior. In some ways, Myshkin recalls the figure of Christ in the famous encounter with the Grand Inquisitor in *The Brothers Karamazov*: sincerity, simplicity, a sense of pity, and the will to bestow love are all elements alien to our society, and somehow misunderstood or rejected. Madness is thus not a negative condition, but a different—and truer—vantage point on reality and human relations. The characters seem somehow to grasp Myshkin’s power; they are drawn to it, yet dread it. Nastasya understands him better than the others, yet shrinks from him for fear of hurting him; Aglaya loves him, yet wishes he were different, more compliant with the rules of society; and Rogozhin hates him precisely because he perceives that Nastasya is irreversibly drawn to Myshkin’s nature. The other characters too—and they are countless—act out of the same ambivalent sentiment, wavering between contempt and admiration. Alongside this central theme run innumerable other lines of inquiry, some characteristic of contemporary society (such as the nihilism already explored in *Demons*), others more universal: among the most compelling are the anticipation of death and the anguish that grips humankind, the face as a mirror of the soul and of the observer, and the theme of evil and hatred, embodied by Rogozhin and evoked within the gloomy atmosphere of his house. *The Idiot* is a singular novel. It is highly traditional in its narrative style, which is so overburdened with dialogue as to almost resemble a play, yet it is profoundly innovative in terms of the themes it addresses. The near-total absence of the religious theme (dominant in *The Brothers Karamazov*) allows for the explosion of other concerns closer to an existential dimension, in which the individual must seek selfhood autonomously rather than relying on divinity or metaphysics. Even more than his other novels, *The Idiot* gives expression to the "new man" and thereby opens the door to postmodernism. The narrative pacing is not consistently compelling (closer to *Demons* than to *Crime and Punishment* or *The Brothers Karamazov*), and in strictly literary terms, it is not particularly successful.

The setting is Barcelona during Franco's Spain, in the 1950s. The son of a bookseller is taken by his father (a dealer in antiquarian and rare books) to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a repository for all those volumes no one will ever seek out. Here, the boy picks up a novel by a Spanish author. Reading it draws him into a sequence of events that unfolds across his youth, in a sort of parallel narrative: the tribulations that engulfed the author's life (betrayed friendship, love for a girl who turns out to be his sister, her death, and ultimately persecution by a former friend turned brutal police officer) seem to recur in the boy's own existence. The young man gradually uncovers what happened to the author, finds himself similarly hounded by a vicious policeman, and seems destined to lose the woman he loves, just as the writer did. The book concludes with a happy ending: the villain is killed and the young man is free to marry. The opening of the tale seems intriguing, with this premise of forgotten books heralding a plot woven between the mysterious allure of books and the discovery of the life that lies behind the author and the stories told. Yet this promising start is lost in a plot that grows increasingly predictable, where the constant reliance on “telling” (characters recalling episodes from the author’s life) renders the book verbose and often tedious. As so often happens, the novel is too long, overloaded with themes and characters (frequently superfluous to the narrative), and provides far too little sense of place. The result is a touch of boredom.

The novel’s settings are the Finnish winter and spring, while the historical context is the war between the White forces, fighting to defend the country’s independence, and the Red forces, intent on extending the communist revolution to Finland as well. War, intertwined with a wild and pristine natural world, forms the backdrop to the ordeal of an imprisoned woman and her interactions with the judge (an alcoholic, paranoid writer) and the soldier, with whom she lived for eight days on a deserted island and by whom she is expecting a child. The entire story unfolds within a former asylum, where one of the protagonists is a poor madman who believes he is photographing ghosts, laying bare the sheer absurdity of events. Finally, there is also a young boy, the orphaned son of the woman’s friend, who suffers violence at the hands of his grandfather and cousins before ultimately being rescued by her. Alongside the plot and the characters’ trajectories, brief introductions to each chapter depict the behavior of wolves and humanity’s attempts to exterminate them in an apparently endless struggle. It is then, perhaps, that the meaning of the book begins to emerge—a work that remains, in certain respects, cryptic and elusive. The woman is a she-wolf: fierce and determined, yet devoted to her young—both the boy in her care and the child fathered by the soldier. In a hostile environment, pitted against a judge who is both cunning and cruel, the woman, like a she-wolf, moves with calculated shrewdness. By contrast, the soldier (a young man who enlisted to redeem himself both from professional failure and from his father) behaves like “a dog”: time and again he saves the woman’s life, falls in love with her, remains loyal, and dies to protect her. Two heroes, then: the woman is the positive hero, who does not passively endure the absurdities of war, but reacts, confronting them with her gaze fixed on the future; she ultimately prevails, restoring hope to a child and carrying within her the germ of a new horizon. The soldier is the negative hero, a weak man destroyed by war who nevertheless, unlike the others, salvages his dignity through the very act of protecting the woman. The book possesses profound depth and addresses a remarkably timely theme. In a society that is unraveling, the future must be confronted with strength and tenacity.

In his splendid biography of Matteo Ricci (*The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci*, published in Italy by Adelphi), Jonathan D. Spence recounts how the Jesuit missionary won over the Chinese mandarins with the gift of clocks brought from Europe. What astonished the Confucian elite was the exquisite mechanics of seventeenth-century Europe and the notion that time could be dissected into infinitely small increments, capable of deconstructing and even halting the flow of events. Perhaps this was what de Giovanni had in mind when entitling this novel: a "quasi-noir" that blends the discovery of one's past and identity with the machinations of a shadowy "Entity." There are two temporal dimensions: a washed-out professor of medieval history is prompted by a young journalist to uncover the truth behind the unsolved murder of a magistrate and his driver, only to discover that the killer was his own father—a terrorist from the 1960s and a skilled maker of mechanical devices, ranging from explosives to innocent clocks; on another timeline, set many years earlier, a naive young woman begins a relationship with a powerful cardinal whose assistant, acting on his superior’s instructions, arranges the girl's elimination with the help of a mysterious operative. How do these two storylines intertwine, and how do they culminate, perhaps, on the Atlantic coast—in Brest, no less? We will not reveal that, so as not to spoil the surprise for the reader. Already in a 2022 novel, *L'equazione del cuore* (see the review on this site), the author had departed from classic, deeply atmospheric Italian-style noir to examine the conflict between rationality and emotion, drawing inspiration from the physicist Dirac's equation, according to which bonds of love do not evolve—they remain intertwined forever. Here too, in this narrative, de Giovanni relies on the metaphor of clockwork gears to show how the past incessantly resurfaces, binding two people—the professor and the young journalist—in an unsought yet indissoluble knot. Narratively speaking, the plot is excessively constrained by the criminal schemes of Power, embodied here by the influential Cardinal and his ambitious assistant. Why get bogged down in such an implausible plot, when it would have sufficed to explore the theme of an unaccepted memory—one nonetheless vital if one wishes to live an authentic existence? By attempting to cram together too many subplots and too many literary genres, the author has produced a bloated, redundant potboiler that only fitfully hits the stride of a noir. Further marring the narrative is the layering of temporal planes, which clear up only near the very end, failing to generate any real suspense. Finally, it is regrettable that de Giovanni has severed all ties with Naples, depriving the tale of a rooted setting, which consequently remains entirely evanescent. Why not read it? It is boring.

It is a historical novel set in the year 900, during the disintegration of the Lombard world. The protagonist, Arechi, is educated at the papal court, later becomes a powerful lord of Cividale, and returns to the papal court as guardian of the papal throne. He leads a life of crime and intrigue, only to repent on his deathbed. The book is insipid. There is no characterization of the characters, nor of the protagonist himself, who makes inexplicable choices, such as abandoning his beloved wife out of jealousy. Nor is there even any real historical setting, and events simply follow one another as though part of a bare chronicle, with frequent lapses into the macabre and predictable visions of a corrupt and secretive Church.

An opera singer recounts a dream in which he relived a love affair: several years earlier, in Madrid, he had met and spent time with a couple—the wife of a prominent businessman and her male companion. The singer had fallen in love with the woman, whose husband later killed himself out of despair. While writing down the contents of the dream, news reaches him of the accidental death of his former girlfriend. The device of the recounted dream seems intended to recreate that atmosphere of enchantment, present with greater force in the author's other novel, recently reviewed. In truth, the author intended to tell a love story to demonstrate how that feeling > always requires something fictitious beyond what reality affords it. Love is based to a great extent on its anticipation and its memory . From this point of view, the true protagonist is the husband, who did not opt for reality but lives in yearning and thus in an expectation of love, constituted by his wife's acceptance of his affection and passion. I do not know why, but the book recalls a Pirandellian plot, insofar as the impression emerges that reality is not what it appears to be, but rather what one would wish it were, and despair is born precisely at the moment one realizes the profound divergence between reality and imagination. The various protagonists—the wife, the companion, the husband, and the former girlfriend herself (who held no importance while alive, yet acquires it through her death)—are analogous to Pirandello’s *Six Characters in Search of an Author*. They are attempting to escape unreality through the opera singer, who appears to be a passive subject in the affair, enduring events that he actually sets in motion. Does the passivity with which the singer accepts being abandoned by the woman perhaps intend to signal the prosaic nature of reality compared to the depth and vitality of the imagination? The book is very well written, but it possesses less depth, stylistically as well, compared to the previous one.

Although he went by the moniker "Captain Salgari," the Veronese writer never actually traveled; for his novels, he relied on the numerous accounts of explorers and geographers who brought back to Europe tales of hitherto unknown worlds—accounts that blended reliable reports with fanciful inventions, steeped in a burgeoning racism. Our author was always deft at promptly seizing upon "the trend," chasing the public’s appetite for strange and exotic novelties. Right from the mysterious and evocative title, one enters the atmosphere: *La perla sanguinosa* (*The Bloody Pearl*) is a pearl of rare beauty, stolen from a sacred temple in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) and steeped in the color of the blood of the thief who took it, only to drown later in the great shoal of Manaar, an extensive shallow reef situated between southern India and Ceylon. Behind the pearl lies a love story: a maiden has been forced to become a Buddhist nun and can only be redeemed through the delivery of the bloody pearl; vying for both pearl and maiden are a humble pearl diver and the One-Eyed, a villainous impostor. Both are held in the prison of Port Cornwallis, a British penal colony located in the Andaman archipelago, a group of islands in the center of the Bay of Bengal. It is from this prison that the novel sets forth: three inmates (our diver, an English sailor, and an Indian machinist, all wrongfully imprisoned) manage to escape the colony and head toward Ceylon in a fragile boat to recover the bloody pearl and redeem the beloved maiden. Not only are they pursued by the One-Eyed, but they must also confront a series of ordeals: from the assault of a sea vampire—perhaps a "lamprey," a fish with a sucker mouth that feeds on blood—to a terrible storm with gigantic waves, culminating in their capture by the Queen of Nicobar, who wishes to take the handsome Englishman as her husband, much like Circe with Odysseus. Salgari’s imagination knows no bounds, conjuring up the Vadassi, whose valiant chieftain Adikar—fascinated by Napoleon—sought to emulate his deeds and lead his people to triumph, a sort of feral Sandokan; and what of the "crucified dolphins," in reality a small cetacean that inhabits Antarctic waters, far removed from the Bay of Bengal. To this muddled wealth of geographical, zoological, and anthropological references corresponds an equally muddled plot, packed with adventures that are all too often repetitive and prolix. Salgari’s narrative formula hinges on a central protagonist flanked by supporting characters who leaven the narration and throw the hero into sharp relief. When he departed from this model successfully, as in *Capitan Tempesta* and *La stella dell'Araucania* (see the reviews on this site), it was because he proved capable of constructing a compelling, intense love story. The setting, while ever-present, always remained in the background, instrumental in evoking an exotic and mysterious atmosphere. Here, the narrative functions are inverted: setting takes center stage; the band of fleeing prisoners is flat, devoid of a true leader (the Englishman predictably emerges, yet remains a faded figure), and lacks any clear hierarchy of roles; the love story remains suspended and remote, and the villain is easily defeated. Layering adventure upon harrowing description fails to impart rhythm to the narrative or captivate the reader. One finds solace only in a few isolated descriptions, as in the recounting of the struggle with the vampire: > it had wrapped itself around my body with all its tentacles, and the monster’s eyes—those huge, glaucous eyes—were fixed upon me, motionless, as if relishing my torment; and through that nearly transparent body, I watched the transfusion of my own blood flowing from the suckers into its mouth and passing thence into the ventricle. Why read it? As a testament to how the world was viewed in nineteenth-century Italy.

Following an eventful journey and having lost her luggage, the young doctor Andrea Dalvina Zanardelli arrives in Ravenna to take up work at the Marina di Ravenna sanatorium, where "scrofulous" children from the orphanage are treated. The year is 1943. Dalvina comes from an affluent family on Lake Garda. Her very first encounter surprises her, when at the station she is asked whether she needs to go to Marina or to Abyssinia. Then there is this strange landscape, so distant from her idea of the sea: > a sort of swamp, a pool of rippled water that one sensed was barely deeper than a puddle, and which are called "valli" (or piallasse), like those in her mountains. From the outset, she felt its charm, a > wild charm, (...) burdened by the toil of poor folk, (...) the camaraderie among the sailors, the respectful silence with which they greeted one another while puffing on clay pipes, and because of all this (...) she felt rather at home. For her, the lovely girl *with apricot-coloured hair*, little was needed: > her character demanded frankness, authenticity, for she felt she belonged to simple stories. And so she immediately took to the sanatorium, > the absolute radiance of the place, the ceaseless breaking of the waves, the briny taste clinging to the flesh, (... the orderly simplicity of the rooms and the quiet diligence of the nuns, bearing peculiar names such as Leopola, Nolasca, Zoefe, Benespera, Galizia: a community of religious women devoted to Saint Dalmazia, yet always and above all women, with their secrets and their loves, not necessarily directed solely to Christ. Over the span of a few months, a "simple" story unfolds—a microhistory set against the grand history sweeping across Italy, from the Allied landing to Mussolini's downfall and the German invasion. Up until 8 September 1943, the author recounts these events through the madness of the sanatorium’s previous physician, who was removed and institutionalized because he believes himself to be Benito Mussolini: a deft metaphor for the folly that dragged our country into war. Then, at a certain point, it is no longer possible to hide behind the incurable rhetorical delusions of a poor madman: > the word "bombing" had just entered, with all its disruptive force, into the organized routine of the sanatorium. What had seemed stable and everlasting now wavered, was no more, and by any measure of logic no guarantee, no immunity could be foreseen. For just a while longer, we readers hope to remain immune to the war, able to follow Dalvina as she discovers herself, her body yearning for love, and her maternal side, which binds her inextricably to a poor scrofulous boy—not out of pity, but because > she felt those whispers creep into her flesh, cross barriers and defenses, and reawaken an intimate, indecipherable unease that made her start, and certainly not because of the mysterious origin of the words. Yet destiny looms over us all, its meaning difficult to discern because it pays no heed to Love and Hope: > bombs are hardly obedient, nor are they intelligent. They go wherever they please. (...) Yearning to dream. And so who knows, perhaps she had made up this whole fable of nuns, sea, and children. Her children. These are Dalvina's final thoughts. And had everything remained a dream, might she have been saved? Paolo Casadio possesses the ability to take small, real facts—the fruit of meticulous archival research—and build stories that invariably feature an enchanted "Setting", steeped in mystery and magic. In his debut novel, *Il bambino del treno*, it is a small station along the Faenza–Florence railway line that serves as the backdrop to a true event. In the subsequent *Fiordicotone*, the setting is Lugo di Romagna, although this narrative effort is less successful than the former because the author scatters his focus across too many themes and departs from his smooth, elegant prose—Casadio's quintessential virtue (see the reviews on this site). Here, by contrast, the Romagnol author is at his best: the reconstruction of Marina di Ravenna's atmosphere, so different from what it is today, evokes in the reader indecipherable, fairy-tale sensations, and it is easy to imagine how captivating it must have been for an educated girl from the North; the nuns' personalities are portrayed with affectionate irony, and we seem to see them right before our eyes, in their feminine passions and their nonetheless steadfast faith; and what of the "scrofulous" children, growing increasingly unruly and lively as their health improves (thanks also to the herbs of the pine woods); and then that gem of the delusional patient who believes himself to be Mussolini, amusing yet realistic. Perhaps the only shortcoming concerns the figure of Dalvina, drawn with insufficient psychological depth and constantly relying on hints of past wounds, which remain unresolved and prevent us from fully grasping her personality. And finally, we readers are left disappointed, having expected a happy ending. Why read it? It is a wonderful novel, an enjoyable and compelling read.

In fifteenth-century Transylvania, > there is a story fording rivers, flying through leafy woods, and snagging on the lips of passersby. A tale that horrifies, (...) an immortal creature of violent hunger, thirsty for blood, seemingly roams the countryside. (...) For two months, a comet has been furrowing the sky like a knife wound from which drips the blood of creation. It is Dracula—not the historical Count Vlad Dracula, who, despite his cruelty, was certainly neither immortal nor nourished by the blood of his victims. In our story, he is Radu, a slight adolescent, a predator ever ready to spring at the throat, > swift as a flea, but with a lethal bite, (...) a maddened, spurting moth. In a narrative paced by death itself, within an environment ravaged by wars, violence, and massacres, enveloped in a bleak, terrifying atmosphere where the sun never seems to shine, a small family struggles to survive: Maria, the mother, deeply versed in herbs, even those that kill—a witch, perhaps; Anna, the daughter who, still a child, must protect her newborn brother; and Radu himself, who, still an infant, must feed on blood, unable to draw sustenance from his mother's depleted milk. > He is tiny, purple, smeared with blood and woman's humors. He ought to die, says the midwife, because > he is not wanted by the spirits of the wind, (...) Anna snatches him from her hands and presses him to her chest; his first wail is born there, in the arms of his little sister. And so Radu, the future "vampire," is the fruit of his little sister's love—she carries him along, watches over him and hides him, giving him whatever meager food she can find. In the forest, the small family must defend themselves against wild beasts; when abducted, they must save themselves from men. There is no need to delve further into the plot, intensely Gothic in its framework, so surreal as to verge on "Fantasy"; it is better to let oneself be carried away by the imagination, and to consider this tale, so distant in time, as ultimately a metaphor for our current condition: wars, massacres, violence, and genocides can only give birth to a Monster; and we are left to wonder whether Anna did right in saving and nourishing Dracula, offering him all her love. There is no sense in comparing this novel to Bram Stoker's *Dracula* (see the review on this site): a work steeped in positivism that recounts the clash between science and the unknowable, where Dracula is not a real character, but an allegory for our deepest, unutterable drives. Perhaps, beyond its Gothic undertones, the novel is the continuation of *La Colpa* (see the review on this site). Certain themes seem to recur: the untamed environment (here Transylvania, there the desertified Marecchia); in both, "the lucid madness of constructing possibilities that are terrible because they are plausible, (...) a naked, reddened, dripping Prometheus..."; an existential dimension where only friendship and love can save. In *La stirpe e il sangue*, written ten years after *La Colpa*, it seems the author has slipped into that very precipice envisioned in the 2012 novel, and only by retreating into Fantasy was she able to survive. The fundamental merit of the narrative lies in the writing: short yet evocative sentences, almost prose verse, that embed themselves in the reader's mind. One senses the influence of a poet like Beatrice Masini. Why read it? It is gory, at times excessively so, but the prose captivates. And so tender is the figure of Anna.

The author imagines a former schoolmate, now a film producer, proposing that he write the screenplay for a film based on *Michael Kohlhaas*, an 1810 novella by Heinrich von Kleist. The plot lends itself to a theme particularly dear to Kenzaburo Oe: that of freedom and rebellion against the abuses of Power. Set in the sixteenth century, Von Kleist's novella recounts the story of a horse dealer who refuses to accept being robbed and humiliated by a powerful feudal lord and, stubbornly and desperately, fights for Justice. It is only natural for Kenzaburo to transpose this tragic tale to the peasant uprisings that shook Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century, which swept through the writer's own native village, as previously described in *The Water Forest* (see the review on this site). Such is the context thus far; yet from the very first pages, one senses that something else lies beneath the plot, as though the screenplay were unleashing primordial forces that well up from the underground of the human soul. Unlike Fyodor Dostoevsky's *Notes from Underground* (see the review on this site), here it is not malice, but that subtle, ambiguous, and shameless desire for erotic fantasies that can still overpower an old man. Indeed, the novel is structured around two distinct periods in Kenzaburo's life: in the first, he is already an established writer, yet deeply depressed and trapped in a severe creative crisis; in the second, he is an elderly gentleman in physical decline. The clue to an "underground" theme beneath the official plot is found in the quotation of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, written in 1849, the year of Poe's death (how many "allegorical" references abound in the great Japanese author!): "It was many and many a year ago / in a kingdom by the sea / that a maiden there lived whom you may know / by the name of Annabel Lee; / and this maiden she lived with no other thought / than to love and be loved by me". These are Poe's verses, laden with erotic evocations; but who is Annabel Lee to Kenzaburo Oe? She is Sakura-san, a Japanese actress famous in Hollywood whom the producer wishes to cast as the lead in the film on Michael Kohlhaas. As coincidence would have it, Kenzaburo had already seen the young Sakura—and had been "captivated" by her—in a short film on Annabel, where Sakura, then still a child, starred in the final scene in the guise of a > maiden in a flowing white gown, who beneath the purity of the image possessed > something ambiguous and mysterious. The novel's plot unfolds around Sakura's "underground," beyond her calm, self-assured demeanor. First of all, the actress is determined to center the film on the woman who led the peasant revolt in the second half of the nineteenth century and who was gang-raped before being murdered: the ordeal of this woman, known in legend as Meisuke's mother, was the subject of a stage play organized by Kenzaburo's grandmother and mother, in which the writer took part as a young boy. Later, the writer learns that Sakura is known as the "Eternal Virgin": while still a child, Sakura was taken to America by a soldier who became her husband and launched her film career; a man who loved her, yet with whom Sakura was never able to consummate a full sexual relationship. It is from this that a recurring nightmare of Sakura's arises: > in the dream I felt an unspeakable fear, yet I didn't quite know why; I couldn't bring it into focus. And yet in that short film on Annabel Lee, directed by her husband himself, such purity shone through the image of the child Sakura reclining on a tree trunk by the riverbank, just as in Poe's poem. But there was something else, something hideous in the short film's ending—a conclusion kept hidden, and which Sakura unconsciously sought to retrace as the lead in the theatrical staging of the tragic tale of Meisuke's mother. > Thanks to an extremely placid and bucolic passage, I was even able to imagine Meisuke's mother setting out along a mountain path leading deep into the forest. (...) I felt a profound regret, thinking that I had lived so many years without reflecting deeply on what might truly lie hidden beyond this path; I had become a seventy-year-old man who had done nothing but listen to that melody, so simple and pure (Beethoven's Piano Sonata Opus 111, accompanying the short film on Annabel Lee), which dragged me inexorably toward the unknown. I could not, and will never be able to, rid myself of the image of that thick, stubby thumb forcing its way into that small slit.... > I awake in the darkness that precedes dawn, floundering among the agonized shreds of dreams that still linger in my consciousness, in search of a burning sensation of anticipation. (..) I have slept with my arms and legs bent to the side, in the posture of someone who refuses to remember his own nature or the predicament in which he finds himself. So writes Kenzaburo Oe in *The Silent Cry* (see the review on this site), as if to express what we have repressed our whole lives, only for it to return in old age, fiercer than ever. In *The Eternal Virgin*, it is an old man's erotic impulses, in a narrative revolving around a woman who is captivating precisely because of her deepest secrets—so deeply buried in the "underground" of the soul as to be unknown even to herself. Artistic creation is essential to dredge a lifetime of grief back to the surface. The novel is a hymn to literature, to its capacity to interweave historical events, literary references, self-reflection, and therapeutic powers. One senses an undercurrent of regret for what was left undone, and unlived. It is a flawless novel! To be sure, with subtle irony, Kenzaburo pokes fun at his own tendency to lose himself in the narrative, to often be verbose and rambling. That cannot be said of this work: the plot develops seamlessly, steering the reader with a steady hand toward the dark core of the story. The success of the narrative stems, perhaps, from having focused on a single character who grows and asserts herself, slowly but inexorably, throughout the novel, in search of herself and of her determination to remain authentic, like a Japanese Anna Karenina (see the review of Tolstoy's masterpiece on this site). The prose flows with elegance and precision, displaying such stylistic mastery as to leave one astounded. Why read it? It is a masterpiece.

Children are increasingly the innocent victims of war, violence, and death. One need only consider what we are witnessing today, in Ukraine and Palestine. For a child who has seen their parents murdered, is it still possible to rebuild a life? And can one forge a relationship with the killer capable of saving his soul? This novel is aimed at adolescents, yet it tackles weighty themes—unfortunately through a narrative approach reminiscent of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's *The Little Prince*: bland, moralistic, implausible (see the review of *The Little Prince* on this site). Pablo lives with his parents in a small house in the far south of Chile, > where no one ever arrives by chance. Angel is a killer. When taken in by Pablo's parents, he cannot help but murder them, because it is the only thing he knows how to do. While Pablo is away from the house, > out there, from the sea, dense rainclouds were rolling in. (...) Angel drew a knife and plunged it into the man's throat, then into the woman's. On the table, wine and blood mingled, staining red all the deep cracks in the wood. Angel does not kill Pablo. > Sparing the brat made him feel relieved. And, besides, he could send him to the well to fetch water. Over time, a complex relationship develops between Angel and Pablo; it is a bond of mutual dependence: for Angel, it is the first time he has ever felt affection for anyone; for Pablo, > Angel is the only person who cared for him, fed him, gave him the fox (which they had taken in when it was still a cub), (...) in a world where only the dead can rest, the living must grit their teeth and endure their existence. One day, walking across the vast and desolate Chilean countryside, Pablo and Angel come across an isolated house in a forest, where an old woodcutter lives. Here, they could live in peace; the goodness inherent in every man could even express itself in Angel. > There are very discreet metamorphoses, said the old man; those that happen to our soul, for example, are not always visible. (...) Angel seized the knife hidden in his pocket; he felt the handle between his fingers. (...) He stepped toward Pablo. (...) He laid his eyes on Pablo. (...) “Here,” he said, “this is for you.” The silence was absolute. The knife blade reflected the flicker of the candles. We can rediscover peace and brotherhood if even the worst of murderers can love a child. An important theme is handled in a superficial and ambiguous way. First and foremost, it is implausible that a child who witnessed the murder of his parents could overcome the trauma as easily as Pablo does: this trivializes Evil, reducing it to something inconsequential. Secondly, love cannot save the soul of a wicked man unless he acknowledges his guilt and seeks forgiveness. Weeping and making a noble gesture are not enough. Why not read it? It is false.

The novel depicts the gradual exhaustion of a man who, upon his release from prison, finds himself abandoned by the most significant figures in his life (his wife, his daughter, and his friend) and pursues an impossible revenge. It is a psychological and introspective journey (a sort of inward retreat) during which the protagonist fails even to perceive the love of those around him (the woman who took him into her home), dominated as he is by a delusion of omnipotence and victimhood that causes him to lose sight of genuine feelings in his pursuit of nothing but vengeance. No distinct setting emerges: Cairo and Egyptian society merely serve as a backdrop, but the narrative could just as easily be set in any other city. This is an apt choice, as the story is psychological and therefore common to all human beings, rather than bound to a specific social context. Yet, as an introspective work, it fails to leave a strong impression, and both the plot and the depiction of emotions feel predictable.

This is a narrative that can be divided into two parts. In the first, the author recounts his bicycle journey from Milan to the Romagna coast, although, in reality, he stops in the mountains of Modena. The second part depicts his stay in Bellaria. The first part is very fine and lively. One senses a feeling of escapism, of flight from the city and industrial society; the landscape, the inns, and the people encountered are described in a style that is ironic yet affectionate. In these pages, there also prevails a literary self-indulgence, in both diction and references, which comes at the expense of the narrative’s spontaneity. In the second part, this characteristic becomes more pronounced, accompanied by a lyricism that seeks effect for its own sake and remains redundant in relation to the story’s content. The subject, indeed, is Romagna at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the harshness of its life, its poverty, and its squalor. The journey to Comacchio is remarkable: the arduous bicycle route, the town in the evening, the overnight stay, and so forth. The depiction of the family living in a shack on the beach takes on almost Verist undertones: the man’s ravenous meal, the children’s curiosity, and the woman’s ragged clothes. Yet the powerful character of these pages is lost in a generic, conservative moralism, when the writer reminds us that misfortunes can strike any social class: his companion suffers from a serious illness that forces him onto a strict diet! As the 1935 Treccani Encyclopedia writes (an era beyond suspicion from a political standpoint), Panzini’s work tends, > despite its classicist premises and its intentions of objectivity, of composure... , toward lyrical confession, impressionistic notation, an interior soliloquy varied by melodic cadences and veritable flights of song ; all traits that made reading another work, *Viaggio di un povero letterato*, unbearable.

> Come to this wall if you hate your place/and face a taste of cosmic space/where no form of life can exist/and objects do nothing but fall (Joseph Brodsky, *The Berlin Wall Song*, 1983, from the special insert of *Internazionale*, 2019). This poem apt encapsulates the narrative under review, set in Berlin in 1975. It is no coincidence that the opening image is that of a bird falling, as if out of nowhere, at the feet of one of the protagonists, sixteen-year-old Sven. The boy has just fallen in love with a peer: green-haired Cloe. > I wish I could remember what we talked about. I really do. And yet, nothing. What I remember is that Cloe’s right shoe and my left shoe brushed against each other (...); I remember her skin, on her wrist, almost translucent, and her tense arms and her head hunched into her shoulders. Her hair. (...) Every now and then Cloe would turn and give me a strange look . It would seem like a typical adolescent story, and for a long time the narrative unfolds slowly and prosaically around the two teenagers, who alternate as narrators with a somewhat repetitive cadence. We gather from subtle clues that Sven and Cloe’s circumstances are profoundly different. Sven lives in a “normal” family: his parents, small shopkeepers, would still like to control the boy, but are too consumed by arguing and separating. Cloe was abandoned by her mother, has an eccentric, fragile father who drifts through precarious jobs, and must care for her grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. She survives an attempted rape, is at times seized by suicidal urges, and procures a gun to avenge the assault given her father’s pusillanimous inertia; inwardly, she scoffs at the romantic Sven for wanting to help her. > Trust by the bucketload. In what he does. In who he is. In what awaits him. Probably, he even trusts me. (...) Stomach-turning stuff . But this is Berlin, where a Wall divides the city, and to those who, like Cloe and Sven, live in the West, the East seems a mysterious place, albeit so remarkably similar: > streets and buildings, and more streets and other buildings, just like here. Perhaps, looking closer, it would have been different, but I had never been to East Berlin. There had never been any reason . Kurt, Sven’s best friend, wants to liberate Frida, his childhood sweetheart who lives in East Berlin. The plan fails because Kurt and Frida are taken prisoner by a criminal gang; upon learning this, Sven resolves to go rescue them, and Cloe decides to help him. Why? Does she love him after all? Nothing of the sort. > Berlin is at our feet, burning in the sunset, (...) it is a promise. And the East burns too, where I have never been, yet even just seeing it from here, (...) it is a promise. (...) A promise of adventures like the ones when I was little, but more exciting. And wilder. (...) My hand gripping a gun. Nothing is real. That is why I want to enjoy everything, and I want to suck every moment down to the marrow . In an adventure that tastes of a thriller and lacks a happy ending, Cloe is irrevocably lost, but Sven fails to grasp this and searches for her in vain. One is led to wonder whether this is merely an adolescent story, or rather a tale that speaks of ourselves, of that “no man’s land,” of that > painful time that for me and you and all of us painfully wears away (Arrigo Bertolucci "time wears away" from *Viaggio d'inverno*). And if the poet finds his son again in the crowd at midday Mass, such is not the case for Sven: with a restless, naive gaze he searches for Cloe through a tumultuous and indifferent Berlin, believing that love alone can save her, can redeem us. Bleak is our fate! It is a fine novel: the writing is clear and precise, the protagonists intense, and the plot well-crafted, gripping us from a certain point onward and building suspense. At times one gets the impression of something contrived, deliberately engineered, but this feeling is overcome by the landscape of Berlin—deeply loved by the two authors—and by its steering clear of the expected conclusion, the happy ending. Why read it? Highly compelling; the figure of Cloe is fascinating!

> I am a Dreamer... I have so little real life! In reality, I have lived moments such as these so rarely that I hope to make them live again in my dreams. I will dream of you all night, every week, every month, all year round.... This is how the first-person narrator expresses himself when, one night, he meets a weeping girl who also describes herself as a "dreamer." We will never learn his name; hers we discover is Nasten'ka, and she lives with her grandmother, who keeps her pinned to her skirt with a safety pin to prevent her from wandering off. It is a peculiar sort of cloistering, given that Nasten'ka slips out into the night without trouble and has embarked on a relationship with a young neighbor who promised to marry her—an improbable, "tear-jerking" tale that would have seduced no one but our naive Dreamer. On the other hand, he is a young man disillusioned with life, possessing *a fantasy sick with anguish*, waiting for a > spark from which to flare up a fire to warm the frozen heart, from which to revive that which was once so dear, which touched the soul and made the blood boil, which drew tears from the eyes and deceived so majestically. And if for Nasten'ka the encounter is a way to console herself and, if you will, a coquettish, self-victimizing pose to win admiration and toy with feelings, for the Dreamer the young woman is the continuation of the Dream, of a fantasy of Love. > Oh Nasten'ka, Nasten'ka, if only you knew how alone I am. the Dreamer cries out, as though the girl could, or wished to, fill his void. Poor Dreamer! The subtle game of seduction is carried to the point where our Dreamer is ready to marry her, given that Nasten'ka's betrothed has failed to show up to honor his promise of taking her to the altar. Better a Dreamer than an old maid pinned to her grandmother's skirts! > I had looked at her... She had leaned against me more heavily. At that moment a young man passed us by. (...) God, what a cry! What a shudder! How she tore herself from my arms to run toward him. (...) I remained there, for a long time, watching them... In the end, both had vanished from my sight. In her fine introduction, Sarah Tardino evokes the distant love of the Provençal poet Jaufré Rudel; in this light, Nasten'ka would be a Fantasy of Love, a figure both idealized and real who, as Giosuè Carducci sang, "three times the trembling mouth / with love’s kiss did kiss." Far too much grace for the wretched Dreamer! This interpretation focuses attention on the relationship between the two youths, losing sight of the core of the tale: the Dream. Within a narrative structure hinged upon dialogue, the story is actually a long soliloquy, in which the part recounted by Nasten'ka is merely the distorted mirror of the Dreamer's suffering and of his need to construct a narrative wherein he is the protagonist, the savior of the sorrowful maiden. In this dialogue born of the Dreamer's fantasy, Nasten'ka asks herself > why can we not all be like brothers? (...) Why can one not speak plainly what is in one's heart...? Why can the Dream not become real, I would add? Why can one not meet someone to confide in, and fall in love with, with whom to escape from loneliness? Or perhaps, it is better to go on dreaming. Why read it? A fragile tale, difficult to grasp, yet admirably written.

The book aims to be a middle ground between a praise of books—that is, of reading—and the very meaning of reading. The author surveys numerous writers and texts to ultimately demonstrate how writing manages to portray, in differing ways, seemingly similar situations and contexts. Furthermore, reading is an introspective process through which people actively interpret the resonances emerging from events and words. Writing is thus the conduit between a story and the reader's personal life: rather than merely understanding the writer, the reader pursues their own spiritual path, activated and nourished by reading. Two statements from the book leave a lasting impression, one from the writer’s perspective and the other from the reader’s: Petrarch says in *Epistulae Familiares* > I want my reader, whoever he may be, to think only of me... I do not want him to attend to his business and study at the same time; I do not want him to master effortlessly what I wrote not without effort ; Machiavelli says in a 1513 letter to Vettori: > when evening comes, I return home and enter my study... and for four hours I feel no boredom; I forget every worry, I do not fear poverty; death does not dismay me . The book is an enjoyable read, but it feels a «bit strained», lacking a true underlying thread.

Set between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the novel recounts the life of Hassan al-Wazzan, known as Leo Africanus. Forced to leave Granada following the Castilian conquest, the protagonist leads an adventurous life: first in Fez in North Africa, then in Cairo, and subsequently in Rome; he also undertakes numerous journeys, encountering widely disparate figures and milieus. As with all the author’s novels, the unfolding narrative and the depiction of Mediterranean civilizations serve as an occasion to address the themes of religious and cultural diversity, and to envision a society where coexistence and exchange among different peoples and traditions are possible. What also emerges is a portrait of Muslim society that is markedly more tolerant and open than that typical of Christian nations. A prevailing sense of nostalgia pervades the work for a historical and social context—such as that of Mediterranean societies prior to the sixteenth century—that was destroyed by the fanaticism of the Christian kingdoms, particularly the nascent power of Spain, as well as by the drive for dominance of the Turkish Empire, which was likewise in an emergent phase. From a narrative standpoint, the novel is compelling in its first part (life in Granada and Fez), only to lose its way in an acceleration of events that precipitates a decline in pacing and style. In particular, the fourth part, set in Rome and Italy more broadly, feels rushed: the protagonist's conduct is insufficiently explored, coming across as peculiar and superficial; his embrace of Roman life and of Catholicism itself ought to have been far more thoroughly examined and analyzed.

Social convention would have parents serve as the solid foundation of the family, and children as its fragile walls, in need of guidance and support. In this strange novel, that is not the case. Katia, a divorced mother, lives in uncertainty, > she felt somewhat on the border, between city and countryside, between the world as it had been and the new one just beginning. She was comfortable there, suspended halfway. (...) She had no great desires or hopes. It was merely the notion that perhaps, one fine day, things might take a different turn for her . Leone, on the other hand, a six-year-old boy, possesses an unshakable certainty: he prays, because he believes in Jesus, even if only in the form of a ceramic figurine. What harm is there in that? ask Katia’s friends, mildly incredulous and affectionately wry; yet the child heads in an unexpected direction—and, truth be told, an unconventional one in our falsely devout society. Katia is worried, racked with guilt; Leone of all people, so profoundly disoriented. > A child who seemed to have gotten lost in the middle of something, a wood at night during the age of dinosaurs. (...) At times he seems to her like an angel, stranded in their kitchen, trying to flutter about without a sky . Through a singular lens—the need to pray—the author explores the bond between mother and son. She > felt brimming with tenderness for this child who had come into her life just like that, without her ever having decided on it. Like a mushroom, a flower. (...) A flower might not have any passersby at all, if it happens to grow on a patch of land where no one ever walks. It can happen that a flower is born and no one ever sees it. And what about children? And Leone, who “moved diagonally rather than straight,” who tried to > exist as little as possible. (...) Exercises in nonexistence, one might say. (...) Jesus, please make them stop talking about me . The author avoids any potential psychological detours toward dissecting parent-child relationships; she has no interest in seizing upon the narrative to offer futile wisdom or banal insights: she chronicles the events gently, passing no judgment on the mother or the other adults. This is a virtue—one that might have led us to appreciate the tale had the author managed to impart narrative rhythm to the story, rather than allowing herself to drift into a slow, tedious progression. Perhaps realizing, at a certain point, that the narrative was fraying into nothingness, the author resorted to the miraculous, and even to a new deluge. Prayer becomes redemptive of humanity’s sins, and Leone a miniature, modern-day Jesus. Yet that is not quite it, because—further degrading the quality of the narrative—Mastrocola never commits herself, maintaining a hypocritical, pseudo-secular stance. The reader comes away embittered. It could have been an interesting story; it proved instead to be a cloying tale: if the intention was to demonstrate that there exists within us, from childhood onward, an innate yearning for the sacred, and that prayer is an intrinsic dimension of existence, this theological question is trivialized by a narrative far too inadequate for the subject's complexity. Compounding matters is the prose style: a repetitive writing built upon flat phrasing, marked by an excessive reliance on the full stop, by verbless complete sentences—in short, an approach that willingly slips into the simplistic vernacular of journalistic or television storytelling: there would be nothing wrong with this, were the novel supported by a compelling plot and by a penetrating, evocative analysis of characters and circumstances. Why not read it? It is pointless, and ultimately cloying.

The novel is meant to be the sequel to *Capitan Tempesta*, a tale set in Famagusta in 1517 during the war between the Venetians and the Turks. The protagonist was a young noblewoman: a skilled swordswoman who, disguised as a man, had set out in search of her betrothed, abducted by the terrible Haradja. Salgari had succeeded in crafting a story full of allure, working upon gender ambiguity, vigorous female figures, and a final plot twist: the love between Capitan Tempesta and the Lion of Damascus—a passion that disregarded different allegiances, both national and religious. One would expect the same intriguing atmosphere and the very same freedom from convention. And the opening shows promise, even if certain signs make it clear from the outset that the story will take a different turn. It begins with the figure of Haradja: > a very beautiful young woman (...) pitch-black eyes, (...) very long, loose hair, of a hue that gleamed like raven wings... (...) the whole of her face had (...) something hard and forceful that instantly betrayed the Turkish woman, ever cruel at heart, as the bloodthirsty sultans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had by then accustomed them to be . Haradja is no longer an unconventional woman: she is part of a cruel and bloodthirsty breed, that of the Turks, and foul black birds, "eaters of the dead," are the living symbol of thousands upon thousands of corpses, left in the sun to be stripped of their flesh. A grim and deathly atmosphere pervades the entire narrative and strips of narrative momentum the adventures that Salgari, despite everything, attempts to construct. Haradja seeks vengeance against Capitan Tempesta, who deceived her by posing as a man and with whom she had become infatuated; she also intends to punish the Lion of Damascus, formerly her betrothed, who had abandoned her for the Christian noblewoman. She therefore kidnaps the couple’s son and the father of the Lion of Damascus. She holds all the cards: overcome by hatred and above all by pride, she challenges Capitan Tempesta to a duel. > The two horses had collided with such impetuosity that they nearly threw their mistresses from the saddle; then came a clattering of weapons against armor. (...) Haradja continued to attack, trying to force down that sword which flashed with fiery gleams beneath the already scorching rays of the sun. (...) By the death of Allah!, cursed the Pasha's niece (Haradja), (...) You stand firm as a rock, do you?.. And yet I shall kill you! (...) A cry was heard, or rather, the howl of a wounded beast; then the great admiral's niece crashed to the ground with a great clash of steel. (...) Finish off the tigress of Hussiff! , shouted the Lion of Damascus; but numerous Turkish soldiers rushed in, preventing Capitan Tempesta from slaying her terrible rival. It is the finest moment of the novel; thereafter, the narrative loses its bite: Haradja and Capitan Tempesta vanish from the story, the Lion of Damascus is present but relegated to the background, faded and irrelevant, while minor characters emerge who, as often happens in Salgari, try to inject brio and establish a dynamic among the roles; meant to act as foils to the protagonist, they merely underscore his insubstantiality. Instead, a real historical figure comes to the fore: Sebastiano Veniero, the great commander of the Venetian fleet, to whom, according to Salgari, the victory of Lepanto against the Turks was owed. The narrative draws to a weary close. The book was published in 1910, a year before the Libyan War (1911–1912), which pitted Italy against the Ottoman Empire. It is possible that Salgari tapped into sentiments widespread among public opinion: the Turk as a cruel oppressor of peoples, bloodthirsty and treacherous. The novel abounds in massacres, tortures, flayings, quarterings, and other gruesome deeds: there is no mercy on the part of the Turks, nor any chivalrous respect for the vanquished. And the Christians know how to die with honor, whispering the *Miserere* "in the excruciating agony of the horrific torment"! Yet there is too much relentless ferocity here to believe that the novel's deathly atmosphere merely answers to an editorial demand or a nationalist resurgence on the author's part. Salgari took his own life the year following its publication, in 1911: the writer was by then living in a profound depression, plagued by frequent self-destructive crises and numerous suicide attempts; the novel mirrors Salgari's despair and his fascination with a gruesome end. At the same time, the narrative suffers from a weariness and an exhaustion of ideas, which the writer desperately tries to compensate for by resorting to prefabricated formulas, no longer embedded within a dynamic narrative framework: evidence of this lies in the repetitiveness of dialogues and scenes, the weakness of the characters, and the sparse descriptions of landscapes—the latter set against a peculiarity of the novel: historical digressions, generally rare in Salgari's oeuvre, a clear sign of a narrative vein that had grown fragile. Why not read it? It is a swan song, a bitter and sorrowful epilogue to a great writer.

The novel traces the entrepreneurial and human history of the Florio family across a century, from 1799 to 1869, when economic and social success was fully achieved; and it does so by structuring the narrative around the commodities that laid the foundation for that success: Spices, Silk, Bark (from which quinine is derived), Sulfur, Lace, Tuna, and Sand. Historically speaking, perhaps it would have been appropriate to place greater emphasis on the other cornerstones of their rise: the fleet of steamships and thus technology, the concessions secured from the Bourbons and later from the new Kingdom, the usurious loans extended to the indebted Palermitan aristocracy, and their unscrupulous ties to political power. It is a grand family saga, boasting strong male figures while the female ones are relegated to supporting roles. If one were to seek a single interpretive key, it could be found in the John Milton quotation the author places at the opening: > The study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield . The Florios hail from a small Calabrian village, and Paolo's decision to open a spice shop in Palermo creates a rift within the family: a dispute that lies at the root of a ruthless resentment never to be overcome, which shapes the very relationship between mother and son. Another element that hangs heavy over the entire story is Palermo: > strange city, wretched, filthy, and regal all at once, (...) they cannot fathom how the stench of the sewer can coexist with the scent of orange blossoms and jasmine adorning the courtyards of aristocratic palazzi. (...) As much as he might love her and consider himself her son, Palermo treated him as an outsider. He had tried to win her acceptance, had wooed her with wealth, had provided work, had brought prosperity. Perhaps this was what could not be forgiven: the work. The power. The eyes opened wide to the world, while Palermo kept hers firmly shut . The Calabrian roots, as «bagnaroti», weigh on the Florios and lend them a hardness of character in business as well as in human relations. When Vincenzo, Paolo’s son, falls in love with Giulia, he makes her his mistress because the young woman does not belong to the Palermitan aristocracy; after two illegitimate daughters, he will marry her only when Giulia gives him a male heir and no noble daughter will have him as a husband, because he remains a «bagnaroto», wealthy though he may be. Thus Ignazio, Vincenzo’s son, chooses not to pursue the woman he loves, marrying a young aristocrat instead—at long last. In a suspended moment, stepping outside the role to which he is condemned, Ignazio looks at his mother. > And it is in that moment that he notices the dark circles under her eyes, the wrinkles around her lips, the lined forehead. How could she have aged so much? When did it happen? To answer these questions, it would be necessary to unveil the inner world, the domain of feelings between mother and son, between husband and wife. Instead, there is an > ancient rift, which business and the intimacy forged over long years of proximity had been unable to heal. Intimacy, indeed. Not that of feelings... The book could be defined as a fictionalized biography: a reconstruction of the historical context, an examination of the available documentation (how extensive remains unclear, not least because sources are not cited), and a narration of characters and events likely filtered through the author’s imagination. There was ample room to lend depth to the protagonists, especially the female ones. Take Giulia, for instance. She is introduced as a character rich in personality; raised within an entrepreneurial Milanese family, she is educated and well-versed in the dynamics of the business world. How is it possible that she succumbed so easily to the role of mistress and then to that of obedient wife, asserting her strength only in the bedroom? Why not "invent" a more complex, conflictual relationship between Vincenzo and Giulia? In the same vein, a slumberous, alluring Palermo lingers in the background; only rarely do the colors and sounds of a city undeniably known and loved by the author break through. Constrained by the family tree, the writer left no room for imagination, all too often reducing the narrative to a chronicle. For someone like me, who appreciates rich, adjective-laden, almost baroque prose, an initial sense of resistance prevails against a dry, fragmented narrative style, lexically impoverished and simplistic. Then, perhaps because the writer grows more confident in her voice, one begins to appreciate the prose: it becomes evident that the simplicity is deliberate. The aim is to reach the widest possible readership and focus on the story itself, without getting lost in Pindaric and rhetorical flights of syntax and vocabulary. There remains a lingering nostalgia for a more lush and captivating style. Why read it? It reads smoothly and is interesting, even if not gripping.

The author is billed as a master of the thriller, superior even to Stieg Larsson. In truth, he is merely a pale heir. Harry Hole is a Norwegian crime-squad detective specializing in serial killers. Following an investigation in which the perpetrator attempted to murder his wife and son, Harry quit the force and sank into despair in Hong Kong, amidst alcohol, drugs, and gambling. There, a detective named Kaja tracks him down to convince him to assist the police with another serial killer case. The thriller unfolds, relying primarily on dense dialogue, across several narrative threads: the hunt for the criminal (with multiple investigative leads), the turf war between different factions of the Norwegian police to spearhead the fight against crime, and Harry’s personal struggle in search of his own equilibrium. As one of the potential culprits puts it, > you cannot cheapen your feelings like that. You try to dodge the fact that you, like anyone else, are guided by concepts of right and wrong . And Harry is, deep down, a knight in search of truth, yet he continues to “wander in circles,” unable to find his roots. Throughout the story, he consistently makes the right choices, yet these do not lead him to find “the place to which he belongs.” And the novel closes with Harry, triumphant over crime, but returning to Hong Kong in search of himself. The book is interminable, in the sense that it seems to draw to a close only to reopen again and again, exhausting the reader. The problem is that it lacks suspense, and the protagonists—Harry and Kaja in particular—remain entirely on the surface, their motivations and personal developments never fully coming into focus. Why avoid it? It is a pointless book, fit only for the beach.

A spare, dry narrative, devoid of any form of elegy, grounded in the reminiscence of minor events and, above all, of behaviors and words. In reality, a profound tenderness toward the family emerges, especially for the parents.

The book is structured in epistolary form, a collection of letters exchanged among the various protagonists. The central figure is a young girl, Rita, who, on the verge of taking the veil, writes a letter to a priest confessing her lack of vocation. At first, her arguments appear rational and straightforward; gradually, the account given by the girl—and by the other protagonists—turns ambiguous, increasingly laying bare the complexity of the human soul. Rita is a young woman who genuinely wishes to aspire to goodness and clarity, yet is actually ruled by a languid passion, by far more material fantasies and longings. There is in her a sense of grievance against a fate that forced her to live in a convent from early childhood, contrary to her own sensuality and her yearning for life. The contradiction between appearance (the good, devout maiden) and her true being (the desire to seize the pleasures of life, beginning with love) drives her to cunning and deceit: her true personality emerges, however, over the course of the letters, when, confronted with the facts, she is forced into a gradual unveiling. The other protagonist is the mother. Hers is a clearer personality compared to her daughter's. She is evidently a frustrated, fragile woman who wishes to lean on her daughter, drawing her into her own romantic tribulations. When she realizes that her daughter rejects this role—and indeed deceives her—a deep hatred erupts, rooted in the nuisance of having had to look after a child and then an adolescent: hence also the decision to urge her to become a nun. Alongside the story of these two women are the priests and nuns: the ecclesiastical world acts with hypocrisy, seeking to conceal the scandal that gradually comes to light (Rita has killed a man, and the mother superior is aware of it) and, in some instances, allowing itself to be drawn by the girl into an intimacy that seems to suggest a romantic liaison (as in the case of Don Paolo). As the author states in his preface, > the characters in my book possess this inner diplomacy, but turned to an evil end and to the sole benefit of their indolence and selfishness , but, > the fanatical morality of inner clarity is of no use to art, since it combats and destroys the world of feelings, rendering them fictitious, framed as they are within rules foreign to the complexity of the human soul . The plot is very simple. From childhood, Rita is sent to boarding school. Leaving the country house is traumatic, as it separates her from her grandparents and from nature—the Venetian landscape she deeply loves. The girl experiences all this as an act of cruelty to which she must resign herself. On holiday at her mother's home, Rita believes she has rekindled an affectionate relationship with her, only to realize that the latter merely seeks support for her own fragility and romantic sorrows. In the meantime, she meets a young man with whom she falls in love and wishes to run away. When the young man tells her that he has no intention of fleeing with her, Rita, seized by rage, kills him. At this point, the mother, in agreement with the mother superior, decides to make her a nun in order to conceal the crime and the scandal. Yet Rita's refusal to accept this fate, relying on a series of letters—some anonymous—riddled with lies and half-truths, ultimately brings the crime to light. Now abandoned by all, deemed deranged, the poor girl ends up in prison, where she dies of pneumonia. The world's uncharitable judgment is encapsulated by the priest who delivers the news of her passing: > today I have reflected at length and ascertained that Rita was not good, though liked by all. And for this reason we say with special sorrow: May God have mercy on her! . The book may well be called perfect. The epistolary device, the gentle, lucid prose, the gradual thinning of the descriptions of Venetian landscapes—ever moments of serenity and sweetness—and the ability to bring forth little by little the complexity of the characters are all elements that make the reading enjoyable and richly suggestive.

Vince, an eternally precarious literature teacher, has invented a new profession for himself: bibliotherapy—dispensing reading advice to help people resolve their existential and psychological issues. But do books truly possess this therapeutic power, which «wards off the pull of emptiness and black bile» as the ancient Greeks believed? Or does reading fiction merely and humbly lead us to daydream about another life, with a different ending? Hampered by a tenuous plot and flimsy characters, the novel attempts—perhaps—to answer these questions through two parallel narrative strands. In the first, we witness Vince’s sessions with his patients: women who come to recount their stories to a penniless, inexperienced therapist, sitting on the sofa bed of a squalid studio apartment. Some leave in indignation without paying; others accept his reading recommendations, though we will never know if they actually read the suggested titles. One might anticipate amusing or paradoxical scenes, but in truth, these consultations serve merely as a pretext for the author to flaunt his bookish erudition. Coupled with the French epigraphs opening each chapter, beyond the narrative void, one's mind turns not to Italo Calvino’s *Six Memos for the Next Millennium*, but rather to Matei Vișniec’s *Panic Syndrome in the City of Lights*, in which a chaotic succession of characters and authors overwhelms the reader in the absence of narrative unity (see the review on this site). Whence this compelling urge to foist a disguised bibliography upon us, much like in another tedious and futile book, that of Alba Donati (*The Bookshop on the Hill*, reviewed on this site)? The second strand concerns the disappearance of an elderly female neighbor, who left behind as her only trace a list of books borrowed from a local bookshop. What do all these authors have in common: from Paul Auster to Raymond Chandler and John Updike (several reviews of this author can be found on this site: *Rabbit Redux*, *Terrorist*, *Villages*) all the way to John Fante (on this site you can read reviews of *1933 Was a Bad Year*, *The Brotherhood of the Grape*, *Wait Until Spring, Bandini*), among still others? > Inevitably, I wondered about them too: what relational dilemmas might they illuminate, and to what paths of self-awareness and reconstruction of the personality did they lead? I was terrified by this. Would I ever again read solely for pure, childlike pleasure? It is difficult to find an interpretive key to the novel, beyond the flimsy investigative inquiry, tacked on merely to inject some semblance of pace into the storytelling. Certainly, the grand theme of the interplay between literature and life remains present, along with the yearning or hope of turning our dreams into reality. Perhaps meaning can be wrested from this deluge of cited books by returning to the author's locus: Rome. > Down below, Stassi notes, the city had once again become an anagram to be solved, a charade of streets heading in confusing directions. (...) Walking in Rome means moving toward something without any specific destination. At certain hours, this involuntary commuting becomes the space of a perfect solitude, one that brings neither pain nor sorrow. Lacking any distinct personality, the prose flows smoothly within a skillful syntactic construction, the sentences gliding along effortlessly, unhindered and without friction. What emerges is the impression of an artificial narrative, lifelessly engineered at the desk: «literary emotions», as the author himself admits. Why skip it? Pointless and prolix.

Just like *Per le Antiche Scale*, the book is set in an asylum, and the protagonist, who is also the first-person narrator, is a psychiatrist. There is no plot; rather, it is a fragmented narrative composed of descriptions of individual figures—mostly women—within the institution: patients, nurses, nuns, and peasant women from the countryside surrounding the asylum. Some of them, such as Lella, play more than a fleeting role in the tale, yet generally they are all subsumed by madness, as though it were difficult to discern sanity from insanity. > With the mad who communicate their laws I easily settle in, we walk along the same track, and if a sudden onlooker were to judge on the spot which of the two is the sick one, he would find himself uncertain; and this exercise of mine, which on some days I repeat frequently, exhausts me and I return to my corridor in the mist of a vague anguish, almost a convalescent, as if those minutes I spent transferring into the mind of the madman, forsaking my own, were like going into hell, living in the circles, having crossed the cold waters of Hades, and returning to life with my soul still frozen by death . It is, therefore, a series of episodes which, despite their specificity and apparent disarray (almost diary-like), allow several narrative threads to be identified: the tenderness and wonder that emerge from the portraits. It is not the physician writing, nor is there any search for an ideological imprint; the individual characters are described with affection, at times with irony, but always with the acute awareness that there is no escape from madness. The theme of eroticism emerges, clearly revealing how loneliness often lies at the root of the path leading to madness; yet madness is also an inevitable fate, binding together both the poor and the rich. Emblematic is the figure of Lella, who seemed to have emerged from her illness, yet it takes merely another woman showing an interest in the object of her desire (a purely dreamed-of affection) to plunge her back into a depressive crisis and thus into madness once more. The balance is ever precarious. > The woman has a very beautiful face and, strangely, though she implores so, she seems on the verge of laughing, and at moments laughs as if in a blissful intoxication, as though touched in that instant by an amorous joy . Yet madness conceals itself. > Perhaps it was that woman, an ultra-flourishing blonde woman, exuberant and domineering; for several days she had been polite, sweetly accommodating in assisting with every service on the ward; indeed, like a sinless nun, she tended with all piety to another most petulant patient. And this morning I read a letter of hers addressed to her husband where the words declared her spirit lusting for violence and murder ; the serenity of the Tuscan landscape, almost in contrast to the violence and disorder of the asylum. > The plain of Lucca sparkles with harvests from the burst of spring until autumn; it rests in a deep ellipse surrounded by mountains silhouetted clearly against the sky. The Lucchese plain in summer is a shifting-swaying of laughing green, a witty conversation with every fruit and bud, and one’s sight varies and dances and is lost and is refreshed, and by no means do the mountains that distantly encircle it hinder that gladness ; the existential pain of the protagonist, whose anguish stems simultaneously from within himself and from the life of the asylum: the bond between his own existence and the fates of the mad seems the sole reason for overcoming an anguish that would otherwise prove unbearable. > My life is here, in the asylum of Lucca. Here my feelings unfold. Here I reveal myself honestly. Here I watch dawns and sunsets, and time passes beneath my watchful gaze. Inside a room of the asylum I study men and love them. Here I wait: glory and death. From here I depart for holidays. Here, until now, I have returned. And my desire is to make of every grain of this land a calm, orderly, universal speech . Yet there is hope, the love between creatures: all this allows the writer to say that there is, perhaps, a way out of madness and existential anguish. > And of little Lella I hope to say no more, for ample, if heaven has aided me, are the words I have spoken . The book, magnificent, is distinguished by an elegant style—imbued with a classical education—that admirably manages to evoke a dreamlike atmosphere, as though what is narrated were not real but rather the fruit of the author’s imagination and desire. The phrasing, the choice of adjectives, and the diction, often bearing a distinctly Tuscan stamp, make the reading pleasurable while highlighting the dramatic weight of the subject matter.

Alba Donati lives in Milan and works in the press office of a major publisher. How did she come up with the idea of moving to a remote village in Lunigiana to open a bookshop? The novel revolves around this question, and it does so in diary form, day by day. The author's immediate answer is that > things don't just come to mind; things smolder, ferment, clutter our imagination while we sleep, (...) and at a certain point they knock: here we are, we are your ideas, ready to be heard . Between the folds of the narrative, one can trace another, intimate and familial motive: returning to the house where she had grown up as a child—a house "half habitable and half sunk into nothingness," with two doors, one of which > led to the cellars, a place that added at least a couple of years to the analysis with Dr. Lucia , and the other led up to the attic via a new staircase built by her father, which then continued with a wooden one, because "paternal love had broken off." For anyone who has cherished the dream of opening a bookshop to live among these mysterious and fascinating objects, and at the same time wishes to understand why books sustain us in childhood just as in old age, Alba Donati's diary seems to promise unexplored worlds within the unconscious and the soothing function of literature. Instead, the editor who lived in the publishing world, among critics, publishers, and intellectuals, takes over: rather than a journey toward herself and her roots, the diary takes the shape of a survey of the books beloved by the author. There are numerous reading cues and interesting recommendations, but where is the story of the novice bookseller? Lunigiana dissolves; the daughter, the mother, and the father remain in the background, merely sketched; and even the flock of friends and benefactors remains voiceless. What is worse, however, is that the bookshop itself has no voice—that peculiar kind of shop so difficult to launch and manage today, in the face of such kaleidoscopic confusion. Beyond crowdfunding and "mail-order" sales, was it successful? How much toil did it take? What did she leverage? The diary form places the self at the center and is therefore a means to express anxieties, doubts, sensations, and feelings. Through a diary, one opens up slowly, one step at a time. In this account, the diary is merely a device that weighs down the narrative, rendering it repetitive, fragmented, and prolix. Why not read it? It is dull and banal; only the parade of recommendations holds any interest.

The novel revolves around two figures: Galip is a young lawyer who has been abandoned by his wife and sets out in search of her, following the clues left behind by the novel’s other character, Celal. The latter is a journalist who has written a column for many years, and is both Galip’s cousin and his wife’s half-brother. The book unfolds across two voices. A third-person voice recounts Galip’s wanderings through Istanbul on the trail of his wife and cousin. Celal, in the first person, draws upon reflections—paradoxical at times, yet always evocative—from his column to develop meditations on existence and Turkish society. It is a deeply dense, complex, and verbose book, with a very slow narrative pace that is, in many stretches, tedious. A primary theme is undoubtedly the context: Turkish society, poised between Europe and Asia, between modernity and Islamic tradition, perpetually on the verge of shedding nostalgia for past greatness, yet somehow pulled back by history. In an interview, the author stated that “Turkish is synonymous with confusion,” and this assertion emerges as the book’s dominant theme, particularly in its first part. From sociological and cultural contours, the focus shifts swiftly to an existential theme: nothing appears as it truly is. The wife’s ex-husband, a far-left militant, deliberately lives a bourgeois life with a wife and children. An old friend obsessively compiles documentation on leftist political movements, from the reading of which emerges a total confusion of names and facts, often fabricated. A former schoolmate married a man simply because he resembled Galip, believing that in this way she could live with him rather than with her husband. Objects themselves carry a double meaning: > what frightened him was the precise feeling that those objects had a different meaning... What is it used for?, he asked... it’s a table leg, replied the other, but some people slip them into the hem of curtains. It could also be made into a handle. What must one do to penetrate the arcane world of second meanings and uncover the mystery? . At this point, a philosophical theme opens up: there was once a felicitous era in which words (“letters”) fully represented the meaning of the object, and thus narrative and life corresponded. > In that Golden Age, the objects we placed in our homes coincided with the ones we dreamed of... everyone knew full well that words and what they described were so contiguous that, on foggy mornings, words and meanings blurred together. Upon waking, people could not distinguish dreams from reality, poetry from life, names from those who bore them. Stories and lives were so real that no one would have ever even conceived of asking where the former ended and the latter began. Dreams were lived, and lives were interpreted to their depths . The split between words and objects, between poetry and reality, between dream and life, leads to loneliness and to the incommunicability between people, as well as between people and objects: > the world he wanted to enter was not this one, but another realm that Celal had spent a lifetime creating. According to him, Celal, by calling things by their name and telling stories, had gradually walled off the world where he had sequestered himself, hiding the keys . Can one be oneself? Can narrative be reunited with life? Yes, but only in the stillness of mannequins, of cold objects that, even more than living beings, succeed in offering the exact representation of life. The key chapter of the book is that magnificent one depicting the visit to the underground workshop of a mannequin maker; in this place beneath represented life (“advertising mannequins”), this man had carried on the family tradition of crafting mannequins that genuinely represented the characters and figures of reality. Yet, if only mannequins allow narrative and life to reunite, is death not the sole moment in which the Golden Age is realized? The book appears in many respects intellectualistic and tedious, locked within philosophical and existential themes that cause the narrative and the characters themselves to lose their luster. Moreover, it feels fragmentary and redundant.

In *Diary of a Failure* (2004), Eduard Limonov imagines that > they will all come. The delinquents and the shy (...). The drug dealers and the procurers for brothels. The onanists will come, the lovers of porn magazines and films. (...) The pensioners will come, those who queue at the supermarket in the express lane for customers buying fewer than five items. (...) They will all come, take up arms, occupy one city after another, destroy the banks, the factories, the offices, the publishing houses, and I, Eduard Limonov, will march at the head of the column, and everyone will recognize me and love me. This passage, quoted by Carrère, aptly captures who Limonov (1943–2020) was; this Russian D'Annunzio who moved through the second half of the twentieth century like a superman, seeking not to build anything (be it literature or a political party), but pursuing action solely for action's sake, outside of every framework, driven by an ideal of narcissistic aestheticism. For Carrère, Limonov is what he himself never dared to be (as the writer's sister described him as a boy: > my brother is very serious, he never does foolish things, he reads grown-up books all day long ), and so, to live a little like a superman, Carrère writes a “real” novel that suffers from the major flaw of drawing fundamentally from the character's own autobiographical accounts. And it is fortunate for us readers that the entire narrative is filtered through the halo of imagination. From the very beginning, when Carrère meets him in 2007—a sixty-five-year-old engaged alongside Kasparov in a liberal-democratic movement—Limonov appears an exceptional figure in the eyes of the French intellectual: > he is still lean: flat stomach, adolescent build, smooth and tanned Mongol skin, (...) something of the aging d'Artagnan of *Twenty Years After* (...). Or is he, the bandit, the rogue, amusing himself playing the role of the virtuous democrat...? (...) Deep down, does he relish playing the wolf in the sheepfold?.Carrère lightly retraces the entire life of our protagonist: the myth of the father, an officer in the glorious Soviet army, later shattered by the family's downward social mobility; the wild adolescent, always with a heavy knife in his pocket, yet a young poet nonetheless; the stay in Moscow during the height of the Brezhnev era among intellectuals passively chafing under the regime; and then New York and Paris, where he succeeds in publishing his American novels; and once again the return to Moscow, his association with Aleksandr Dugin, Putin's alleged ideologue, and together they found the National Bolshevik Party, which lands him in prison, from which he emerges triumphant. Bisexual, ever surrounded by gorgeous, sensual women, shifting between scenes of uninhibited sex and subtle intellectual conversations, not without his share of crimes and violence in the former Yugoslavia (after all, D'Annunzio too knew “regenerative” war), Limonov's life unfolds without remorse, like that of a true superman; or is it merely what the trickster Eduard wished to tell us, and the naive intellectual swallowed whole? Whatever Carrère’s intentions may have been, one must wonder why he did not devise an original story, the fruit of his own creativity, choosing instead to chronicle a real-life figure. This approach suffers from two principal shortcomings. First, one falls prey to the self-representation offered by Limonov himself, creating a sort of distorted lens that ultimately exalts such extreme figures—figures the media industry adores because they are simultaneously harmless and magnificent. Second, the narrative follows an uneven course: sharp and incisive when drawing upon Limonov's own novels (the years up to Paris and his imprisonment), only to flatten out into mere chronicle when forced to rely on other sources. It is no coincidence that the dialogues are concentrated where Limonov's autobiographies are used, and it is precisely in those sections that the narrative becomes most vivid. Assuming Carrère wished to depict the decline of Europe and the United States along with the root causes of the rise of Putin and sovereignist movements, why not do so through historical analysis grounded in established methodologies, or set himself a more ambitious goal: to be a new Hugo or Dostoevsky capable of true literature? In our minds, Limonov will forever remain trapped within his own era, never achieving the universality and eternity of Jean Valjean in *Les Misérables* or the characters of *The Brothers Karamazov*. The novel's merit lies in its narrative style—elegant and subtly ironic. Well-constructed, if overburdened with names, the reading flows pleasantly, particularly in the first part, which is undoubtedly the finest from a narrative standpoint. The tension begins to flag during the Parisian period, marred by a certain characteristically French complacency, before declining steadily to the point of inducing a distinct impatience. Why read it? Well-written, and an interesting depiction of the decline of Europe.

The novel is part of a trilogy that includes two other books: *Oltre Babilonia* from 2008 and *Adua* > from 2015 (reviews are available on this site). And indeed we find the same theme: the Black woman lives in a world of violence and abuse, because she is a woman and because she is Black. Taking up the narrative framework of *Adua* > the author pursues two parallel stories: that of Lafanu Brown, an African American painter who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century in papal Rome, a city soft, welcoming, and roguish, and that of Leila, an Italian of Somali origin who lives in today's Rome, alluring, decadent, and cruel. They are distant eras, yet with a common starting point: the Fountain of the Four Moors in Marino, featured in Rino Bianchi's photographic gallery in the book's appendix—a deeply evocative gallery, fundamental to interpreting the entire story. Thus writes Lafanu, those women, those ancestors of mine, because we descend from the suffering of slaves, want someone to give them a voice. Oh Lizzie dear, I see how they struggle to reach out toward us > . Leila is with a friend in Marino before the Fountain. The friend, an intelligent young woman, open to the world and a student of Arabic, says to her, laughing: did you see that? (...) Don't you find it beautiful? (...) She too, despite her breadth of knowledge, was blind to the pain of those four black-skinned prisoners. Perhaps she hadn't even noticed they were Black > . The two stories, Lafanu's and Leila's, unfold with different rhythms and a distinct narrative style: at the root, there is always violence. Lafanu was raped as a young girl in the abolitionist American town of Coberlin, in 1859. A model student, she attended a college that took pride in having students of color. One evening, Lafanu insisted on going to the theater, wearing an elegant dress rich in color. Every color was stripped from her. All she had left was a faint trace of mother-of-pearl in her frightened eyes and the black of her ebony skin. The black would not leave her. I will never leave you, it promised her > . Where to survive? In a place where color and surface meet. Lafanu becomes a painter; the pursuit of beauty as a lifeline brings her to Italy, to Rome. She painstakingly earns her place as an artist, enchanted by Italian Baroque and Classicism. Nightmares haunt her. She is fascinated by a painting by Lorenzo Lotto, *Santa Lucia davanti al giudice* > , where in a corner of the painting a young Black servant girl holds back an unruly child. Lafanu devotes sketch after sketch to this painting. She erases everything she considers superfluous. Everything disappears, even the child disappears; only the Black girl remains with her anxiety. A scene that Lafanu transforms into her obsession. Into the investigation of a terror > . As though beauty could free us from violence—it is an illusion! Leila, too, is Black and at the same time uprooted from Somalia: an exile from a land that ultimately was never mine > . If you are Black, it is hard to escape violence. Binti, Leila's cousin, in an attempt to reach Italy finds herself in the traffickers' infernal circle, who rape her, just as their white counterparts did to Black people during the terrible sea voyages to America. And now, Binti screams in silence. It is an agonizing sight: her mouth gapes wide, her eyes dilate, you expect a scream... but nothing comes from her lips." Perhaps salvation could be the meeting between color and surface. "I took a breath, steeled myself, and walked up to my cousin. (...) She stopped drawing. I was nearly struck dead with astonishment. There was a woman tied to a stake who was breaking her chains. She was weeping, and in her lap she held a passport. > Lafanu is a fictional character, a composite of two Black women who actually lived in Rome: the first a midwife and activist, the second a sculptor. The blending of reality and fiction gives the narrative a calm and evocative rhythm, like an escapist historical novel. While this diminishes the story's dramatic weight, it stimulates the reader's curiosity without generating anxiety: clearly there will be a happy ending, even if somewhat melancholy and bittersweet. Leila is the author, and the events unfold in the present day. There is of course imagination, but the raw reality of migration and human smuggling looms over the entire narrative: it slips into chronicle and indictment. The wounds inflicted upon our conscience—hypocritical and lazy though it is—are too deep for us to dally. As was already the case in *Adua*", it is truly demanding to sustain two narrative threads without making the story verbose and redundant. The sparse writing does not help create atmosphere and thus fails to support Leila's story, which often has a journalistic slant. Highly innovative, if not always entirely successful, is the blending of reality, fantasy, and the visual arts. Why read it? It is an innovative book that develops a dramatic story

> Four little chests all in a row / Veiled in dust, and worn by time, / Four women, who have learned from scars and sorrows, / To love and endure in the prime of life. These lines of Jo's epitomize the meaning of the entire novel, which recounts the passage from adolescence to adulthood, and also tells us how every woman has but one destiny: to become a "good wife." The "four little chests all in a row" are four sisters, whom we meet from the opening pages of *Little Women*: Meg is the eldest, > with fair skin and large eyes, with thick, soft brown hair, a sweet expression, and white hands, of which she was particularly proud, (...) Jo was tall, thin, brown-complexioned, and resembled a colt, for she seemed never to know what to do with her long limbs, (...) grey, observant eyes, which saw everything, and were by turns fierce, amused, or thoughtful; (...) Beth, a rosy girl of thirteen, (...) of shy manners, a timid voice, and a tranquil expression. (...) Amy, though the youngest, was the most important person, at least in her own opinion. (...) Blue eyes, blonde hair, (...) pale and slender, she always behaved like a well-mannered young lady. They live in a modest home, pervaded by > a pleasant atmosphere of peace , governed by a mother > not elegantly dressed, but a woman of noble bearing, and the girls thought that the grey coat and unfashionable bonnet covered the most splendid mother in the world. There is an air of Guido Gozzano's world of "small things," yet stripped of the poet's gentle irony; the whole is pervaded by a pedagogical moralism, rooted in steadfast values and upright customs. The father, a devout man dedicated to teaching, volunteered for the war (the novel is set during the American Civil War); the paternal presence manifests through letters to the family, a decalog of good intentions. The girls grow up sensible and industrious, mindful of the family's financial straits, convinced of what their mother says: that being poor is no fault, but can rather be a virtue. Contentment seems to be the guiding rule of life; on the other hand, sisterhood seems sufficient to enrich and enliven existence, all the more so when spurred on by Laurie, a restless lad, welcomed by the girls like a brother. Anyone raised in a large family recognizes themselves perfectly in the narrative, just as teenage girls in the 1950s, before the explosion of consumer culture, likely still saw themselves mirrored in *Little Women*. As Gozzano writes, > Carlotta sings. Speranza plays. Sweet and blooming, / life unfolds to the romance of a thousand promises (from *L'amica di Buona Speranza* selected from *Poesia italiana del Novecento* edited by Eduardo Sanguineti). In one of the finest episodes of *Little Women*, the four sisters have a picnic with Laurie: five adolescents building "castles in the air," to which they hold the keys, though they know not whether they will ever be able to open the door, as Jo says. Meg > would like a lovely house, (...) I must be mistress of it, and manage it as I like. Jo > wants to write books, and become rich and famous: that would please me, that is my dearest dream. Mine is to stay peacefully at home with Father and Mother, and take care of the family, said Beth happily. Amy > has so many wishes, but the chief one is to be an artist, and go to Rome, (...) and be the best artist in the world. At the end of *Good Wives*, the girls wonder which of these dreams came true. As in Alba De Céspedes's *Nessuno torna indietro* (see the review on this site), life turned out quite differently from their castle in the air. Meg has a small house, a devoted yet poor husband, two darling children; she has known the hardships and deprivations of a housewife. > My castle is very different from what I had planned , says Amy, who had to abandon her aspirations of becoming a great artist, but marriage to Laurie made her > sweeter, deeper, and more tender, while Laurie has grown more serious, strong, and resolute, and both have learned that beauty, youth, wealth, even love itself, cannot keep from the greater part of life its duties and griefs, bereavement and suffering. As Ungaretti says, life > flows ever on as living ever does, / Unexpected gift and grief / In the ceaseless whirlwind / Of vain mutations (from > *Ultimi cori per la Terra Promessa*). Jo is the one who suffered the severest disappointments, not from fate, but by virtue of her own choices: she refused Laurie's hand, simply because she did not love him and regarded him merely as a brother; she ceased writing sensational adventure potboilers, which earned her a living but were unworthy of her moral values and of good literature; she returned to her parents' home to attend Beth's deathbed, after which she inherited the role of angel in the house > , future spinster and mere aunt. Until one day, aided by the rain and an umbrella, she discovers love with a German professor, much older than she, yet wise and eccentric like her father. With him she will open a boys' school, a home for destitute children, where she can pursue innovative pedagogies. To her mother's praise for such a courageous endeavor in raising youth, Jo replies with a shout, > with those impetuous outbursts she could never control, (...) Not half so good as yours, Mother. Here we are, and we can never thank you enough for your patient sowing and for the harvest you have reaped. The book is an autobiographical novel. Jo is undoubtedly the author, just as the father's character mirrors Alcott's own father, who pursued unorthodox educational methods throughout his life, founding schools that were invariably doomed to fail. Ostensibly, the protagonists are the four sisters, whose stories form the plot of the two novels: a family saga that would continue with *Little Men* and *Jo's Boys*. The true protagonist, however, is the mother: grounded, affectionate, of steadfast moral principles, and ever ready to offer the right counsel—advice aimed at helping her daughters accept the realities of life, whether it be marital relations for Meg or Jo's headstrong exuberance. It is she who tells Jo that Laurie is not the right man, because, like Jo herself, he is restless and unpredictable. The irony is that this will become Jo's very argument to justify turning down his proposal! Unlike Jane Austen's independent and willful heroines (see the reviews of the English author's books on this site), the "Little Women" do not rebel; they wearily resign themselves to the destiny of "good wives." They are not who truly interests Alcott: it is American and European society. The former was drifting away from Puritan virtues, swept along by the capitalist transformations of the late nineteenth century; the latter, European society, was vain and evanescent, certainly no model for young American women. The stories of *Little Women*, so immediate to our sensibilities and above all to those of young girls, serve to reinforce and disseminate a Protestant moralism (one utterly detached from Catholicism): an ethic steeped in social idealism, frugal habits, and philanthropy, yet fundamentally conservative. Beyond the plot, which is intricately woven and deftly conducted, the fundamental merit of the two novels lies in the writing. We do not refer so much to the psychological analysis of sentiment (we are far removed from Jane Austen!); the feminine realm is stereotyped, predictable in its dynamics (perhaps the very reason for its success, as girls from every corner of the world can see themselves reflected in > *Little Women*). Alcott's allure stems from her lexical richness, deeply American in character, to the point that many words are difficult to find in a standard dictionary. If in Henry James—a contemporary of Alcott's in the second half of the nineteenth century—the style remains profoundly English, in both vocabulary and syntax (see on this site *Selected Short Stories*, a collection of tales highly representative of this author's literary output), Alcott's robust and proud American stamp leads her to revive idioms, syntactic turns, and vocabulary that are at times archaic (consider the use of *blest* instead of *blessed*), and at times drawn from the vernacular of the triumphant new Nation. We are confronted with a linguistic tour de force that could not fail to leave its imprint on the evolution of United States literature, propelled by the novels' immense popular acclaim. Why read it? The language is beautiful, certain passages are captivating, but it is long-winded and ultimately melodramatic.

Elie Nagéar is a young cosmopolitan who grew up and lived for a long time across many countries, particularly in Turkey. On his journey to Europe, he meets Sylvie, with whom he has a relationship. The young woman works in a nightclub, and in no time the two squander what little money they possess. Seized by desperation during a train journey from Brussels to Paris, Elie robs and kills a wealthy patron of the nightclub. To hide him, Sylvie sends him to her mother, who runs a boarding house. The life of the landlady, of Antoinette, her other daughter, and of the lodgers revolves around the kitchen, where relationships intertwine and where Elie soon becomes the center of attention with the incredible stories of his life and the countries he has lived in: > like the prelude to an orchestra, one could hear the clatter of forks, plates, and glasses rising and intensifying; whenever a voice was heard, it was Elie’s... He was not lying, yet he felt as if he were. He searched his memory for something more to tell, something comforting and flowing like a Neapolitan song . Thus a surreal atmosphere is created, disrupting the house’s mediocre and monotonous existence. All the inhabitants of the boarding house are so fascinated by the new lodger that, once it becomes known that he is the killer, far from reporting him, they actually help hide him in the hope that he might escape. Even when Elie, by then captured and sentenced, is boarded alongside the other deportees onto the ship that will carry him to forced labor, the landlady will be there on the pier to see him off, filled with nostalgia for a young man who, for a brief time, brought novelty to her mediocre bourgeois life. The milieu is the Belgian petite bourgeoisie. The story unfolds slowly, attentive to the details of life in a boarding house, where the tenants can barely make ends meet and where, paradoxically, all concern is devoted to propriety, to upholding a good name: the landlady’s husband is a conductor for the Belgian railways!! Why, then, does everyone let themselves be captivated by the new lodger’s stories? Why do they not turn him in? Perhaps because, Simenon seems to tell us, we all feel constrained by the flatness of everyday life. Why not read it? It reads very well owing to its concise and effective style. Yet the narrative pace is too slow to make for an enthralling read.

The setting is typical of the “American crime novel”: characters (Terry and Sylvia Lennox, Roger and Eileen Wade) seemingly unrelated yet with intertwined stories, an unseen and overarching power, organized crime, corrupt police, alcohol in abundance; and, what is more, > a city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and empty . The plot unfolds along a conventional pattern. Terry Lennox is accused of his wife’s murder, flees to Mexico, where he kills himself after confessing to the crime. The case is closed. Philip Marlowe, a private detective, is accused of having aided Lennox’s escape. Released, he continues to investigate because he is convinced the man is innocent and did not commit suicide at all. Several figures urge him to drop the inquiry: crime bosses, Sylvia’s powerful father, and the police themselves. Marlowe takes on the assignment of protecting a well-known writer, Roger Wade, an alcoholic prone to violence. We learn that Eileen is the widow—or so she believes—of Terry Lennox, who fought under another name in England, where he was reportedly declared dead. The story unravels: Terry’s past is vastly different from what it appeared to be. In a succession of plot twists, Roger is murdered by Eileen, who then takes her own life. And Marlowe? He is present at the moment of Roger’s murder, but is distracted by the sound of a boat; he senses that Eileen might commit a rash act; yet he does not intervene. “It just kind of grew up around me,” a phrase that is literally untranslatable; it could be interpreted in the sense that everything happens around him without his wanting it to: a resigned vision of a fate against which it is futile to fight. Besides, it is that way for everyone: > twenty hours a day someone is running, someone else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night people are dying of a thousand crimes. (...) People are beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and killed. People are hungry, sick, bored, desperate because they are alone or full of remorse and fear, angry, cruel, excited, and shaken by despair . The novel concludes with a surprise, which unfortunately must be revealed, for otherwise the meaning of the entire book would be lost. Before doing so, one must speak of Philip Marlowe; his character, in fact, turns the story into something far removed from a traditional “whodunit.” > I could even have been a rich man (Marlowe thinks), small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday, (...) and me with a brain like a sack of cement. It’s for you, pal, I’ll take the big, sordid, dirty, dishonest city . It is not to play the hero; Marlowe is deeply pessimistic, almost cynical. > That’s how human beings are. (...) What do you expect, golden butterflies fluttering over a rosebush? And yet this man, seemingly disillusioned, meets another man, Terry Lennox, and—who knows why?—helps him, stubbornly trying to prove his innocence. > I thought I was tough, but there was something about that man that won me over. I didn’t know what it was, unless it was the white hair and the scarred face and the clean voice and the gentleness . “How naive can a man get, Marlowe?” a cop asks him. And indeed, at the end of the novel, Marlowe discovers that he has been deceived. Terry Lennox is alive; he merely wanted to disappear. And so the cynical and generous detective admits that once Terry meant something to him, but today not even a goodbye. > I’m not judging you. I never did. It’s just that you’re not here any more. You’ve been gone a long time. You’ve got nice clothes and perfumes and you’re as elegant as a fifty-dollar whore . Heir to the great Dashiell Hammett, perhaps the greatest crime writer of all time, as Jeffery Deaver notes, Chandler pushed the crime novel toward new frontiers, opening it up to grand narrative literature: and this is credited to the figure of Marlowe, but also to a singular prose style—elegant and demanding, composed of neologisms, novel syntactic constructions, and above all geared toward creating an atmosphere of suspension, of estrangement from the narrative. The novel is too long, excessively convoluted, with tight and often redundant dialogue. It is therefore not perfect; it is strenuous, and one senses Chandler’s frustration at being unable to fully investigate > the real enemies: expectations, betrayal, the desire for power and wealth (Deaver). Why read it? It is a strenuous read, but well worth it if one wishes to delve deeper into the human soul.

There are books that overwhelm the poor reader with their narrative and stylistic complexity; one feels inadequate and wanders through the pages, fascinated and frightened, without finding the unraveling thread. And then one discovers, or believes one discovers, the path charted by the talented Valeria Luiselli, a Mexican writer writing in English. How can we ensure that the voices of the world do not become mere echoes of background noise? > Memory / day by day disappears / the heart grows ever deafer / to distant, wretched plights (Carlo Vallini, *«Da un giorno»*). The author seems to find the answer in children: in the stories of those who are lost and in the journeys of those who courageously retrace the experience of disappearance. If in Torquato Tasso’s *Gerusalemme Liberata* it is knights who set out in search of the holy sepulchre, of truth and light (see review on this site), here it is children, like the “Eagle Warriors” (Native American child warriors), who venture into a tunnel, fearful yet determined. > Children used to play in this tunnel, they held their breath as the train rushed toward darkness, they allowed themselves to breathe again only once the train car had crossed the entrance vault, returning into the light, and the valley opened wide again, like a terrifying and blinding flower, before their eyes . In the first part, a journalist is the first-person narrator: mother of a four-year-old girl, she is married to a researcher specialized in collecting and archiving the sounds of the city; he is, in turn, the father of a 10-year-old boy. It is a marriage in crisis: love has cooled, and above all the differing interests of the two partners have emerged—the man a dreamer, ever distant in his thoughts; she, instead, practical, attentive to the care of the children and to what is unfolding in society. The husband decides to embark on a journey toward the American South in search of traces of the Apaches; the choice is grudgingly accepted by the journalist, who ultimately agrees to it because she wishes to gather information and testimonies about the “lost children”: having entered undocumented and locked in detention centers awaiting repatriation, all trace of these children is lost. Confined to the cabin of a car, the four travel together the many miles between New York and the South, > looking out the windows at a landscape wounded by decades or perhaps centuries of systematic agricultural aggression: land dissected into quadrangular grids, gang-raped by heavy machinery, fattened with modified seeds and drenched in pesticides, (...) land caged within circles of green crop strips, resembling Dante's Inferno; (...) and land turned into non-land, under the weight of concrete, solar panels, storage tanks, enormous wind turbines... At first, the children are helpless spectators to the crumbling of the marriage and everything happening around them; then, slowly, > our rational, linear, and organized world dissolves in the chaos of our children's words, (...) their thoughts are filling our world... (...) I understand now, perhaps too late, that my children's repetitive games in the back seats were perhaps the only way to really narrate the story of the lost children . The turning point comes from the sight of the young migrants boarding, all in a mournful line, the plane that will take them back to their country of origin. The older boy, imbued with his mother’s civic passion and captivated by his father’s evocation of Echo Canyon, where the voices of the last Apaches dispersed, decided to go in search of the lost children. He sets off, backpack in hand, together with his little sister. At this point, the narrative structure and the writing change. The boy becomes the narrator of this adventure while the story of seven children in search of their families unfolds in the third person: these are the “Lost Children Elegies”: a series of fragments that elevate one of the tragedies of our time into song, recalling David Grossman’s poem in their intensity and evocative power (*Falling Out of Time: A Novel in Voices*, reviewed on this site). If in the first part the style is linear, almost essayistic, it becomes increasingly lyrical, relying on words rather than syntax, lending force to a rhythm so pressing and relentless as to leave the reader’s conscience defenseless. The two stories converge in the desert, in a makeshift shelter, and the children, now together, can tell each other their adventures: the “lost” children can leave a testimony of themselves. By a stroke of fortune, the two runaways manage to find Echo Canyon, and by shouting their names they are heard by their parents. Our children are saved, while the young migrants disappear into the desert, and only their little skeletons will speak of their fate, one day. The happy ending confirms how even the courage of children is futile. After photographing the seven young migrants, > I was looking at them, concentrating hard, when you suddenly came up with an intuition, which was true and smart but also terrifying. You said: look, everyone in this picture is disappearing . And then the echoes are merely incomprehensible words, merely noises, > so strange that I didn't know if they were in my mind or in the air, (...) and I wondered if we were listening to the sound of all the dead in the desert, of all the bones scattered there . “The world is broken,” the author synthesizes. > No one is capable of capturing what is happening and saying why. Perhaps it is just that we sense the absence of a future, because the present has become too oppressive, so the future has become unimaginable. And without a future, time is perceived only as an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, births, photographs, sunrises . All that is left for us is to > record the sound of the wind, (...) trying to capture their past presence, make it audible, despite their absence today, archiving whatever echo still reverberates of them. (...) Echoes of the echo: mem, mem, mem, mem, wa, wa, wa...cow, horse...bzzzzz, bee buzzing... “As the poet says,” and imagine the boundless number / of perturbed open permutations (like a limitless / lyricist, in an unstable / Scrabble-like kaleidoscope), which thus multiplies us” (Edoardo Sanguineti from “*Senza titolo Glosse 15* > ). It is impossible to express the kaleidoscopic beauty of Luiselli's writing: the richness of the vocabulary, the shimmering style, shifting from traditional prose to sentences unburdened by periods, the continuous and innovative experimentation, the intense engagement of language with the subject narrated, never approached in a bureaucratic or prosaically literary way. It is a masterpiece! We urge the reader to read and reread the Fifth Elegy, magnificent and powerfully evocative, as well as the telephone game of the lost children,” the desperate nostalgia: a page that takes our breath away, to be savored in apnea. Why read it? A masterpiece.

This is a series of short stories exploring the lives of women. The narratives unfold delicately, pivoting entirely on emotion, the depiction of context, and interpersonal relationships. The stories have no definitive conclusion, imparting a sense of how life, seen through the eyes of women, is somehow more attuned to the “process” than to the results. The prose contributes admirably to creating this sense of suspension: it is delicate, elegant, rich both in its vocabulary and syntactic construction, yet without excess—hitting precisely the right note. It would be interesting to read a novel by the author.

We are in eighteenth-century Sicily. Marianna belongs to a wealthy aristocratic family from Palermo. She is deaf and mute, but her impairment has not prevented her from becoming a resolute, cultured, courted, and ultimately independent woman, capable of disregarding the rules and customs of her contemporary society. Indeed, > her impairment has made her more attentive to herself and to others, so much so that she at times succeeds in gleaning the thoughts of those beside her . She would like to > shake her head to rid herself of those inopportune thoughts, sticky as carob juice... in the end she falls right into them, into people, drawn by a certain lively fluttering of their thoughts that promise who knows what surprises . Marianna’s life unfolds precisely within the cage wrought by her disability: on the one hand, she must force others to write to her in little notes to which she replies with slips of paper of her own—a filtered relationship, therefore, hindered by her interlocutors’ poor grasp of the written word (the aristocracy itself being largely semi-illiterate); on the other hand, Marianna possesses a sort of telepathic power, which is simultaneously lip-reading, sensory acuity, and the imagination of a melancholic and solitary soul. It is, nonetheless, an invasive form of communication, devoid of respect for personal privacy. Outwardly, Marianna’s life holds nothing exceptional for the era: married while still a child to an uncle, who becomes “the uncle-husband,” she bears many children, devotes herself to managing her vast estates, and prefers the reading of books to high society, in which she partakes merely out of duty. The marriage is consummated in a series of loveless couplings, yet she harbors no particular rancor toward the uncle-husband, even when she discovers that it was he who raped her when she was five years old. Yet it is to her father—loved and admired—that Marianna, now a widow and a mature woman, attributes her mutilation; for it is to him that she owes the silence surrounding what happened to her as a child, and a gruesome marriage to her own violator. > She understands with adamantine clarity that he, her father, is responsible for her mutilation... it is he who cut out her tongue and it is he who filled her ears with molten lead so that she would hear no sound and turn perpetually upon herself in the realms of silence and apprehension . And it is at the end of her long life, once she has discovered both sensual and literary love, that Marianna abandons Palermo, alone with a mad servant girl. Wandering through Italy, she travels with a troupe of actors, and at last Marianna > tasted freedom: the past was a tail she had curled up beneath her skirts... the future was a nebula inside of which one could glimpse the lights of a carousel. And there she stood, half fox and half siren, for once unburdened by mental weights, in the company of people who did not give a damn about her deafness and spoke to her merrily, contorting themselves into generous, irresistible grimaces . Enzo Siciliano, a prominent literary critic, places the book within the tradition of Verga, De Roberto, and Lampedusa. It is a misguided comparison. The historical backdrop, much like the family saga, serves merely as a pretext to recount something else: the woman’s solitude, exacerbated by deafness and muteness; the struggle to break free, to carve out a space of her own within a petty, coarse, and hypocritical society. It is an intimate, contemporary novel, not least in the role—both redemptive and insular—entrusted to fantasy. At one point, Marianna “reads with her chin resting on her hand” a sentence by David Hume in a notebook, perhaps left behind by a traveler in her library: > the intellect, says the English philosopher, entirely subverts itself... we are saved from this skepticism by means of that singular and seemingly vulgar property of the imagination (to penetrate) into the most recondite aspects of things . Imagination is the key to comprehending reality, and the novel can be interpreted—through its baroque style and precious, timeless descriptions—as a continuous escape from the harshness of everyday life, within which one would find oneself imprisoned were one to rely on reason alone. A philosophical novel, then, beneath the guise of a family chronicle and historical narrative? Such an interpretation is also prompted by the narrative structure, composed of sketches and episodes, and by the prose, which is at times bombastic, imagistic, and affected. And it is these very traits that make the narrative wordy, sluggish, and tedious. Why not read it? It is boring.

The novel recounts the fortunes of Madame Bovary, who, married to a provincial doctor, attempts to escape a prosaic and tedious existence by pursuing a series of affairs and leading an extravagant lifestyle—choices that ultimately lead her to financial ruin, emotional desolation, and, inevitably, suicide. It is a celebrated novel, widely considered the wellspring of nineteenth-century realism, which tackles the theme—subsequently taken up by numerous other authors—of the pettiness of bourgeois morality. At heart, Emma Bovary pursues a dream of happiness, striving not to be trapped within the mediocrity of everyday life. Surrounding her, by contrast, hypocrisy, the pursuit of money, social ambition, and the like prevail. In truth, Madame Bovary is herself a child of her time: there is no genuinely romantic sensibility within her, no sense of guilt, and she is willing to resort to any falsehood to achieve her ends—which are, in reality, modest, such as meeting her lovers, buying elegant dresses, and so forth. The third part of the book, unquestionably the finest, which portrays the events leading to Madame Bovary’s death, is conducted in an almost illustrative manner. The characters, in fact, emerge as cold and flat, devoid of even the slightest introspective probing into their motivations and feelings. Ultimately, this is a social novel that appears to have enjoyed a renown far exceeding its actual merits. It bears the heavy imprint of the nineteenth-century ethos and leaves little room, even in its style and narrative rhythm, for that lyricism so typical of our own day.

In Canto XVII of the *Paradiso*, in verses 43–45, Dante recounts that his ancestor Cacciaguida turns to music to explain his vision of the poet's impending exile: > thence (from the divine mind), even as to the ear comes / sweet harmony from an organ, so comes / to my sight the time being prepared for you . The sound of an instrument's strings, together with the sweetness of the voice, is a divine gift granted to humankind to soothe the wounds of both body and soul—and, for Dante, to endure the prophecy of his sorrowful wandering. Is this true, or is music merely a palliative? If we probe Alberto Riva's novel beneath the surface, we must conclude that while music induces a kind of wondrous bewilderment, it can do nothing to heal loneliness, depression, and madness. We are in the eighteenth century, between 1720 and 1758; Domenico Scarlatti, son of the more renowned Alessandro, arrives in Lisbon to become a musician in one of the wealthiest courts of Europe at that time. Domenico > is a man in his late thirties who looks a few years older, with a prominent knobby nose and eyes of a shifting hazel, distant, perhaps flawed by a slight squint: his skin is exceedingly pale and his clothes black, a resolute, mournful black. (...) For years, his father kept him bent, almost kneeling over the keyboard for hours on end every day, especially at night . Shy to the point of rudeness, he is certainly neither the classic cicisbeo nor a man of polished manners, as the elegant and vacuous society of the eighteenth century would demand. And perhaps precisely because of his sullen and independent nature, he is unwilling to endorse the sovereign's wish to stifle the musical inclinations of the Infanta, the plump and rather plain Maria Barbara. Instead, Domenico becomes her tutor, refining and exalting the girl's natural gifts; a bond is forged that will endure over time, even after Maria Barbara marries the heir to the Spanish throne and subsequently becomes queen. Any composer of the age, from Vivaldi to the singer Farinelli, would have seized upon such circumstances to secure fame and wealth. Not so Domenico Scarlatti; driven by a somber frenzy, he vanishes into taverns, where > he listens to imaginative arrangements transposed onto the strings, carried by female voices . In Inquisition-era Spain, he frequents the world of the gypsies, where he discovers that > within that Andalusian folk lay a buried civilization, and that civilization was music. That the guitarra is the unwritten book through which a history is handed down. But it is not just the guitarra: it is the hands, the voices, the fingers, even the feet. (...) They ask us why our singing is deep (explains the old gypsy). They ask us for the secret of cante.....And we answer: our singing is the search, our singing is the journey. (...) a mysterious drama, a drama without an ending . All his life Domenico pursues something indefinable, and finds it, perhaps, by wandering through the poorest, most disreputable quarters. > Anyone who had caught the maestro unawares on one of those nights would have seen him slightly slumped, an elbow on the table, one leg stretched out, a certain look in his eyes. (...) He looks at his hands: his relationship is with the instrument. (...) His relationship with the instrument is one of interrogation. Of progressive unveiling . Had it been up to Domenico, the musical exercises—the famous Scarlatti Sonatas—would have been lost: perhaps the musician deemed it futile to leave behind compositions incapable of soothing his *male oscuro*. It is to Maria Barbara's credit that we know them today. The novel's framework is something poised between historical reconstruction and an introspective inquiry into the two protagonists: Domenico Scarlatti and the Infanta Maria Barbara, as well as the idiosyncrasies of their relationship. Music, and the mysterious allure of the Sonnets, have prevailed over a narrative that might have placed the two protagonists on equal footing: Maria Barbara remains in the background, flattened by the duties and demands of her station; beyond the fascination of the musical exercises composed by the maestro, what truly bound Maria Barbara to a man so withdrawn and discourteous? The only significant element is Maria Barbara's stubbornness, her determination to preserve Scarlatti's work and bring him renown. Could a repressed love for the man have driven her? We shall never know, because the musical and biographical genesis of the Sonnets took precedence, consigning Maria Barbara once more to the oblivion from which the author had sought to rescue her. The prose is plain and flows placidly, neither attracting nor repelling. Only when the author depicts glimpses of Lisbon do impressions rich with vivid colors emerge. Here is Lisbon, perhaps frequented and beloved by the author: > something grim, that smell of dissatisfied souls, of unhappy men, (...) and then the city, opening onto an estuary that is already the sea, composed of shifting colors, of ascents and descents, of sudden azures, turquoises, ultramarine blues. > And the City understands/And kindles/ And the flame titillates and absorbs/ The magnificent remnants of the sun/And weaves a shroud of oblivion/ Divine for weary men . (Dino Campana, *Genova* in *Canti Orfici*).

The setting is a fishing village in late nineteenth-century Sicily. The Malavoglia are a family of fishermen, owners of a boat (the *Provvidenza*) and a home with a small plot of land (the house by the medlar tree). Life unfolds serenely and with dignity within a community that respects the Malavoglia because they are economically self-sufficient. In short order, a succession of misfortunes plunges the family into poverty and grief: the *Provvidenza* is shipwrecked, claiming the life of Bastianazzo, the son of Padron ’Ntoni, and a cargo of lupins is lost. The family is forced into debt to repair the boat and repay the loan contracted to purchase the lupins. Then one of the sons, Luca, dies as a soldier, and a second shipwreck forces the sale of the house by the medlar tree as well. ’Ntoni, Padron ’Ntoni’s other grandson, turns to smuggling; surprised by the police, he severely wounds an officer in the ensuing scuffle. To spare him a life sentence, the defense lawyer invokes the officer’s pursuit of one of the Malavoglia daughters, who, consumed by disgrace, flees the village. Following this series of catastrophes, the novel appears to conclude on a positive note: Alessi, Padron ’Ntoni’s other grandson, manages to repurchase the house by the medlar tree. In reality, this positive note bears witness to the cyclical nature of history, the perpetual struggle for survival composed of positive moments and negative ones—the latter far more frequent. Alongside the Malavoglia family, the book’s other primary subject is the community itself, embodied by a gallery of characters, their mutual entanglements, and their utilitarian logic, but also by a continuous intertwining of economic concerns with gossip, the hunt for husbands, moral hypocrisy, and, ultimately, indifference toward misfortune. No one aids the Malavoglia, save for fellow unfortunates, while the propertied families—or those who perceive themselves as such—abandon them, as misfortune is, at bottom, regarded as evidence of guilt. It is a complex work, layered with manifold themes. In the background lies an absolute fatalism, reflecting a destiny already sealed by social hierarchy and economic utilitarianism: > What ails you? he would ask him. Nothing ails me, only that I am a poor devil. And what can you do if you are a poor devil? We have to live as we were born . "When a man cannot catch good fortune, he is a fool, as everyone knows." It would be reductive, however, to limit the novel to a mere mirror held up to society, or to subsume it under a kind of philosophy of history. In truth, the vitality of the various characters, the narrative tempo, and above all the language—highly idiosyncratic in that it is non-dialectal yet profoundly representative of its milieu—are all elements that elevate the narrative into a realm that is non-realistic, imaginative, and expressive of universal sentiments. If one compares Verga’s work with those of Émile Zola, particularly *La Terre*, a profound difference clearly emerges. Verga’s novel seeks neither to sensationalize nor to incite revolt or desolation; instead, it operates on the terrain of "lightness," steeped in irony toward a society locked within its own rigid codes and incapable of comprehending the heroic spirit that animates the Malavoglia. The clash between individual (and familial) heroism and the narrow-minded conservatism of society constitutes an inherently Italian theme, and is thus emblematic of a culture and a country.

Benedetto Croce panned this novel, Fogazzaro’s first, observing that it lacked “the central intuition that dominates all others,” offering instead an irritating confusion. One is tempted to agree with him if one allows oneself to be led merely by the plot, with its innumerable secondary episodes. If, however, the book is read from the perspective of one of its protagonists, Corrado Silla, it becomes evident that one is faced with the narrative of a troubled spiritual journey, unfolding amid existential unrest and the quest for faith—the only thing capable of providing balance and serenity. Silla, behind whom the author conceals himself, is an > intellect lacking lucidity, mystical in its tendencies, powerful through certain fleeting intuitions rather than by any steady, inherent vigor.. he had vague, unpractical ideas, an ardent spiritualist.... he loved, even in slight matters, to lean upon some grand general principle . He has written a short story, ignored by both the public and the critics, which has nevertheless aroused considerable interest in Marina di Malombra, a young aristocrat, orphaned and penniless, taken in on that account by a wealthy uncle. The writer portrays her before the mirror: > from the ample dressing gown emerged, as from a white cloud, the slender, elegant neck, and between two torrents of dark-blonde hair, wherein shone two large, piercing eyes, fashioned for dominion and for voluptuousness... with a toss of her head she cast behind her shoulders the two torrents of hair and who knows how many turbid thoughts . Silla and Marina share many affinities, above all a restlessness that manifests in impulsive actions and in disordered, hallucinatory meditations; yet poor Corrado, weak and insecure, is overwhelmed by the woman, who banishes him, seeks him out, desperately summons him, professes her love, and ultimately kills him. Marina, on the other hand, is ruled by the phantoms of the past—specifically, by the mad determination to avenge the murder of an ancestress, the first wife of her uncle’s father. She sees in Corrado the reincarnation of the murderer and, despite loving him, must nevertheless punish him with death. The relationship between Silla and Marina has no rational, psychological foundation; it belongs entirely to the realm of the magical, the fantastic, and the dream. Silla’s fault lies in succumbing to the dark allure of a spiritualism unanchored to faith, to rationality, and to the order of the Catholic religion. Conversely, the other narrative thread, the pairing of Silla and Edith, develops around the search for faith. Edith is a German girl who has come to Italy to be reunited with her father, an aging exile who had found refuge with Marina’s uncle. > She was graceful in her black dress, exceedingly simple, short but not excessively so, with a small bunch of violets at her waist.... in her delicate, faintly rosy face, the mouth and eyes bore a more pronounced expression of firmness. It is strange how those eyes expressed an understanding of real life, tempered with goodness..... as though another spirit infused into hers, a melancholic spirit, were somewhat revived by her gaiety . Faith governs Edith’s personality and directs her feelings and conduct. “Edith’s elegant, dark figure, which he clothed in poetry,” captivates Silla, who yearns to find in her the balance he so desperately needs. > And he felt within himself a serene light, a warmth so distant, it seemed to him, from indifference as from passion, a rising of some indefinable faith . Yet the summons of Marina’s dark allure proves too potent for Silla, just as Edith is too confined within a religion of sacrifice and duty to fight with the necessary passion for the love she nonetheless harbors for Corrado. And “the demon of somber voluptuousness” leads Silla to his death. Edith is left with nothing but the memory of what her life might have been, a destiny she accepts with Christian resignation. Meager consolation and a thoroughly hypocritical justification for a bloodless love, incapable of fighting for the beloved! And what kind of religion is it that leads to timid passivity, to being mere spectators of one’s own life and that of others? Beyond the lack of cohesion underscored by Croce, the fundamental flaw of the book lies in the purely literary treatment of the characters, who rarely take on real life. Moreover, the entire novel is steeped in, and weighed down by, lengthy philosophical and religious digressions, as abstract as the depiction of its protagonists. The most compelling feature of the book is its landscapes. Nature is painted in bold strokes—at times somber and tempestuous, at others luminous and serene. Above all, nature possesses “a soul,” one that is indeed living and real: a soul that reflects and amplifies the characters’ emotions, thereby bestowing upon them at least a semblance of vitality. Like mankind, nature is fraught with contradictions, admirably synthesized in descriptions of the landscape such as this: > a lake modest in size and fame, passionate, changeable; now violet, now green, now leaden; at times, toward the plain, even azure . The contemplation of the landscape captures the eternal yearning of the human soul: > oh amorous fury of blossoms reaching toward the omnipotent sun, exultant grasses, drunken with wind, what solace to be you, to live your single-day life, to feel memory fall silent, and the heart, and that wearying tumult of thoughts relentlessly battling together, making and unmaking the future . Why avoid reading it? It is a tedious, prolix, inconclusive book.

The best introduction to this strange book is the figure of its author: Count Potocki, who lived between 1761 and 1815, when he died by suicide. A great traveler, ethnographer, archaeologist, geographer, and philologist, Potocki was the quintessential exponent of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: his curiosity and immense erudition were placed at the service of a rational approach to reality. A keen observer of religions and customs, Potocki was likewise drawn to esotericism, spiritualism, and the realm of the fantastic in general. The complex interplay between reason and mystery is the guiding thread of the manuscript, whose own history is no less obscure and unbelievable: written in French, it was lost, resurfaced in a translation from an alleged Polish version, and finally what may be the original French text was recovered. Constructed in the form of the *Decameron*, as a series of novellas divided into days, the novel recounts the adventures of Alfonso, who must cross the Sierra Morena to reach Madrid. In fact, the young protagonist—and narrator—makes very little headway, as he finds himself sucked into an infernal and mysterious loop between the gallows of two hanged men and an abandoned inn: in the morning he awakes among decomposing bodies, by day he travels toward the inn, and at night he is visited by two splendid women who claim to be his cousins. In this continuous shuttling back and forth, he encounters other characters who tell him their stories, fraught with apparitions, skeletons, and supernatural retributions. Despite situations that obsessively defy rational explanation, Alfonso continually attempts to find a rationale for them and refuses to accept the existence of mystery. > Perhaps at the inn I had been given a draught to put me to sleep, after which nothing could be easier than to transport me during my slumber beneath the fatal gallows. Pacheco (a madman or demoniac whom Alfonso encounters) might have lost an eye in an entirely different accident than through his amorous liaison with the two hanged men, and his frightful tale could well be a fable.... But slowly he is overcome by a sort of «annihilation of all my faculties».....( he begins to realize the existence of a powerful cabal) > which seems to have no other purpose than to conceal who knows what secret, or to bewitch me with sorceries that I sometimes partially manage to penetrate, but which then, through other circumstances, soon plunge me back into doubt. It is clear that I, too, am part of this invisible chain . Reason wavers before the inexplicable, and vast erudition can be, at best, «agreeable company,» yet it risks ending up like the hundred volumes of another character in the novel: gnawed and destroyed by rats. The narrative structure is founded upon the singular repetition of the same prophecy: an ever-identical situation, reproduced and multiplied through a series of fantastical combinations that seem to have a single aim: to assault the stability of rational interpretation. This repetitiveness, which might otherwise render the reading tedious, is sustained by an explosion of narrative invention and by a style that is pleasing, imaginative, and often ironic. Thirsting for experience and knowledge, Potocki meant to tell us, with this unfinished novel, that life is wondrous. Why read it? It is an enjoyable and fantastical book.

A ten-year-old girl, a poor relation, is taken in by her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, a wealthy landowner and an influential member of parliament and the community. From the very beginning, the rules must be made clear: > without depressing her spirits too far, to make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram ; and Fanny Price lives up to expectations: small for her age, without any particular beauty, exceedingly timid, bashful, and retiring, > the consciousness of being a poor relation grew hand in hand with the conviction that for a creature as insignificant as herself it was only right not to be happy . In a conversation with her cousin Edmund, with whom she strikes a chord from early adolescence, Fanny states: > I can never be important to anyone; what should prevent it? (asks her perplexed cousin), everything, my situation, my lack of judgment, my plainness . Yet it is precisely this loneliness, this feeling of being an outsider, of always having to be mindful of decorum and social norms, that helps forge a strong, independent personality, steeped in steadfast ethical values. None of this causes her to lose her "bearings" when the entire family allows itself to be swept away by the allure of the theater; taking advantage of the absence of Sir Thomas, away for an extended period on business in the West Indies, they decide to stage a then-famous play, *Loverʼs Vows* (*Lovers' Vows*). It is a period of "general madness," as Edmund will later call it, in which everyone steps outside the rigid social roles to which they must adhere, to assume the guise of the various characters in a play considered licentious at the time for its plot and dramatis personae. The only one who obstinately refuses to take part is Fanny; this allows her to observe the behavior of the others, and in particular that of Edward Crawford, a brilliant young man who shamelessly courts Fanny’s elder cousin, despite her already being engaged. Upon Sir Thomas's return, everything appears to return to normal, with Fanny more highly regarded by her uncle for the virtuous demeanor she maintained throughout the "general madness." We arrive at a turning point. Up to this moment, Fanny appears as a somewhat prudish girl, still waters, even slightly opportunistic and subservient; her true personality will emerge fully when she must confront a grave danger for someone so independent: a man seeks to decide her fate. Edward intends to "conquer" Fanny; accustomed to being pursued by women, he has found one who keeps him at a distance, and all of this intrigues him. It may be a whim, yet the man appears to have serious intentions: he is generous, affable, and through his connections he has arranged for Fanny’s brother to be made a naval lieutenant; he is an eligible match who would provide wealth and security to the impoverished girl. Yet she, now eighteen, cannot accept him. > She was feeling, thinking, trembling, about everything; agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely grateful, enormously angry. (...) No, no, no, she cried, hiding her face, all this makes no sense, (...) I will not, I cannot bear it. I must not listen to such things. No, no, do not think of me. But you are not thinking of me. I know well that all this is nothing . If she manages to withstand Edward's assault with ease, it is far more difficult to defy her uncle. Sir Thomas, bolstered by his authority, attempts to persuade Fanny; astounded and indeed angered by her lack of gratitude and respect, he runs up against the girl's categorical refusal. > With eyes intently fixed on one of the windows, she listened to her uncle in the greatest perturbation and dismay . And to her uncle’s bewildered question regarding the reasons for her refusal, Fanny's answer is simple yet revolutionary for the era: > I cannot love him, Sir, well enough to marry him. (...) Have you any reason, child, to think ill of Crawford’s character? (asks the uncle kindly). No, sir, (...) and she would have liked to add, but I have of his principles, and her heart failed her to tell the father of Crawford’s misconduct toward her cousin. Fanny’s troubles are not over. First she must face Edmund, and he too attempts to convince her; then she is sent for several months to stay with her parents—a ploy by Sir Thomas to show her the wretched social conditions in which she might live in the future, should her uncle's support be withdrawn; it would be wise of her to accept Edward's offer, a marriage to a wealthy young man. The matter resolves itself: the play was not merely an interlude of "general madness"—it unleashed the forces lurking beneath the rigid surface of bourgeois life. Sir Thomas’s family falls apart; specifically, the cousin abandons her husband and elopes with Edward. For Fanny, the story has a happy ending: she returns triumphantly to Mansfield and marries her cousin Edmund. Approaching the novel from Fanny’s point of view is perhaps an obvious and reductive perspective, given the numerous characters, the underlying social issues, and in particular the role of the theater within the narrative, its demonic and liberating function: a theme that has drawn the attention of most critics, to the extent of claiming that it would be impossible to read the book without being familiar with *Loverʼs Vows*. Beyond the historical context, the question remains remarkably relevant today: how profoundly can an eighteen-year-old’s experience be shaken? Fanny’s tribulations undoubtedly strengthened her, bestowing upon her the character that allowed her to govern her own destiny; but is all this just? Ought the girl not to have been protected, granted the opportunity to grow up peacefully? These are the questions that keep the novel relevant today. The novel is very long and does not always sustain its narrative pace; the prose is typical of Jane Austen, intricate and complex. To be appreciated, the book must be read with care and patience, seeking its value in the details, in the unexpected and ever-incisive insights into character psychology, in the spirit of independence that animates the entire work, and in the sharp, unerring judgments on humanity and society. Why read it? It is somewhat long, but well worth reading, with patience and care.

> They whisper among the neon lights/under the canopy. They want/me to strain my ears/and recognize them one by one/as the night trains arrive/at the station of memory. Who are you?/Where do you come from? I would like to ask,/but my shadow swerves/on the platform of so many sudden/departures, my heart shrivels,/air runs short...: Is my wife with you?/Let me hear her voice once more/I plead, flinging my arms open/in a dream now extinguished (Stefano Simoncelli, from *Terza copia del gelo*, 2014). The protagonist/narrator is a reporter, perpetually abroad; and so he was when his wife Chiara died suddenly. > I wasn't there. I was far away, on an assignment. Photographs of Chiara are everywhere, almost as though he wanted her still present, yet he never speaks of her, > the pain has self-fertilized, has expanded. Burdened by loss and guilt because he was absent at the moment of his wife's death, he lets himself go, neglects his work, abandons friendships, feels like > a usurer of feelings. It is into this state of existential crisis that Martino bursts: an eight-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome, one of the many forms of autism. His daughter Nina brings him to him, leaving the father to manage the child on his own. It is an unusual encounter: a man who let himself drift with the flow of existence, and a boy for whom it was enough to sit nearby, turn on a computer, without necessarily having to converse or get involved, > always without exchanging too many confidences, but also without distress. From this stems a slender story, in which an adult and a child help each other discover a bond that transcends the dimension of responsibility, solidarity, and sentiment. There is no striking, salvific ending, nothing that offers us a moral, a lesson: the story concludes with an embrace. > I would have liked to embrace him, raise my hand and then my arm, and finally gently take him by the shoulder and hold him tight. (...) "What are you thinking about?", he had asked me, just as my thought was about to be filed away in the drawer of resignation. "About the fact that I'd like to hug you." (...) He hadn't answered, keeping his lips pressed together for a while. Then he had leaned into me, burying his head under my armpit and starting to tap gently. And so the dead can return, > leaving behind only fragments that no longer have a place in memory. What gives us the strength to move forward is not remembrance, but caring for others: call it Love. The novel's title does not reflect the meaning of the story: rather than *maintenance of the senses*, it ought to be titled *discovery of the senses*—not those we habitually think of today: sex or romantic relationships (in truth, the protagonist stumbles into a few fleeting affairs); I refer to that physical bond that employs the entire spectrum of our senses without expecting anything in return, be it play or gratification. It is a pity that Faggiani addressed such an important topic, that of the discovery of the senses, by framing it within an escape from the city, in an exceptional setting such as the mountains. Which of us can afford to go and live in a chalet in the woods? And who can afford to live > as we wanted to live , free, watching > the Earth turn without hearing its noise?. It is not clear whether this is an autobiographical story; what is certain is that the context is too flimsy to give depth to the narrative, beyond some interesting, yet fragmentary and sporadic insights. The writing is the novel’s fundamental merit, even if the style is at times journalistic, with an overabundance of periods, gerunds, and verbless clauses. Take this example: > But he hadn't answered me (already Word's grammar checker would have marked as an error the "but > after the period), probably he was negotiating, reassuring, supporting someone. Someone else, instead of yours truly. Wasn't a comma sufficient before someone else"? And aren't three gerunds in a row too many? The narrative develops slowly, without twists; the characters remain suspended, without their inner turmoil ever truly being understood: so many feelings crowd in, yet always on the surface. Why not read it? Too fragile.

The setting is the Sicilian countryside of the second half of the nineteenth century. Rabbàto is a small town, long awaiting rain to put an end to the drought that is driving the entire community to destitution and hunger. The Marquis of Roccaverdina is a wealthy landowner who lives as though the world were immutable and acknowledged his boundless power over things and people. He had long taken a peasant woman, Agrippina Solmo, as his mistress. To keep up appearances, he decides to give her in marriage to his bailiff, on the condition that the marriage must remain unconsummated. Jealousy drives him to murder the bailiff and then to orchestrate the conviction of a poor peasant, who will perish in prison. He feels no true remorse for these outrages (the abandonment of his mistress, the murder of the bailiff, and the condemnation of an innocent man), since, after all, they are merely common folk and to the Marquis of Roccaverdina everything is permitted. Rather, he senses a creeping fear, “the usual apprehension of perils lurking in the shadows.” The abandoned mistress and the murdered bailiff “would suddenly appear and just as suddenly vanish,” and > he felt the strange sensation of walking upon unstable ground that might collapse beneath his feet at any moment . It is cowardice that acts as the catalyst driving the Marquis—previously so confident in himself and his social standing—to doubt, to reflect upon the very existence of God and the validity of religion, upon mankind, and upon himself. In vain, he seeks solace in feverish activity, throwing himself into politics, launching an enterprise to modernize wine production, and marrying a local noblewoman. Only the sight of the countryside, bathed in rain, affords him a measure of peace: > let us leave this subject, for now. Look. The countryside looks like a garden! An immense expanse of green, in a thousand shades of green, from tender to somber, almost black; a triumph, a frenzy of vegetation even in the most unyielding soils, which had never borne a single blade of grass! The suicide of a peasant, from whom he had extorted land through threats and abuse of power, unleashes the madness that leads the Marquis into dementia and, ultimately, to death. In his final illness, only his mistress remains at his bedside to attend to him, a testament to a love that transcends social hierarchy. Yet appearances prove stronger than affection: the poor woman cannot remain at the moment of the Marquis’s passing, and she > let herself be dragged away, offering no resistance, humble and resigned as she had always been, convinced herself that she could no longer remain there, because her destiny had willed it so! It is a complex novel: on the one hand, a rigid and immutable social order within which the characters move according to predetermined roles; on the other, the figure of the Marquis of Roccaverdina, who seeks to break these social moulds, both from an economic standpoint (new crops, modern processing methods, technical innovation, cooperative models among producers) and in the realm of personal affections and feelings. The Marquis has no love for his own social milieu; he feels far more at ease among the peasants, with the old servant woman who raised him, and with the mistress for whom he killed. His madness stems precisely from the contradiction between an unfettered, almost “superhuman” will, and the inability to shake off cultural and social conditioning, superstitions, and the dread of divine retribution. Why read it? It is an absorbing read and a strikingly modern novel. The figure of the Marquis of Roccaverdina is emblematic of an inner conflict typical of our own time.

Anna Maria Ortese returns to Naples, a city from which she has been absent for many years. Officially, she was commissioned to interview young Neapolitan writers, some already renowned, others destined to become so: Prisco, Rea, Incoronato, and La Capria. A long chapter recounts, precisely, her visits to these authors, and we come to understand how the city’s immediate postwar cultural and political awakening had by then dissolved, leaving behind disillusionment, resignation, and pessimism, and driving an exodus toward Rome and Milan. When she meets Prunas, the guiding spirit of the review *Sud*—by then defunct, yet around which so many intellectuals had once gathered full of ardor and hope—Ortese perceives > an infinite grief and curiosity: you must have pity, those extinguished eyes seemed to say, you must avoid looking. Is it true that we are dead?, he asked, is it true that we have been absorbed by the city, and are now at peace? (...) The city had destroyed him. And why should it not have destroyed him? All had fallen here, those who had wished to think or to act; all tongues had grown confused and had gone to swell the sorrowful human vegetation. This nature (Naples and its people) could not tolerate reason, and against man it mobilized its armies of clouds, of enchantments, so that he might be dazed and submerged. The journalistic inquiry is merely an expedient: the author wishes to lose herself, to become disoriented, to seek out a “vision of the intolerable,” possible only in a city, like Naples, in which everything is > conceived, imagined, dreamed, and even artistically realized, but not real: a disquieting representation . The book opens with several sketches of Neapolitan life, the most accomplished of which is undoubtedly the first, *Un paio di occhiali*. In a putrid, foul-smelling district, the sun touches only the highest balconies, while the rest is nothing but shadow and filth; yet the people joyfully greet the sunny day, as though > that air, that celebration, and all that azure suspended over the paupers’ quarter were also theirs. A poor girl, nearly blind, anxiously awaits the eyeglasses that her family has purchased for her with their meager savings. Yet can someone who has never seen what reality is truly like bear the sight of it? Is it not better to see everything blurred? > Eugenia, still holding the eyeglasses with her hands, walked as far as the doorway. (...) Suddenly the balconies began to multiply (...) the vegetable carts were tumbling down upon her; the voices filling the air, the shouts, the whipcracks, struck her head as though she were diseased. (...) So many holes, so many ants ; a sense of bewilderment seized her, reality was too intense to bear. Following these sketches—brief, elegant, and evocative—comes the account of a visit to a massive tenement building, which houses families who can no longer afford a decent apartment. The author is guided through the long corridors, from the first floor, composed of dark, foul-smelling dens, up to the third floor, where the dwellings are cleaner and brighter. The trajectory of those who enter the building is always the same: at first they reside on the highest floor, only to descend, inexorably, lower and lower. > The children, once neat and cheerful, in that darkness became covered in insects and their faces grew ever more somber and pale, the young women took up with married men, the men fell ill. No one ever climbed back up from down below. (...) There was something calling from down below, and whoever began to descend was lost, but only realized it at the end . The vast tenement is a metaphor for the anthropological, social, and existential condition of Naples, where the plebeians and the bourgeoisie coexist, mutually indifferent, like > shadow, weakness, neurasthenia, resigned fear, and impudent gaiety . In the preface to the 1994 edition, Ortese admits that > the writing of the *Mare* has something exalted, febrile about it; it tends toward a high pitch, borders on the hallucinatory: and almost everywhere on the page it exhibits, despite its rigor, a certain excess: in it, all the signs of an authentic neurosis are manifest . This judgment is the perfect diagnosis of the book: the individual pages, sentences, and words are often magnificent, rich, and capable of fully rendering situations and emotions; yet the whole remains disordered, confused, and unresolved, such that any conclusions must be drawn from the author’s own words. It is an outcry, a desperate indignation against a reality that is, for Ortese, “incomprehensible and hallucinatory”: the demise of the dream of Naples’ rebirth, and therefore a defeat. Why read it? It is exceptionally well written, and above all, the visit to the vast tenement possesses an astonishing vividness: a true masterpiece.

The novel is set in Sicily in the first half of the nineteenth century: an ancestral, arid land, > a sun-scorched expanse, hills upon hills, tumbling over one another, bare, parched, stony, scattered with rare and stunted olive trees, with dusty prickly pears . Ever since his youth, Mastro Don Gesualdo has toiled relentlessly to amass wealth and > defend his property against everyone, to pursue his own interest, with not a single person in the town who was not his enemy, or a dangerous and dreaded ally . Moreover, as a commoner outside the circle of local landowners, he must therefore > always conceal the fever of profit, the blow of bad news, the surge of joy; and always keep a closed face, a watchful eye, a grave mouth! He has the opportunity to escape the marginalization to which his peasant origins condemn him: he can marry Bianca, a member of the ancient yet decadent aristocratic Trao lineage. At a reception hosted by an exponent of the local nobility, Don Gesualdo ( > freshly shaven, dressed in fine cloth, with a brand-new hat between hands eaten away by lime ) makes his entrance among the town's notables, only to realize that marriage will not allow him to lower his guard. And it is precisely to take revenge for the icy, contemptuous reception of his marriage by his wife’s relatives that Mastro Don Gesualdo flouts all local traditions by taking on the lease of the communal lands entirely alone, and at an exorbitant rent. The description of the auction is one of the finest passages in the novel, depicting the landowners as they attempt to repel Don Gesualdo’s assault, then seek to invalidate the auction, and finally try to broker a deal—exerting pressure on Bianca as well, and thus appealing to the very kinship ties they had previously repudiated. Yet our protagonist presses onward along his path, steadfast in his position > with his foolish little smirk, the only one who did not lose his head in that bedlam . Don Gesualdo’s victory—first and foremost a social one—concludes the first part of the novel, undoubtedly the most accomplished, owing to the detachment with which Verga narrates, through brisk and rapid dialogue, the dynamics of money and relationships within the local petty aristocracy. The characters seem like puppets trapped within their social roles: there is no psychological introspection; instead, the cold facts speak for themselves. Subsequently, an ideological and stylistic shift takes place: the novel descends into a sugary sentimentalism, taking on the characteristics of a serialized feuilleton. Bianca proves to be an obedient yet distant wife, who shows neither affection nor intimacy toward Don Gesualdo, thereby reaffirming the disparity of their social origins. Their only daughter, Isabella—perhaps the product of an earlier liaison of Bianca's—grows up spoiled and contemptuous toward her father, whom she too regards as a coarse peasant, failing to grasp his sacrifices and toil. Don Gesualdo, now aged and ill, sees the estate he accumulated with such hardship squandered by his daughter and son-in-law, and dies amidst indifference and solitude. And yet, even on his deathbed, he commends to his daughter > his property, to protect it, to defend it.... He explained what his estates had cost him... he reviewed them all lovingly.... he described them minutely, clod by clod, his voice trembling, his hands trembling, the blood still flushing his face, tears welling in his eyes . Only out of a pang of conscience does he implore his daughter to give something (“you will consider it a gratuity”) to the illegitimate children he had by a servant woman—the only person who ever truly loved him. Numerous critics consider the novel to be the > demystification of the social climber.... implicitly aimed at striking at the core values of bourgeois society itself (Romano Luperini 1968) and the chronicling > of the rifts induced in the fabric of an archaic economy and a peasant society by a capitalist-bourgeois economy and society, governed by a brutal, exclusive economic code, by the alienating logic of wealth and possession (Vitilio Masiello 1972). This interpretive approach is superficial and reductive when set against the complexity of Verga’s pessimism. While it is true that the author has his character state that “everyone in the world pursues their own interest, and goes their own way,” it is equally true that the accumulation of property is perceived by Don Gesualdo as a calling—one about which he can only lament, but from which he cannot escape. Likewise, the other characters are all trapped in a social destiny that forces them to live in existential—and at times physical—misery. One need only consider the figure of Bianca herself—among several others in the novel—who is forced to marry a man she does not love and spends her entire life frail and ill. And so, perhaps, the true interpretive key to the novel lies in the impact wrought upon the human personality by an immobile, static social structure that permits neither ascent nor escape. One of the earliest commentators on the novel observed that Verga never reveals > his characters through the internal workings of their soul: he makes them act, he does not show them in the act of thinking (Guido Mazzoni 1890). This authorial approach lapses into superficiality and obscurity in the second half of the novel, where the narrative pace becomes relaxed, fluid, yet conventional. In the first part, up to the magnificent auction scene for the lease of the communal lands, the predominance of dialogue over narration and the reliance on brief character sketches are remarkably original literary devices designed to distance the author and capture the protagonists, highlighting their total surrender to their social roles and effacing the inner stirrings of thought: they are not conscious subjects, but societal marionettes. Why read it? It can at times make for demanding reading, but the novel’s first part is well worth the effort.

The novel is set in Vietnam and recounts the dramatic ordeal of a company of the American military, forced first to garrison an outpost in the middle of the jungle, then to abandon it when deemed useless by military command, and finally to retake it in a bloody battle. Matterhorn is a mountain, a circumscribed territory, a microcosm that allows the author (a highly decorated former Marine) to narrate the absurdity of war and the perverse mechanisms that sustain it. And he does so from the perspective of the soldiers, all very young. In war, a soldier is nothing but > the ash of a cruel game... nothing more than a collection of empty events that will end up as a faded photograph above his parents' mantelpiece. They too will die, and relatives who do not know whose photograph it was will throw it away . In war > the people one loves will die to give meaning and life to what was always thought to be senseless words, a language of death . The novel is structured in three parts, which can also be interpreted as a kind of military life path of a young man, still a student: from his initiation as an officer to his forging in the epic struggle against the enemy, down to existential despair and the loss of the only bond that holds value in war: friendship. Mellas is a nineteen-year-old officer who, as dictated by an absurd military tradition, is sent to the front despite his inexperience. Mellas must make decisive choices for his own survival and that of the soldiers entrusted to him. They move through a hostile environment, amid fog, jungle, aggressive insects, and ferocious beasts. The enemy is invisible, and one often fires without knowing whether anyone is truly there or if a target has been hit. Yet the young officer is never alone, for the commanders—comfortably safe, drinking and smoking—hound him over the radio, demanding his position, the enemy body count (often fabricated to pacify them), and the reasons why he does not act with greater resolve. > Already weary from lack of sleep, Mellas was now fighting the physical exhaustion of hacking a path through almost impenetrable brush, climbing muddy slopes to gain a ridgeline, to search for a path, a trail. He was drenched in both sweat and rain. Strain, Weight, Flies, Cuts. Vegetation. He no longer cared where they were or why.... (still) three hundred and ninety-nine days and then stand up and walk away . Yet Mellas, too, is seized by ambition, by the desire to advance his career. He volunteers to go on patrol with a few soldiers. Deep within the dense tropical forest, they finally encounter a Viet Cong fighter, who is mortally wounded. He is a young man, just like him and his comrades. Terrified, he begs for help, but Mellas knows that the only real mercy would be to kill him rather than leave him as prey for the tigers. He cannot bring himself to do it and returns to the outpost in tears. He cannot accept that this is what war is, and > in doing so he opened himself up to the pain of seeing thrown away the bonds tying those slain enemies to those who loved them: mothers, sisters, friends, and wives. Command has decided that the company must abandon the outpost and reach another location as quickly as possible, still deep in the jungle. And the Marines are forced into an exhausting march, dragging behind them the wounded and even the corpses of fallen soldiers—one mauled by a tiger, another killed by a strain of malaria found only in that specific region of Vietnam. Because they failed to reach this new outpost—every bit as useless as the last—within the allotted time, the company is designated as an emergency reserve for the front’s most precarious sectors. Mellas wants to protest such an unjust decision, but his friend Hawke reminds him that one must play politics—not for one's own sake, since they are merely reserve officers after all, but because command, out of spite, might withhold the helicopters needed to resupply companies at the front and evacuate the wounded and the dead. The helicopter is a weapon of blackmail! In the novel's second part, Mellas's company is sent to retake Matterhorn, now occupied by the enemy. Military command does not know how many Vietnamese there are, but it does not matter. A heroic feat must be performed to cast the regiment’s senior officers in a favorable light and advance their careers. The company finds itself embroiled in a horrific battle. It is an epic narrative, a kind of *Iliad*, complete with its heroes and martial episodes. What drives the American soldiers is certainly no ideal (why are we here? the soldiers ask themselves; does Vietnam have gold, oil, or some other raw material?). What moves them to extraordinary acts of valor is brotherhood and rage: saving their comrades, recovering the wounded or at least the dead; fighting with the conviction that their true enemies are the very men who led them into this butchery. And then there is the taste of killing for killing's sake. Tension and fear forge a bond between enemies, who are as if bound together in a web of violence and death. In the third part of the story, Mellas is wounded in combat and consequently sent to convalesce. Yet upon his return, he discovers that during the lull, the company has been gripped by the racial strife between whites and blacks that plagues American society—a conflict that had temporarily vanished during combat operations. The solidarity and friendship forged in combat merely suspend social and racial rivalries. War is not a moment of genuine change; it only habituates one to violence. Indeed, his friend Hawke is killed in an attack orchestrated by a faction affiliated with the Black brothers. Nothing truly changes; they are merely shadows, > moving through this landscape of mountains and valleys, changing the character of things as shadows move but leaving nothing changed when they leave. Only the shadows themselves can change . War triggers an individual transformation, not a collective one. It is undeniably a war book, one in which the epic element prevails. Yet it would be reductive to view this novel merely as an account of the Vietnam conflict, a sort of prose poem, a modern *Iliad*. It is not merely that. It is an indictment of war. Narrating it from such a circumscribed space—Matterhorn and its surrounding territory—already allows the reader to enter the mundane yet tragic reality of individual men's experience, shedding the overarching, particularizing frame of the Vietnam conflict. It speaks of war—of any war. Then there is the figure of Mellas, undoubtedly autobiographical. The young man refuses to accept the inexorable laws of military life and war. Yet he rejects them not out of nostalgia for civilian life, which for him, as for the others, is already considered forfeit. He refuses to accept the futility of the decisions, the gratuitous suffering inflicted upon the soldiers, and the killing of enemies—unknown to him, yet fellow human beings with lives back home, young men who also had a future. It is the chronicle of the tragedy of all wars. The book is very long, meticulously detailed, and at times slips into reportage. By the end, one grows somewhat weary of so much slaughter. Yet this is perhaps the author's very intent: to sicken us with war. Why read it? It is a magnificent war book.

The novel, written in Italian, is set in a country never named, yet readily identifiable as Iran, before and after the Khomeinist revolution. There is perhaps a protagonist, Reza, but he is a figure merely "brushed upon," about whom we know little because his character and fate are determined by the circumstances and personalities of the other characters. Or perhaps he has no need to express himself because "he > is steadfast, with just the right dose of opportunism and selfishness to survive, while those around him are too fragile to endure in a harsh and cruel world. The novel is structured into five chapters, corresponding to the characters who shape Reza's fate. In the first chapter, Akbar takes advantage of the people's credulity to replace his stillborn son with an infant, Khodadad, abandoned on his doorstep. To do so, however, he must cry miracle, thereby offending faith and sealing the fate of Khodadad, who from that moment on will be marked as one favored by God, as one capable of raising the dead. Akbar then commits another sin: he makes love to his sister-in-law, who will later give birth to Reza. The entire narrative thus originates from a dual deception, and it is as though a curse hangs over all subsequent events. In the second chapter, Khodadad, no longer able to bear the role of the miraculously saved > , flees together with Reza to seek a new life in the big city. To convince his friend to follow him, Khodadad leads him to the cemetery, where there is an empty grave, already dug so as not to be caught unprepared by God's inevitable summons. Going to the city, the boy says, is the only way we have to save ourselves from that end there." Yet the practical and prosaic Reza rightly replies to him, "if it's not there, it will be elsewhere > . Life in the city proves far more difficult than they had anticipated, though it must be said that Reza adapts much better than Khodadad. During an altercation with their master, who refuses to pay them, Khodadad is mortally wounded while Reza kills the man. The two boys flee, deciding to part ways. And so Khodadad fades away alone, with the sole consolation of the angel of death, Ezrail, who swayed him, singing in his ear, in a whisper, the lullaby of oblivion, the only one he knew > . In the third chapter, the novel recounts the sad tale of Donya, which, it must be said, hews a bit too closely to the plots of many a nineteenth-century tearjerker. After a wretched adolescence brought on by a cruel stepmother, the girl falls in love with the classic gentleman > of good family and is forced to marry a man she does not love—namely Reza, who has in the meantime become a skilled and prosperous mechanic. Between the two there is neither love nor, even less, passion; yet while Donya suffers deeply from an incomplete, comfortable marital life, brightened by a daughter but emotionally barren, Reza seems content enough, accepting—perhaps with excessive submissiveness—his wife's coldness. Donya's only moment of relative happiness consists of visiting the cemetery of a nearby shrine, where the woman imagines praying over her dead mother's grave: she sits on the ground, and with a small stone knocks three times to draw her mother's attention and let her know she is there to pray for her soul > . Donya's life might have drawn to a prosaic close in a resigned yet peaceful marriage (Reza is, after all, a decent man), were it not shattered, driving her to suicide, by the tragic end of Mahtab, her beloved daughter. The fourth chapter is without question the most dramatic, in many respects harrowing. The girl is arrested by the Khomeinist police, tortured, and strangled. Her only fault is being engaged to a lawyer who defends his clients—often impoverished prostitutes—with excessive fervor. And at the moment of death, Mahtab takes refuge in wonderful childhood memories, imagining she hears her father's words. The darkness and the crack-free silence cradled her. A warm, gentle voice soothed her eardrums with words that reached her liquid, light > . In the final chapter we discover that Reza has had a long relationship with a prostitute, Laleh. It is in fact she who financed Reza's business, enabling him to become a wealthy mechanic. On the verge of death, she longs for Reza to come and say goodbye to her—she who had always helped him. Yet he does not come. If she recovers, he will come and take her away, so he told her. So much pain? He doesn't come. Yet she does not resign herself. The night still seems very long. Sleep does not cradle her. Will the end ever arrive? > For many commentators, the meaning of this book lies in the quotation of verses by a great Iranian poet, which read we played amidst this for a while, then we ended up, one after the other, in the basket of oblivion > . We are not the ones who forge our destiny, which is, in any case, a trifling thing before God. Without doubt, the novel is steeped in a profound religiosity, a sort of existential resignation that finds peace only in the notion that all of life is God's will. Yet one also senses, throughout the book, an abiding desire to escape from the prose of existence: an escape that ultimately can be achieved only through death. To be resurrected lighter and with wings, she tells herself. She must become lighter, with wings, and fly far away. Far away from there. Up high. But then? How to find one's bearings? Which compass to look to? Which qibla to trust? And what if she gets lost all over again? The book's principal virtue is its prose: simple, elegant, delicate. The numerous dialogues do not thin out the narrative; on the contrary, they allow for a deeper exploration of the characters. The complexity of Iranian society emerges vividly, caught between a deep-seated religiosity and modern aspirations. Lingering too extensively on detail, drawing out the various characters' stories, causes the tension to slacken and works against a sharp focus on the fundamental themes, which are neither easily discerned nor fully developed. Why read it? Splendid prose, an intriguing and at times gripping narrative.

It is singular to open the review of a Hungarian novel by invoking Hideo Fukukawa's *Tokyo Soundtrack* (see the review on this site). It is precisely the geographical and cultural distance that makes the comparison compelling. While the Japanese narrative chronicles the environmental and social unraveling of Tokyo, here the same theme unfolds in a Magyar provincial town swept up in a slow, inexplicable disorder, as if > that lethal, utterly down-to-earth reality seemed irreversibly destined to evaporate. Numerous were the unmistakable signs: the garbage piling up in the streets without anyone collecting it, the increasingly frequent power outages, centuries-old trees collapsing, public transit in chaos, few and frightened people about, even hordes of cats, > enormous beasts, gone feral, (...) returned to the primal instinct of predators, witnesses and emperors of an announced twilight—yet apparently postponed indefinitely— , akin to the dogs and crows of *Tokyo Soundtrack*, and to the wild boars, coypus, wolves, and other wild animals that now roam our streets, alongside the triumphant rat population. > A quagmire over the swamp (...) was the ideal foundation for the situation, [with] the feeling that houses, trees, streetlamps, and advertising pillars were sinking into it. It is a prophecy, if we think of our world seeming to slide into an insidious future, with us living in "a hopeless waiting." It is no easy task to identify the narrative threads of a tale steeped in magical realism, deliberately confusing and fragmented (and how could it be otherwise, when what happens is no longer rational?), marked by extensive, even philosophical digressions, by an ironic and paradoxical tone reminiscent of Kafka. I shall attempt to do so by starting with the protagonists, who, as the great German scholar Erich Auerbach remarked of Dante's characters, are a "figural representation": human beings, with their personal destiny, and allegories of timeless ideas of decline and disorder. Let us take the first character, Mrs. Pflaum; we meet her in a hilarious scene: traveling on an overcrowded train, beside dirty and uncouth people, she herself so neat and orderly. Equally amusing is the description of the small house amid > the immaculate objects of the apartment, and everything seemed to her perfectly in order, (...) it was utterly clear that all those who, like her, lived in their quiet little nest , would avoid the terrible things happening outside. How many Mrs. Pflaums do we know who are certain that tending to plants, polishing furniture, and small daily routines protect them from devastating misfortunes! Then there is Valuska, > this exceptional artist of ecstatic life , convinced that he has found harmony in the perfection of the constellations; he gazes up at the sky so as not to see what happens on earth. He does not notice—or is quite content with the fact—that his drinking companions mock him when he reconstructs the Moon's rotation around the Earth with living bodies. How many of us seek refuge in abstract ideals to avoid grappling with reality? There is also the musician Etszter: he resigned as Director of the Conservatory upon realizing that piano tuning flattened sounds into an abstract and unnatural harmony, and now lives shut away in his apartment, playing an out-of-tune piano, pontificating on the irrationality of the real with his only pupil: the kind, simple-minded Valuska. How often are we forced to listen to authoritative philosophers on the crisis of the West, or rather on the Apocalypse awaiting the earth, because our European "City of Light" cannot defend the values of the Enlightenment and Christianity! And finally, there is Mrs. Etszter, with her enormous, sensual body, > feeling herself mistress of the future, she looked upon the town with the eyes of a bold heiress, convinced that she stood on the threshold of a radically new era, fraught with promise, which would sweep everything away. But just as occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century, when many signs portended the end of a world seemingly joyful and secure, yet it took the eruption of the First World War to overwhelm that golden age, so too the arrival of a circus displaying the mummified carcass of an enormous whale shatters the fragile, declining equilibrium; and nothing is ever the same again. To halt the looting and brutalities, directed perhaps by a mysterious figure known as the Prince (the devil, the personification of Evil?), one can no longer beat around the bush, take shelter in modest domestic peace, daydream about distant worlds, or philosophize about whether "the real is rational"; what is needed is the firm, energetic hand of one who knows how to command. The town readily yields power to Mrs. Etszter, the personification of authoritarian rule. We might sorrowfully stop here: it seems undeniable that only dictatorship can grant us that craved tranquility, our cherished little domestic habits. Yet, perhaps, > the workmen of destruction (commanded by the Prince?) are still at work. As in Thomas Mann's *Buddenbrooks* (see the review on this site), the final chapter is devoted to the body's dissolution in death: a detailed and precise description reminding us how man, in his long evolution, has seen > billions of restless things, poised for continuous change; he had seen how they engaged in stern dialogue with one another, without head or tail, each on its own; billions of relations, billions of stories, billions, yet reduced to a single one that contained all the others: the struggle between that which resists and that which attempts to overcome resistance. In a recent interview (*La Stampa*, October 25, 2025) Orhan Pamuk states that > too much ethics kills literature. (...) Literature is not meant to make moral judgments. It is an art of connections, of understanding. It allows us to enter the minds of people we do not like . And I would add: it answers humanity's need to listen to and tell stories, to become passionately invested in characters, to love and despise them; literature teaches us the complexity of the human being. All of this is missing in Krasznahorkai. To be sure, the characters are described as human beings, with their weaknesses and characteristic traits; but there is no psychological depth—they are treated ironically, without empathy, the prerequisite for understanding. This holds particularly true for Valuska, who is ultimately the protagonist. His description always remains on the surface, never going beyond a paradoxical depiction of him: > the postal greatcoat, along with the leather shoulder bag, cap, a pair of boots. But who is this young man, already destined for the asylum like the village idiot? What are his feelings? Why his trusting bond with the Conservatory Director? Everything remains unresolved. The novel's paramount merit is its writing: long periods, dense with parenthetical clauses, unfolding without interruption—a flow of words and sentences that grips the reader. It is an exhausting read; one must read many pages at a stretch to enter the narrative style, allowing oneself to be guided by the author through the narrative's numerous threads; yet after fifty pages or so, one must pause, catch one's breath, and summon the strength and willpower to continue. In the end, fatigue prevails, and, it must be admitted, one cannot wait to reach the end. Why read it? The writing is intoxicating, at times thoroughly amusing.

Albino is a young peasant who lives above a lake with his mother, an alcoholic, taciturn, and emotionally detached woman. From the sparse details of his past life, we learn that he spent his childhood in France, lost his father as soon as the family returned to Italy, served as a soldier in World War II, and was held in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he likely contracted tuberculosis. Within Albino dwell a nostalgia for a happier time, a need for points of reference (his mother, religion), and an unshakable conviction that he is being persecuted (by officers, by doctors, and later by factory foremen), coupled with a confused anarchism rooted in the peasant world in which he was raised. The lake stands as an allegorical representation of a solitary disquiet. > Blue mists hung over the lake, neither high nor low; only over the lake, like smoke. The sky was clear, and already high up, beneath the veils of day, was a small moon: > see, Albino, I thought, if only all your troubles were like those mists that the moon will surely have consumed by midnight. (...) I touched my shoulders as I had as a boy during my illness, tasting the flavour of myself, a thread of my youth. It is 1946 when Albino presents himself at the Personnel Office of a large factory to be hired as a milling machine operator. From this point two narrative strands branch out, developing in an intertwined fashion: one sociological, the other existential. Volponi, with his experience as an industrial manager, portrays the alienating factory environment with great precision: before their workstations > everyone had a taut muscle, or clenched lips, or squinted eyes, or furrowed brows. It means everyone had a thought pounding inside their head, ricocheting throughout the factory and still pounding. (...) The work itself offered no relief; it required no accompanying thought, it went on by itself pulling our hands along, because inside the factory nothing else was possible. Unlike what emerges from Ermanno Rea’s novel ( *La dimissione* > see the review on this site), there is no discernible sense of belonging to the product, to the machines, or to the organization of labour: the factory is a hostile body; Albino stands apart, feeling no solidarity with the others, nor does he accept the corporate hierarchy, which even suggests he act as an informant. A trade unionist friend tells him, > but you always keep to yourself. Was I under attack, then, because I was alone? , Albino wonders. Despite his illness and his accusations against the factory doctors, Albino is protected by Management (who knows why?), who assign him a quiet job as a gate guard. It is right from the factory gate that Albino witnesses one of the first post-war strikes and rushes to warn the canteen staff to refrain from work, in order to support the workers' struggle (today, it is difficult for us to grasp the importance of the canteen). This act of insubordination is unacceptable to Management, and they fire him. Were this the whole story, the novel would merely be a fresco of 1950s industrial Italy. But Volponi seeks to convey an existential malaise that transcends the historical context and the theme of alienation—a topic pervasive in the Marxist commentary of the 1960s. The author imagines Albino writing a kind of confession, through which he seems intent on definitively coming to terms with his state of abandonment. > As always, I watched the lake gradually swell beneath my eyes on the climb toward home. In the clarity of the afternoon, the lake had no subtleties of tone, no arms reaching out toward the countryside and the trees; locked within its shores. And its colour neither shone nor spread outward. (...) At that point I realized that no one could come to my aid: not the factory, not my comrades, not the doctors, scoundrels or not, nor much less my mother: > I am a drop/the first or the last of a downpour/fallen from the gutter/when in the air/no rain was expected,/not even that drop./my drop is lost, /no one enjoyed it. In his fine preface, Giuseppe Lupo regards the novel as an elegy for the factory, for a world set to the rhythm of machines that has savagely displaced the cycle of seasons and agricultural labours that once defined rural life. Of this transition, Giuseppe Lupo seems to suggest, Albino is both victim and bard; hence the solemn, dreamlike rhythm of the novel. It is remarkable that an industrial executive at Olivetti, such as Paolo Volponi, should have written a work at once so realistic and existential, with tones that seem to verge on psychoanalysis. If we consider that *Memoriale* is Volponi’s debut work, we must forgive its narrative confusion, needless repetitions, or digressions; and we must do so because Albino's malaise seems to mirror Volponi’s own, caught between managerial rationality and poetic tension. Written in the form of a confession, the first-person narrator is Albino himself. The extensive reading in the sanatorium and the leisure time spent in the library must have taught the poor peasant a great deal, given how well the novel is written: fluid, if at times convoluted, phrasing, tight dialogue, and descriptions of the rural landscape steeped in symbolism (echoes of Pascoli resonate throughout), contrasted with an oneiric realism when depicting the factory. What the novel lacks is plot: it stretches out needlessly over many pages, losing concision and growing prolix. Why read it? The marriage between industrial rationality and the magic of the peasant world is compelling.

In the preamble, the author himself divides the tale into two parts. In the first, entitled "Underground", > the character presents himself, his views, and seems to wish to elucidate the reasons why he appeared, and was bound to appear, in our midst, that is, how in the era of positivism and dominant reason, it was necessary to acknowledge a primordial force within man—one rising from the underground, driving one to be wicked, to debase oneself in abjection, making one cry out with self-satisfaction: > I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. It is thus a philosophical manifesto, a nihilistic culmination concerning human nature. In the second part, "Apropos of the Wet Snow" (a title one might expect from a Japanese novel), the protagonist narrates an episode from his life meant to explain the ideas and impressions voiced in the first part. It is as if the protagonist, forty years old at the moment he expounds his theories, returns in memory to when he was twenty and to an encounter that altered his life. If we liberate ourselves from the framework cunningly proposed by the author, we realize that Woman lies at the heart of the tale. A clear hint is already present in the verses quoted by Dostoevsky at the opening of the second part: "when, out of the darkness of error, /(...) you told me the story of what had been before me/and suddenly, covering your face with your hands,/overcome with grief and shame,/indignant and appalled,/ you wept..." (Nikolay Nekrasov, 1846). Here it is a young prostitute, Liza, whom the protagonist meets in a brothel and urges to turn her life around, offering his help. He had been captivated by her > fresh, young, rather pale face, with straight, dark eyebrows and a serious, somewhat astonished look. In making her this reckless promise of redemption, our protagonist is not moved by genuine empathy. > A sordid thought was born in my mind and crept through my whole body like an unpleasant sensation, akin to descending into a damp and musty cellar. (...) Now, however, the absurd idea—loathsome as a spider—of depravity became clear to me, which, without love, in a brutal and vulgar way, begins precisely with that: the crowning of true love. There is, as it were, a faint boundary between subjugation, the pleasure of humiliating, and sincere, pure affection for a Woman; between love as lust and Love without ifs or buts. And when Liza arrives at the protagonist's home, he pursues a cruel game of insults and spite, almost as if it were the poor girl's fault for having caught him in a shabby dressing gown— > filthy, wretched, disgusting, (...) a scoundrel, a rogue, a loafer, no longer the hero of their encounter at the brothel. And then *a strange thing happened*. Humiliated, insulted, in the face of abasement, Liza > had understood, above all, what a woman always senses before anything else, if she is truly in love: namely, that I was unhappy. (...) I had not even imagined that she had not come to hear pitiful words, but to love me, because for a woman all resurrection, all salvation from whatever ruin, and all rebirth lie in love alone, which cannot manifest itself except in love. Unfortunately, > we are stillborn, and for a long time now we have not been fathered by living fathers, and we like it more and more. We do not know how to recognize and accept Love. The tale is an existential, introspective, and philosophical analysis of an antihero, or rather of a split within the Self, between our self-representation in fantasy and literature and concrete life, in which we are no longer great men, but petty and wicked beings. I do not know whether D'Annunzio ever read *Notes from Underground*, but without doubt the novella's protagonist seems to foreshadow the characters of our writer's novels and plays: supermen in art and abject in life. It is not the protagonist-narrator who remains etched in our imagination; on the contrary, we ultimately grow weary of the redundant flood of words behind which he takes refuge. It is Liza who gradually emerges—from a wretched prostitute into a woman wounded in her betrayed love, in her proud refusal of a payment brutally thrust upon her. She is a dynamic, non-stereotypical figure, the only one to evolve within a static narrative where situations and characters seem pinned down in their functions, beginning with the protagonist. It is no accident that *Notes from Underground* did not achieve critical or popular success, precisely because it lacks plot and the development of human figures in their psychological and spiritual dimensions. Why read it? It is of great interest for understanding Dostoevsky's "philosophy".

> When I was four years old, in my father's house, life tasted of true happiness, and before my siblings and me lay the opening of a fairy-tale existence . Memories, nostalgia, and a sense of one's own rank are the distinctive traits of this autobiographical novel, set in Ethiopia and Italy between 1925 and 1946. The author is the daughter of Dejazmach Nasibu Zamanuel, a prominent figure of the feudal aristocracy, a hero of the resistance against Italy, who was poisoned to death by mustard gas—a weapon the Italian army deployed extensively during the 1935 invasion. Martha was driven to write the novel “by a sense of duty”: to shed light on the events that devastated her family and to convey the > astonishing atmosphere that emanates from my country, evoking its colors, flavors, and customs, as well as the vitality of a refined, generous people who deeply respect the dictates of the Christian values upon which they founded their very existence (book presentation, Rome, July 17, 2006). The book is divided into two parts. The first recounts the author's childhood through her mother's stories and the wonder-struck eyes of a little girl. What emerges is a dazzling, sumptuous, magical world, remote from our time and from the reality of Ethiopia itself. These are vignettes of life centered around the figure of the father. At a grand social gathering of the feudal aristocracy, in the presence of the Emperor, Dejazmach Nasibu appears > draped in a diaphanous shamma with broad red silk borders, his broad shoulders cloaked in a blue velvet cape embellished with gold trim, (...) in the saddle of his magnificent white horse harnessed with rich trappings gleaming with gold ornaments. (...) In the cloud of dust kicked up by the tumultuous gallop, a young woman riding sidesaddle drew alongside him . She is Martha’s future mother, the daughter of a Russian prince, and love seems to blossom from the splendor of these two nobles and Ethiopian high society. It is pointless to ask inopportune questions, such as inquiring into what brutal exploitation lay behind such magnificence; we too, like Martha, are captivated by “very distant memories,” when one feels sheltered by parental love, games can go on indefinitely, and > no one would ever have foreseen that anything could disturb the course of our lives . On October 3, 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia with a well-armed army of 350,000 men, supported by aviation. After a glorious yet futile resistance, ground down by the spraying of nerve gas, Ethiopia surrendered. The magic dissolves. > Memory, as if erased, fails to bring forth even the faintest recollection of those moments. Of what followed, nothing remained with me but a feeling of numbness . Augusto Graziani, appointed Viceroy of Ethiopia, consents to spare the hated family of Dejazmach Nasibu, but exiles them to Italy. We arrive at the second part of the book. The narrative sheds its fairy-tale qualities to become the painful chronicle of a wandering exile: after a stay in Naples, they are sent to Tripoli, then to an oasis in the Libyan desert, where Graziani perhaps hopes they will perish from hunger and disease. Brought back to Tripoli, they are sent to Rhodes, subsequently to Val di Fassa, and then to Florence, where they live until the city’s liberation amidst hardships, aerial bombings, and strict police surveillance. One might expect hatred toward the Italians; not in the least: not only the Italian populace, but the fascists themselves—the *federali* and government officials—seem to display a singular tolerance toward Nasibu’s family: in short, «*italiani brava gente*!». We cannot discern whether it is the adolescent Martha’s optimistic gaze that views events in a positive light, or if this benevolent attitude was genuine, perhaps owed to the family's princely status. It matters little: what is missing is Martha's inner lived experience, as she enters adolescence during exile; there are delightful episodes (such as the evacuation to San Giustino and her camaraderie with the children of the small village) and vivid, painterly depictions of nature through which we understand how the young Martha was captivated by Italy’s beauty. Our country must have left an indelible mark on the young princess’s maturation, given that, once back in Ethiopia, she would leave again for a new exile—because her deeply loved native land, in the end, felt too confining. On the other hand, “life is a story”: we remember only that which contributes to the depiction of ourselves. Let us detach ourselves for a moment from Ethiopia and from the crimes of Italian colonialism, rightly recalled by Angelo Dal Boca in his passionate preface to the book: let us dwell instead on the theme of remembrance. In a regrettably forgotten novel (*Il Giorno del Giudizio* > , reviewed on this site), Salvatore Satta, as death approaches, retraces the Nuoro of his youth through a gallery of portraits, and distant faces reappear (...) and perhaps as I think of their lives, because I write their lives, they feel me to be a ridiculous god who has summoned them on the day of judgment, to free them forever from their memory > . Martha's memoir is entirely different: even amid so many calamities, both of her country and her family, the characters and events resurface as if bathed in a bright, clear sky, beneath a canopy of stars, in vivid shades of bright azure. "How beautiful this world is, Mama, (...) It looks like paradise to me!," the child Martha exclaims at the sight of Naples from the sea. It is truly regrettable that the narrative failed to preserve in its second part the vividness and magic of the first. The drop in tension, the inability—or unwillingness—to evolve the narrative into a *Bildungsroman* and, why not, a work of social and political reflection, are all factors that compromise the overall quality of the story, ultimately rendering it verbose, banal, and tedious. Why read it? The first part is a splendid fresco of Ethiopian society, a magnificent cavalcade of memories.

> We know next to nothing about her, and that's that. The fact is she was good at her job and liked being in charge, and that’s where everyone’s troubles began. Masters like having good workers, but they don't like being bossed around. If they had listened to her, they’d be richer still, but we always remain poor and slighted, even in death . This is how Don Paolino, former chauffeur to the Alfallipe family, sums up the fate of Maria Rosalia Inzerillo, known as the Mennulara, who died at the age of fifty-five. The novel opens with the woman’s death and slowly unravels the mystery of this «criata» (servant): born into utter poverty, she was forced from childhood to work harvesting almonds (hence her nickname); taken into service in the Alfallipe household, she became the shrewd administrator of an ailing estate; and ultimately took the helm of the family, ensuring its financial survival. This is how Orazio Alfallipe describes her, recalling the day he fell hopelessly in love with her. > I saw her, slender and petite. (...) She wore a pale slip, wet from splashes of water. I trained the binoculars on her, spellbound by the rhythmic sway of her body, her small, pointed breasts, and her youthful, harmonious arms. She was beautiful. (...) She watched me circumspectly, yet without fear. What is that?, she said, pointing to the binoculars. (...) Teach me how to look, she said. (...) A sense of wonder welled up in my chest, overwhelming me... The Mennulara’s death upends the small town of Roccacolomba, in a timeless Sicily: people pass judgment, often harshly critical, on the woman’s life, gossiping about the funeral and especially about the Alfallipes' conduct. The latter are convinced that the Mennulara harbored substantial hidden funds; they expect a rich inheritance, but find no such testamentary provisions. Growing increasingly exasperated, they fail to comply with the woman's directives regarding the obituary and the funeral. Yet even from the grave, she continues to direct the family, forcing them to do her bidding; in particular, she leaves precise instructions to retrieve ancient Greek ceramics and have them appraised by an expert. Because these artifacts had been purchased from grave robbers—and thus could not be legitimately traded—the Mennulara had commissioned copies, and it was these that were submitted for appraisal, securing a certificate of forgery that would allow the pieces to be taken abroad and sold. Blinded by greed and foolishness, the Alfallipes cannot conceive of so clever an expedient; their disdain for the Mennulara, a mere «criata», leads them to suspect some obscure deception. Yet hadn't she served them all her life, salvaging their estate? She was a servant, nonetheless. Upon reading the appraisal, they believe they have been duped; overwhelmed by rage and hatred for the woman, in a fury they shatter both the counterfeit copies and the authentic originals. Before the astonished and amused town, they divest themselves of their long-awaited inheritance and squander the last vestiges of their respectability. In devastating the ceramics, they also obliterate the «mute witness» to the relationship between Orazio and the Mennulara, and to their shared passion for art and history. Must the feelings of a «criata» be respected in a timeless Sicily? Certainly not. The question is whether the Mennulara is a positive figure, an engine of social change, or if her story is, once again, the testimony of a defeat, the acceptance of an inevitable and immutable destiny. Indeed, the Mennulara believed she could elevate herself («she had estranged herself from people of her own station») without altering social hierarchies; she renounced everything, endured a clandestine affair with her master, bore the contempt of the Alfallipes—for whom she was the cornerstone—and, in the end, failed to preserve her spiritual legacy, the collection of ceramics, the testament to an existence. The Mennulara is a defeated figure. But so too are the numerous characters of Roccacolomba: they gossip, at times they seem to rebel, at others they voice wise and benevolent reflections, yet they invariably yield to power and social immobility. This is the profound meaning of the novel, as well as of the figure of the Mennulara: there is no civic future for Sicily. The novel is nearly flawless up to page 152, up to the scene of the ceramics' destruction. Then, for reasons unknown, the author felt compelled to lay bare the Mennulara’s life, resorting to lengthy explanations rather than relying on the plot and the interplay of characters. It was needless, detrimental to the overall pacing of the narrative. It was a pity, as it drained the tension from the story. Why read it? It is enjoyable, engaging, «a majestic entertainment» (Aldo Busi)

Elisa wanders through the rooms, in silence and solitude, and when she unexpectedly catches sight of her own reflection, she seems to see > a shape moving in these funereal, solitary waters, (...) like a jellyfish , not a saint: “rather a witch.” It is precisely to explain the sorcery that led her to shut herself up in a few rooms that Elisa offers us the tale of her family: and it is “an appearance of shadows,” a “fantastic malady” that speaks of love and death, as in fairy-tale books: “with thee, Fiction, I gird myself, fatuous raiment.” The novel can be divided into two parts. In the first, Elisa has not witnessed the events and characters she narrates: everything is filtered through the reminiscences of those who were still living when she was a child, or through clues, papers, and places. On the other hand, > the past and the future are two fields of mist and vertigo, which the living cannot explore except through fantasy and memory. (...) What is the use of plumbing this palace of death? The mere attempt to plumb it produces anguish and nausea, as when one looks out over a precipice . We will never know whether what she tells us is true, not least because it reads like the narration of a grand deception, of lies meant to cloak the beloved in “fire and splendor.” Thus the maternal grandfather is a scoundrel and a sluggard, yet he captivates his daughter Anna with wondrous tales of travel, jewels, honors, and glory; and Anna forgets that she lives in poverty, venting her rage on her mother Cesira, a petty and desperate woman. The paternal grandparents are hardworking peasants and could have been an anchor of solid substance: their son Francesco, however, was born of the mother’s fleeting affair with a rogue, himself a fabulist and a peddler of "smoke > . One should not be surprised if Francesco, upon going to study in the city, introduces himself as a baron, and one with revolutionary ideas to boot. And what of Edoardo, the wealthy cousin of the destitute Anna: charming, with feminine features, vacuously intelligent, enamored of himself, ready to love, beguile, and betray anyone, purely for the ambiguous pleasure of amusing himself. Anna and Francesco are too naive not to fall into his tempting coils: Anna falls in love with her cousin, dreaming of a bond that can never materialize due to the difference in social standing and, above all, Edoardo’s character, far too superficial for an enduring and responsible relationship; Francesco believes he has found a true friend in Edoardo, unaware that he is being led by the hand from a genuine love (that of the prostitute Rosaria) toward a yearned-for and idealized one, his passion for Anna. And so Anna and Francesco find themselves married, as if under a spell: Anna loves Edoardo and binds herself to Francesco out of despair, while the latter has deceived the woman, masquerading as a wealthy landowner and a young man on the rise. At this point Elisa steps onto the stage, no longer merely the narrator. Henceforth ended is my privilege of attending, a solitary spectator, a comedy of spirits. (...) A lucid insomnia takes hold of me, and in this taciturn and deserted room, henceforth I can interrogate nothing other than my true memory. I can recount nothing, that is, except the things I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and of which my father and mother, in their differing insanities, made me their confidante and witness > . To be protagonists is an act of maturity, and at the same time of sorrow, because one cannot defend oneself with imaginary remembrance. Memories, like animals that have lain in hibernation, stir at my call, and approach me with velvety, funereal steps > . The experience of the adolescent Elisa is truly extraordinary; she is not merely a party to a toxic and perverse relationship, the cause of her parents’ psychophysical decline; the girl is swallowed into a kind of triangulation with Francesco and Anna on one side, and on the other the ghost of Edoardo, dead of consumption. To humor Concetta, Edoardo’s now-deranged mother, but in reality to gratify herself, Anna invents an epistolary exchange of letters from her cousin. What virtue did this counterfeit correspondence possess? > Dwelling within it, full of feast and fire, was a Thought: (...) it possessed inspired movements, chivalric demeanor, and a coquetry cast, like a bold and light armor, over its bitter voluptuousness. Moreover, its shadowy beauty flaunted adolescent fatuity like an oriflamme, that dear, venial fatuity > . But who was truly the author of this correspondence? The Cousin in his ethereal form as a ghost, or Satan, as might appear from the infernal postmarks > of the letters, or Anna herself, as any doctor would have said, hybrid fruit of a poor, morbid mind”. Were this so, “the counterfeit Epistolary turns within me into a mirror, in which Anna’s beloved face appears to me so disfigured and contorted that memory, will, and fantasy urge me to choose a lie in place of this diagnosis. (...) Of Anna, of this twofold idol of mine, of my sleeping, precious Phoenix, it makes an object of wretchedness and pity. And finally, over the fantastic Epistolary, over our renowned correspondence, it sheds the dismal pallor of insanity, and the shapeless tedium of death > . And then the fantastic Epistolary, just like the novel as a whole, comes to be a stanza of love”, a desperate way by which “the spirit that presides over childish things” seeks to overcome death, “at least in play. The novel has a nineteenth-century architecture: a complex plot, meticulous description of settings, in-depth character analysis, richly vaporous prose of refined elegance. One must not, however, be deceived; if love and death are tightly interwoven—because as soon as one loves, one already knows the beloved will perish—only dreaming, fantasizing, lying to others and to oneself allow us to survive, to keep suffering at bay. The sorcery lies in this: Elisa prefers to shut herself in the solitary rooms, pursuing her own shadows, rather than reckon with reality and retrace the demented aspirations of those who came before her. Does the novel not speak, perhaps, of Elisa’s consciousness? Might it not be the fruit of her diseased mind? Only Alvaro the Cat, Elisa’s faithful companion, knows. When every light is quenched, kindle your pupils in the dark, o torch of my half-sleep, and the solemn truce cracks, a thousand ephemeral torches blaze, childish tigers chase one another in sweet deliria". In reading *Menzogna e Sortilegio*, the mind turns to Thomas Mann. We are in Southern Italy; the colors and characters are those of our South; and yet there is the same demolition of the traditional novel, and one breathes the very same air of decay, of slow decline toward death. Its excessive length is regrettable: we are before a work of great originality, which deserves to be rediscovered and read anew. Why read it? Splendid writing, and long live the imagination!

The inside back cover likens the book to Umberto Eco’s *The Name of the Rose* and Ken Follett’s *The Pillars of the Earth*. Nothing of the kind: if one insists on finding a literary reference, one might point instead to *The Da Vinci Code*. The setting is the Middle Ages. A merchant arrives at a monastery in the Polesine region. He is in search of a mysterious book, but also of a young novice who was raised among the monks. From here begins a sort of treasure hunt across Europe’s major monasteries (Santiago de Compostela, predictably, could not be omitted) to recover fragments of the mysterious text and piece together, through various clues, a puzzle of meanings and magical formulas. Throughout this quest, the merchant and his companions (the young novice and a valiant French knight) are pursued by the knights of the Sainte-Vehme, a mysterious and powerful chivalric order. What follows is a succession of ambushes, surprises, and dramatic turns. Naturally, the story has a happy ending, yet it leaves the reader disappointed, unable to understand what was so significant about the long-sought book in the first place: could it be just another sham? The novel is clearly a thriller, yet it lacks all the ingredients that could grant it depth and distinctive character. The medieval setting is pointless. Beyond the sequence of monasteries, there is no thorough or evocative world-building rooted in a genuine grasp of the customs and culture of the period. The characters are flat, and even the figure of the merchant, who might have possessed some allure, comes across as cold, incomprehensible, and superficial. The book is packed with plot twists, yet they are never preceded by an atmosphere of suspense; as a result, they remain entirely predictable, both in their unfolding and in their outcomes. It feels almost as if the author focused exclusively on the plot, only to become entangled in a tangle of episodes and circumstances. Why not read it? Unless one is thoroughly exhausted and in need of something requiring minimal concentration, it simply is not worth the time.

The novel centers on a series of castrations and subsequent murders, which turn out to be the work of a cult. It is an unsuccessful effort, undoubtedly falling short of the author’s other books. The narrative is tedious, flat, and at times contrived (consider the stay in Russia): it lacks the original hallmark of Bartlett’s books, which lies in the depiction of the author’s character, her worldview, and her approach to life.

Monica lives in New York and wants to be a writer; instead, she works in a clothing store. After a series of romantic misadventures, she meets an English publisher (a veritable “Prince Charming”), who not only falls in love with her but enables her to publish a book. This is a novel riddled with clichés (Monica lives with a ditzy Puerto Rican woman who gets pregnant, and a gay man), sappy sentimentality, and banalities. The story could just as easily be set in Rome as in New York, and utterly lacks any depth in its exploration of emotions and events. Yet do such books really find success?

Michel Strogoff > was tall, vigorous, broad-shouldered, deep-chested... he could endure to the utmost cold, hunger, thirst, and fatigue : an iron body and a heart of gold. In this manner, Verne introduces the protagonist right from the outset. The setting is Tsarist Russia, likely in the second half of the nineteenth century. An army of Tartars is overrunning Eastern Siberia and threatens to seize its capital, where the Grand Duke, brother to the Emperor, resides. At the head of this horde of "barbarians" stands a traitor, bent on presenting himself to the Grand Duke, winning his trust, and ultimately capturing him. Michel Strogoff is entrusted with the mission of warning the Grand Duke in time, journeying across a Siberia torn by war. It is an epic endeavor, an extraordinary mission. This adventurous undertaking can be divided into three parts. In the first, which is rather dull and predictable, Strogoff travels incognito as a merchant, crossing European Russia, the Urals, and then the first Siberian steppes. Right from the start of the journey, he encounters a young woman, Nadia, who must make the same trek to join her father. Strogoff decides to accompany the young woman, believing that doing so will make it easier to avert suspicion regarding his true mission. Here emerges a defining trait of the protagonist—dissimulation—which contrasts sharply with the loyalty and sincerity of the other characters who stand by him, particularly Nadia. A dramatic scene brings about a turning point that injects pace and intrigue into the narrative: Strogoff and the young woman are captured by the Tartars; the protagonist is forced to watch his mother about to be beaten to death, reveals himself as the Tsar's courier, and is subsequently blinded. From that moment on, Strogoff becomes dependent on Nadia, who serves as his guide. This section of the novel is the most compelling, as the protagonist's vulnerability makes him human, less of a superhero; moreover, amidst the ever-adventurous and dramatic developments, other characters appear, generous and eager to lend assistance. Finally, the third part is dominated by grand set pieces, where natural perils intertwine with the drama of battle. Strogoff and Nadia, along with other refugees, journey down an ice-choked river aboard a raft. By a stroke of fortune, they manage to reach the capital, besieged by the Tartars, where the traitor has already infiltrated—only to be slain by Strogoff. The story would be flawless were it not revealed at the end that Strogoff was never blind at all, but had feigned blindness so as to be left free to move, given that the Tartars would have deemed him harmless. Yet how could he lie even to his friends, and above all to Nadia, who had helped him asking nothing in return, out of pure love? In the preface, the commentator views this novel as an "obstacle course" in which "a hero above suspicion" overcomes every trial simply to achieve his goal. It is from this that a sense of coldness, contrivance, and determinism arises, where feelings have no place, relegated to the background in deference to duty and the assertion of one's own strength and will. It is the other characters who offer flashes of human richness, from which the author seems to swiftly retreat, taking refuge in stereotypes. The harsh, grim Siberian wilderness forms the backdrop of the novel—in a sense the true adversary of the superhero, Michel Strogoff. It is a pity that here, too, imagination is lacking; it is mere geography, without the description of Siberia ever sparking the reader's imagination. Why read it? The story is gripping, particularly in its second part. Certain scenes are mesmerizing, such as the Tartar feast with its exotic dances, the epic descent down the frozen river, and the final battle.

*Microcosmi* is an assemblage of > fragments that little by little coalesce into an orderly novel, whose structure and meaning reveal themselves (to him) at the end, as happens in life . And life is an assemblage of places, > places and things, scarcely separable from beloved persons and from the image of the world that envelops them . The first fragment is the Caffè San Marco in Trieste, setting the keynote for the narrative: a journey where one never moves. > Sitting at the café, one is on a journey; as on a train.... one cannot leave a vain personal imprint on anything, one is nobody. In that familiar anonymity, one can disguise oneself, shed the self like a peel . And what could be more motionless and yet vital than lagoons and great forests? The narrative proceeds with an evocative, memory-laden description of the sea at Grado and the forests of Monte Nevoso. Here, the forest is not a natural or fantastical place, but rather > at once the exaltation and erasure of borders, a plurality of different and conflicting worlds, held within the great unity that embraces and dissolves them . the following chapter, devoted to the Turin hills, creates a placid and gentle atmosphere (perhaps serene and happy years for the author), leading us to think that > even disappearing could be a celebration, like losing oneself among the hills that in the evening resemble a sea, great and calm waves of a long, powerful breath . And one feels the urge to «go up to one's room and let the world manage on its own». The subsequent chapters (The Absyrtides, which concerns the Croatian islands, in particular Lussino and Cherso) and Antholz (a valley in the Tyrol) lead to places (never explicitly stated) where the author spent his vacations. They are the book's less fortunate pages, overburdened with historical citations and settings difficult for the reader to identify. With the chapter dedicated to the «Public Garden» (a true literary gem), Magris abruptly brings us back to his own childhood, evoking it through a child who carries a dying goldfish to the park's small pond in an attempt to keep it alive. The Garden is a place of recreation, but also of prohibitions. Venturing into the garden is, for the child, like plunging into deep water, finding himself «beyond all those doors that usually bar entry to its secret heart». The Public Garden mirrors the complexity and variety of the human psyche. The self, like the Garden, is a dark forest, an assemblage of open clearings, ancient centuries-old trees, and recesses: > the forest is all around, but one is not inside the forest; invisible thresholds bar the way... one is outside, excluded from the woods, which perhaps begin a meter further on, but the door to enter and reach that gnawing and murmuring cannot be found . The child's return home introduces the final chapter, with the mysterious title «The Vault», which finally speaks explicitly of an episode from the author's life, bringing forth the figure of the mother with poignant tenderness. As in a dream, the child remembers an air raid and the flight into a shelter inside a church. The child is frightened, yet he is together with the others («throughout the church, people greeted one another, shook hands, some embraced») and so > he was not surprised to see her beside him... go to sleep, she told him, I'll wake you when the time comes . He is afraid, but he hears voices that reassure him. They are > two voices, almost identical to his own, the children who had filled the house, the days, life itself, telling him not to be afraid . The cycle of life comes to a close, from childhood to old age, among loved ones. *Microcosmi* possesses several virtues: the author's literary device of chronicling the places and people of his life without ever resorting to the first-person “I,” a felicitous choice in an era as narcissistic as our own; the exceptionally elegant prose, which frequently rises to the level of poetry; the depth and acuity of many reflections, tossed off with seeming nonchalance—veritable aphorisms. It is difficult to discern an overarching meaning across these narrative fragments. One might, perhaps, offer a psychoanalytic reading: revisiting the most significant places of his life allows the author to return to his childhood, to his mother, and to forge a link among the disparate moments of existence. Then there recurs the metaphor of the door—that is, the difficulty of entering, but entering where? Perhaps one's own consciousness. The book's virtues are also its flaws: there is no plot, the references and digressions are often tedious, and the narrative style easily slips into erudite mannerism, losing its candor. One senses the learned Germanist, somewhat snobbish and unwelcoming. Why read it? Reading the entire book is a heavy task. It is worth lingering only over the chapters devoted to the Caffè San Marco, the Turin hills, and the public garden—the latter being a genuine masterpiece.

The book recounts the story of Callie Stephanides, born with female characteristics that evolve into distinctly masculine traits with the onset of adolescence. Sexual ambiguity, stemming from a genetic trait, determines the life of the protagonist, who is unable to accept himself—a male with underdeveloped sexual organs—until the very end of the novel, which chronicles several generations of his family. The novel can be divided into three parts: the saga of the grandparents, who fled to America from a Greece besieged by the Turks; the parents' story, followed by Callie’s childhood as a girl and young woman; and finally, the discovery of this sexual ambiguity—in truth, long suspected by the protagonist—leading to the decision to live as a male and the flight from the parental home. The best part of the novel is undoubtedly the first, as the narrative subsequently loses its evocative power and momentum, becoming increasingly tedious and predictable. The novel revolves around two fundamental themes: the ambiguity of individual identity, for we can embody multiple individuals and cultures all at once; and genetic inheritance, in the sense that we are what the evolution—biological included—of our family has somehow determined. Environment, life’s vicissitudes, and the people one encounters are all crucial factors, but what leaves the deepest mark is our history, for which we bear neither responsibility nor blame. In a historical period where every affliction is traced back to behavior, the book offers instead a return to a comprehensive view of the individual’s inherent traits. From this perspective, the novel proves superficial when called upon to describe the protagonist’s turning point, wherein he decides to reject the doctor’s attempt to force his nature toward the feminine and instead embrace a new life as a male. What impels him in this direction? How can he so effortlessly abandon a world of feelings and behaviors that had governed his childhood? Is cutting one’s hair enough? The novel fails to address any of this, and the family saga seems to prevail as the underlying narrative focus, overshadowing the protagonist’s experiences and inner life. Perhaps this is why the pursuit of a cultural identity (the Greek heritage blending with the American) appears far more pronounced than the sexual and individual one, which ultimately feels like little more than an expedient device to render the novel more alluring.

Can "a person's life be the mirror of a country"? To this question Rushdie responds not with a historical-biographical novel (the classic story of a family intertwined with that of a nation), but with a fantastical, imaginative, and astonishing tale. The protagonist is born in Bombay at midnight on August 15, 1947, the day of India's independence, but also of Pakistan's separation: the so-called "partition." And through this coincidence he has been mysteriously "tied to history" both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively. Duality is the guiding thread of the narrative, of the protagonist's life as well as of the vast Indian subcontinent, characterized precisely by interdependence and diversity at once. The author imagines that the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, narrates his family's story and his own up to 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Saleem's grandparents are Muslims originating from Kashmir, the "mother" of Indian Islam. His grandfather, a Westernized doctor, had been called to treat his future wife, permitted to examine only parts of her body, which remained covered out of modesty. He had therefore fallen in love "in pieces." It is a primary metaphor that recurs frequently throughout the narrative: that of fragmentation. Just as the > ghost of that perforated sheet condemned me to see my own life, its meanings and its structures, in fragments as well , the detachment of Pakistan weighed like a curse upon the new nation, leading to an endless conflict with India. Saleem's grandparents have a daughter who, after her marriage, moved with her husband to Bombay in India, where Saleem was born. At the moment of birth, the midwife swaps the couple's real child with Saleem, who thus usurps his place as a well-to-do child, while the other is destined for poverty. Does independence, then, bear the mark of betrayal? On the day of Saleem's birth, a thousand children were born in India. All possess extraordinary powers, and Saleem has the incredible faculty of communicating telepathically with them all: that is, he manages to forge in his mind an interdependence among distant children with entirely different languages and customs. The mystery of this great country is metaphorically fulfilled—constituted, at the moment of independence, by over five hundred states and a religion, Hinduism, made up of thousands of local deities. How can a country so vast and so fragmented hold together? In 1966 Nehru died, ushering in the era of Indira Gandhi, who introduced authoritarian rule culminating in the phase of the so-called Emergency, when she instituted an outright dictatorship. Saleem's family moves to Pakistan, where they hope to be safer from discrimination and violence against Muslims. Here, strangely, Saleem loses his telepathic powers (has Indira destroyed the unity of the country?). He enlists in the Pakistani army and goes to fight in Bangladesh against the Indian army. Having deserted the army, by then in total disarray, and after hiding in the jungle (a metaphor for the abyss into which India had fallen?), he flees to India, where he marries, lives in a village of acrobats and musicians, and takes up political activity, notably alongside a snake charmer. He seems, perhaps, to have found his path, when Indira Gandhi's crackdown erupts and Saleem discovers that he is one of the few surviving children born on August 15, 1947, > because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to have no private life of their own and to be sucked into the cauldron of the multitudes, and to be unable to live and die in peace . Alongside the bond between personal life and national history, the novel also confronts more intimate themes: Saleem's ugliness (afflicted by an enormous nose), his incestuous love for his half-sister, and the nostalgia for childhood, which, nevertheless, "disappears, or rather, is killed." And the pride of childhood is precisely one of the most intriguing and universal themes of the book: the ability to hide and to travel in one's mind, through one's own imagination, creates a unity that does not exist in reality: > Wonderful irony; the Widow (Indira Gandhi), by bringing us here to separate us, has in fact brought us together! Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our captivity; let the Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility! Children: we have won ! As happens all too often with Rushdie, the pursuit of baroque, wondrous prose overpowers the narrative, which seems to become—especially in the final part of the book—merely an occasion for "special effects." Already lengthy in its own right, difficult to follow—owing also to its references to Indian history—as one advances through the reading, one becomes completely lost in a deluge of words, neologisms, and complex, rhetorical syntactic structures. One must allow oneself to be carried away by the prose, yet at times it is a struggle to read on. Why read it? The core premise is truly remarkable, just as it remains a remarkably timely book for us Italians: the duality between interdependence and diversity, between unity and fragmentation, constitutes a defining trait of every Italian. Having managed to depict this in imaginative terms represents the fundamental merit of the book. As Paolo Bertinetti wrote in the daily newspaper *La Stampa* on August 12, 2017, the novel's greatest merit, > besides a very fine sense of humour and a pyrotechnic gift for linguistic invention, lies in dismantling the criteria of verisimilitude by placing reality and dream, realistic narrative and mythic invention on the same plane .

The impetus to read this short novel arises from the desire to understand why we read books, and consequently why we are so enthralled by the bookstore—that singular shop where paper volumes, large and small, yet always charming and inviting, rest upon the shelves. Who among us book lovers would not want to work in a bookstore! In this case, we are speaking of a secondhand bookshop, some volumes valuable, others commercial, in a Tokyo neighborhood where one sees nothing but bookstores on either side of the street. “A playground for book lovers,” murmurs Takako, the protagonist and narrator, after emerging from the subway station. She left a secure job after a disastrous love affair and has spent months shut away at home, sleeping all day. An uncle phoned her—an eccentric character who inherited her great-grandfather’s bookstore—proposing that she lend a hand running the shop, while also offering her a small lodging, crammed with books, dusty, with an overpowering smell of mold: a perfect den for a depressed soul like Takako. There is the risk that daily life will not truly change; after a few hours in the bookstore, she can slip back under the covers to sleep. But there are the books. > Those old books concealed stories unimaginable to me. And I do not refer only to what they recounted. In each one I found traces of the past . In particular, the young woman was struck by a sentence by Kajii Motojiro (a Japanese writer who lived in the first half of the twentieth century): > what does it mean to look? It means transferring onto an object part of our soul, if not its entirety . It is an evident Shinto approach, typical of Japanese culture, which reveals our relationship with the book: in reading, one feels an affinity with the writer and at the same time understands oneself better, in a mysterious involvement nourished by the words as well as by the scent and touch of ink and paper. The book is like a tree, like flowers and their insects, like animals, a landscape, a work of art: it is something that speaks through physical signs. Soon, however, Takako perceives the limits of the book. > In the bookstore I had found warmth and serenity, but I could not settle for that, or I would never have grown. I would have remained fragile. I had to leave, to take back the reins of my existence . We are at page 59; up to this point, the story is intriguing: from here on, it slips into a banal, saccharine tale of a girl in search of herself. To be sure, it would have been an exaggeration to expect a book on literature like Azar Nafisi's (*Reading Lolita in Tehran*, see the review on this site); we would have settled for Sosuke Natsukawa's *The Cat Who Saved Books* (see the review on this site), a verbose and at times banal tale, yet captivating in its hazy, mysterious atmosphere. Treating our indecipherable bond with books and the bookstore as the author has done stirs in us both disappointment and indignation. Why not read it? It is superficial.

The novel is set in a small Istrian village, spanning a period from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. The narrative charts the momentous events of the century just past: the final years of the Austrian Empire, the First World War, annexation to Italy, the partisan war, and ultimately integration into Yugoslavia following the 1947 peace treaty. These historical events had a profound impact on a border community composed of Croats and Italians: the former in the majority and generally poor peasants, the latter a minority of wealthy landowners. Yet it is not the social theme that interests the author, even though it naturally surfaces throughout the narrative, especially in the frequent blending of Croatian and Italian—one of the book's most compelling features. The theme of the story is entirely internal and can be distilled into a single subject: religion and its function for the individual and for a small community. Tomizza envisions an elderly sacristan recounting his life, and that of his fellow villagers, through the succession of parish priests over the years. > How many priests had I not had to deal with: priests with mothers, with sisters, with housekeepers, and priests on their own. During sleepless hours they revolved before my eyes like a carousel reflecting myself and at the same time the political circumstances of their era. I pondered in the dark that each could have appeared better to me, and each worse, depending on the times, but also by virtue of my own changing way of being and assessing them. (...) Why did I stay? It is hard to answer today, for it is hard to be believed. I felt I was serving the church, and through it the community, not the priests, who were all destined to pass away. I had wedded myself to that service, to that duty, even before Palmira, and everything else came second, Palmira included. Yet I was resolved to forge another path for our son, and this commitment partly redeemed me, even in her eyes . This quotation encapsulates the long journey of the protagonist-narrator, which leads him to drift away from religion as he witnesses the decline of the parish he serves throughout his life. > The church is a building like any other; it will end, as is predictable, without making much of an impression: atop the hills one can still see the walls of small churches from centuries past, engulfed by briars. Yet back then there was a recovery, and people returned to the fields as well. Will it happen again? I doubt it. Born to a sacristan, he becomes one while still young. The priests who follow one another are profoundly different: some ignorant and coarse, others overbearing and arrogant, still others frail individuals, quick to sin with wine and women. Only one, a young Croatian priest, seemed to embody what is expected of a man of the cloth. Yet later, when he sees him again as a bishop, he realizes that he too has become false and hypocritical. > From him I would have expected to hear, or at least read upon his face, the disillusionment, the wounds that could not fail to have been inflicted. (...) In earlier times, would he not have been prouder, if not more compassionate? . And so, left without a parish priest to serve, the old sacristan has no choice but to become the chronicler of his people. In the book's final, deeply evocative pages, the protagonist recounts the lives of some of his fellow villagers, such as *gnagna* Zvana Zuncolin, a "stooped, dark little woman," or Michelin, once "a handsome, dark man with gypsy eyes," who spent a lifetime as a drunkard to forget the woman he loved: he remains famous for the phrase, "there are no spare parts for man." The narrative style is not always effortless, yet the reading moves briskly because one remains captivated by the story of a community—first isolated and hidden, then increasingly caught up in momentous events. In Tomizza's narrative, never folkloric or nostalgic, religion intertwines with ancestral pagan customs and new, ostensibly secular and anticlerical mores. And the church is always there, "somehow simply present," with its registers of births and deaths, written partly in Croatian and partly in Italian, in hands both clear and obscure: a presence from which the protagonist wishes to escape, yet cannot, because > it adhered perfectly to that which I had always learned to know and, for convenience, am accustomed to calling ordinary (life), yet it did not completely coincide with it, while still enchanting me, while still helping me discover hidden or unnoticed facets of real life . Yet by thus contenting itself with "its own full power," religion does not resolve the mystery of death, leaving the individual alone and questioning at life's most solemn moment. > Does the void of the heavens descend upon the earth, or does the better life open wide above us? This I did not know, that the world dies with every death of a man . Why read it? Allow yourself to be enchanted by the story of an ordinary life in a small Istrian village, between Croatia and Italy.

> A certain Miguilim lived with his mother, his father, and his siblings, very far from here, (...) in the Mutùm. In the middle of the Campo Gerais, but in a hollow within forest country, black earth, at the foot of the mountains. Miguilim was eight years old . With this fairy-tale incipit, Guimarães Rosa narrates an extended peasant family through the eyes of a child. > Miguilim had no desire to grow up, to become a grown-up; grown-ups' talk was always the same dry things, with that need to be violent, frightened things . In a family plunged into poverty (the father > shouted that he was poor, on the verge of becoming destitute, of having to beg for alms ), Miguilim lives at the heart of a complex social nucleus made of people and animals: the violent father, the uncle carrying on an affair with the mother, the eccentric grandmother possessing a severe and atavistic wisdom, the witch-servant, "so pitch-black, as Death must be," the cowherds and the village folk, the farmyard animals, and so much more; yet none is like his brother Dito—self-assured, protective, capable of standing up to their father. > All at once, it burst. (...) And then came the thunder! It thundered tremendously, again and again; everyone covered their ears, closed their eyes. Then Dito held Miguilim close. Dito wasn't trembling, only he was more serious. (...) Dito was clever and peaceful. (...) Dito never truly quarreled with anyone, (...) Miguilim always wanted not to quarrel, yet ended up quarreling with everyone. How wonderful to be like Dito: suited to all people's hours... . Miguilim is fragile, unsuited to peasant labor, afraid to venture alone into the forest to bring lunch to his father working in the fields; nothing comes of the cowherd's reassuring words when Miguilim asks if he is deformed, nor of the hugs and kisses of the witch-servant, nor even of the purring rubs of the cat Sossoe, > eyes of a green so much less empty --- it was a light inside another inside another, inside another, without end . It is as though Miguilim lived in a world of his own: magical, incomprehensible, wondrous, and terrifying. It is no wonder that Dito's death shatters the boy; he nearly loses his mind, can no longer hide behind his brother's reassuring certainty, and must himself go to work in the fields, grueling hoeing beneath the sun. As in an exquisite fairy tale, a knight on horseback arrives to save him; he addresses little Miguilim directly and hands him a pair of spectacles. > And Miguilim looked at everyone, with such intensity. (...) He looked at the dark forests on the mountain crest, here the house, the hedge of wild beans and sao-caetano; the sky, the cattle pen, the yard, the round eyes and the high windowpanes of the morning. (...) The Mutùm was beautiful. Now he knew it. If in Anna Maria Ortese's *Il mare non bagna Napoli* (see the review on this site), eyeglasses unleash an unbearable reality upon an impoverished girl from the slums, here, instead, the lenses possess a salvific power, as though only the true knowledge of reality could make it bearable. A fairy-tale ending brings little Miguilim's childhood to a splendid close, foreshadowing the great social narrative of João Guimarães Rosa's masterpiece (see the review of *Grande Sertao* on this site). The extended peasant family characterized the social fabric of our country until the 1950s. And yet there are no great novels chronicling the sharecropping and tenant-farming world. *Pinocchio* is the son of an artisan, the Malavoglias in *I Malavoglia* are fishermen, Giannino in *Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca* is the quintessential bourgeois lad, the stories in *Cuore* are too edifying to mirror a social reality; perhaps only the splendid chapter "The Four Seasons" in *Il mulino del Po* investigates the dynamics typical of the peasant world (for *Pinocchio*, *I Malavoglia*, *Il mulino del Po*, and *Il giornalino*, see the reviews on this site). Here, however, Guimarães Rosa retraces a child's early years within the intricate web of relationships of an impoverished reality, entirely geared toward survival, yet one in which emotions churn and dreams remain possible. The relationship between Miguilim and Dito denotes an informal hierarchy in which the more fragile child seeks the support of the stronger personality, forging a privileged and steadfast bond that offers security—one that only the fairy-tale conclusion can replace. In his intense preface, Antonio Tabucchi defines the novella > an operetta with a Mozartian timbre, performed on the magic flute of an uncommon narrator . It is a particularly apt definition: it is the fluctuating cadence between hyperrealistic moments and fantastic ones, of "non-story," that imparts the sense of ambiguous allure that characterizes the narrative. Behind the easy screen of the fairy tale (but is it truly one?), the story > stirs unease and always retains an unattributable valence, on the margins of (or beyond) speculative formulation. Something reminiscent of the savage mind, bound to the mystery of Being . (Tabucchi's Preface). Why read it? Magnificent!

The novel is set in 1960s Milan. A police inspector is called to investigate the disappearance of a young woman, strikingly beautiful yet mentally impaired. He discovers her body, burned at the side of the road, and uncovers a prostitution ring. Through a series of inquiries into the criminal underworld and brothels, he identifies the killers, but arrives too late: they have already been murdered by the girl’s father. The latter, a decent man, is driven to commit a crime by the sluggishness and incompetence of the police in solving the case. It is a heavy, thoroughly bitter noir: a violent, unscrupulous city and a negligent police force. The story is well constructed, with an engaging narrative pace, even if the plot twists feel somewhat predictable. The author’s interest seems to lie more in the depiction of the milieu than in the construction of the plot.

Time fills up "with interminable, communicating galleries," a labyrinth that is by no means guaranteed to lead anywhere. At the heart of the book lies an existential premise: life is a succession of unpredictable crossroads, able to find solidity and certainty only in the pursuit of one's roots, one's land, and one's ancestors. Gioia is a young woman from Matera who has fled in search of a freedom that neither her mother, nor her grandmother, nor she herself would ever have been able even to imagine. She traverses > a brief season of freedom and belonging, lost in the crowd, in the Italian piazzas, Rome, Bologna, Florence Ponte Vecchio, sleeps with a Swiss boy with skin as smooth as a girl's.... shouts the slogans P38 a hole blooms in your mouth, is moved by the sight of red flags, uses their poles as clubs, pulls the red kerchief down over her face, thinks she has the future in her hands . Inadvertently entangled in terrorism, she flees to Paris, where she works as an actress, takes a job in an erotic call center, and loses herself among many men, more often than not allowing herself to be used. Ma quando > she had become a young woman as perfect as inorganic matter, removed from the unpredictability of time she wonders > what is the point?, to whom would she answer? Now that she could be anyone, she was no longer anyone . Then she feels the urge to retrace backward, > moment by moment, everything that had led there. And so, without realizing it, you lose yourself in history . Gioia traces the history of her ancestors back to Grottole, a small town in Basilicata. The starting point is 1861, the year of Italian Unification, and from there she sets out to narrate the fortunes of her family—in particular, of the women who were decisive through their strength and character. The result is at once a social and familial narrative: a fresco of an impoverished and neglected Italy, stagnant for a century before rapidly transforming during the economic boom years after 1960: the dissolution of family ties, of a communal life that represented both the cage and the strength of peasant society. Emblematic, in this respect, is the bleak everyday existence of Gioia’s parents, Rocco and Alba, who watch the same television program in separate rooms, when such incommunicability is contrasted with the lives of their grandparents and great-grandparents, who worked, ate, quarreled, and lived entirely together. That world, once so steadfast and serene, is no more. Gioia, departing anew, sees from the train that > the rolling countryside that had cradled her nostalgia, nostalgia for a cherished sorrow, for tears, for unfulfilled curiosities, for imprisonment, had now lost its virginity. She, who had kicked against it, now mourned its loss and silently held a tearless funeral for it . The book can be divided into two parts. The first, set in Grottole, is a reconstruction—almost a historical investigation—of a social and familial structure. The narrative pace suffers precisely from this descriptive approach, which only in flashes elevates itself toward the transfiguration of history and the deepening of the characters. The second part, describing Gioia’s life through the 1960s and 1970s, displays a modern style, at times disjointed yet effective in conveying the sense of the character’s "derailment." Particularly compelling are the pages in which the author pursues a sort of parallel history: the Gioia who could have been a respectable girl, university-educated, well-married, and with children, versus the real Gioia who has lost herself in the search for her own identity. The compulsion, perhaps, to say too much in too few pages leads to a cluttered narrative, a kind of haphazard jumble of actions and situations. The reader is left disoriented, unable to fully grasp Gioia’s story. Why read it? It is an enjoyable read, compelling in its historical reconstruction, and provides an effective contrast between modernity and tradition.

*The Thousand and One Nights* is an Arabic manuscript likely dating back to the Abbasid Caliphate, between 750 and 900 AD: the setting is the fabulous empire of Baghdad, stretching from North Africa across the Arabian Peninsula to Central Asia and India. Its discovery is credited to Antoine Galland in the early eighteenth century, and from that moment the text spread throughout the West, sparking wonder and scandal: Orientalism was born. Owing to the many versions of the work, it should be clarified that this review refers to the text established from the original manuscripts by René R. Khawan. Let us begin with *The Weaver of Nights*. The king has been betrayed by his wife: a Moor “lifted her legs in the air, slipped between her thighs, and penetrated her.” From that moment on, the sovereign resolves to take a maiden as his bride each night and execute her at dawn. The vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, who “had read books and writings of every kind,” asks her father to arrange her marriage to the king, saying: > either I shall rise in the esteem of my fellows by freeing them from the peril that threatens them, or I shall die or perish with no hope of deliverance, sharing the fate of those who have died and perished before me . Her father attempts to dissuade her with tales urging a prudent, unassuming life, but the daughter, obstinate and self-assured, replies that she could offer him other stories leading to entirely different conclusions. And herein lies the crux of *The Thousand and One Nights*: the word. Through literary invention, fabulation, and poetry, one can confront the direst straits, vanquish evil spirits, and even bend the will of God to one’s favor. According to the widely accepted interpretation—though not strictly corroborated by the work’s architecture—each night Shahrazad tells a story to the king: enthralled, the sovereign spares the maiden's life out of the desire to hear another tale, ultimately making her his lifelong bride. A miracle of the word! The work follows a recursive pattern: a frame narrative within which other stories unfold, all designed to persuade and astonish the listener. The prose narrative is interspersed with verses in a style characteristic of Abbasid civilization. One does well to surrender to its spell; nevertheless, certain common threads can be traced. In the celebrated *The Fisherman and the Jinni*, the central motif is cunning. A fisherman frees a demon imprisoned for centuries inside a jar at the bottom of the sea. Once liberated, the Jinni seeks to kill the poor man. The fisherman preys upon the demon's vanity, challenging him to demonstrate how he could possibly fit into such a small vessel; it is a ruse to seal the Jinni away once more. To the creature's pleas and promises, the fisherman replies with tales displaying the wisdom of poetry: > they might have remained just and pure,/but they abused their power/ and the world in turn oppressed them/(...) behold them restored to their squalor... One would gladly sink into the allure of the tales of the *Fisherman and the Jinni* (echoing the line “if you return, we shall return”), yet we must hasten to illuminate another magnificent tale: *The Porter and the Ladies*. Here the theme is clemency, itself the fruit of love. A porter finds himself in the house of three ladies of consummate beauty, which prompts the poet to say: > inviolate...when I beseech her to grant me/the embrace. Beauty advises her/to show herself generous,/ but Coquetry forbids her to yield . Three one-eyed mendicants arrive, and presently even the sultan and his vizier. A banquet ensues in which the guests are bound by an oath: > whatever you see us do, whatever you observe around us...do not seek to understand the reason . Yet the strangeness of what they witness is too great for the guests to refrain from questioning. Ten Moors appear, poised to behead the reckless intruders who failed to honor their pledge. To appease the wrath of the three ladies, the mendicants recount their life stories and plead for mercy: it will be granted to all the guests, so profound is the wonder inspired by the tales and the pleasure derived from them by the three magnificent maidens! How can one punish when love is being sung? > The woman took the weapon and advanced until she stood before me. (...) I looked at her for a long time. (...) Her cheeks then expressed the feelings that occupied her soul, and the verses of the poet came to my mind: if my mouth is silent, my glances speak/and they will tell you what I cannot say,/for love makes manifest/the feelings hidden within me.(...)/the one is a writer of genius, though his rhetoric is beholden only to the play of eyelids;/the other is no less fine a man of letters/though he expresses himself solely through the eye . We grasp from these lines how the bewitching word is also the fruit of oral and gestural performance, all within delightful company amidst pleasing music, sweet perfume, and the bliss of embrace, consummate > only if supplied with these four elements/youthful age, wine,/a beloved body, gold coins... One may investigate the myriad underlying themes of the work, from the philosophical to the depiction of a society centered on beauty, art, wealth, the supernatural, and magic, set against a prevailing backdrop of sovereign violence and tyranny. Let us not ask too many questions; let us lose ourselves in the tales, in their astonishing plots, in their incredible deeds and figures, the harvest of an exuberant and irrepressible imagination; let us indulge in the pleasure of the many verses, as seductive and mysterious as the following: > the oath that binds me, I have sworn/by the intoxication stirred within me by the flutter/of her eyelid, by the curve of her hips,/by the bewitched arrows she looses at me/(...) the sorrows have fled as at the radiant rising/of the sun, leaving the moon perplexed./Was the star of day ahead of time?/Did it perhaps already wish to put her to flight?... Why read it? Astonishing, magnificent, spellbinding, an explosion of the imagination.

If the tales of the first volume (see review on this site) have a fairy-tale quality, transporting us into a world populated by spirits and magical inventions, here the novellas have a realistic cast; the reading is less enthralling, but we derive from it a portrayal of Abbasid society, of the power of the caliph and his emirs, of court intrigues, and of the resigned obedience of the subjects. In the tale *The Power of Love*, the wretched Ghanin is severely punished on the false accusation of having seduced the caliph's favorite. Blind jealousy drives the "Commander of the Faithful" to persecute the young man and his family. When the caliph realizes his terrible mistake and asks what he can do for him, Ghanin replies that > the servant cannot in any way reproach the master for how the latter saw fit to behave toward him. (...) The servant remains the servant, and the master remains the master ; it is the young man's mother who courageously urges the caliph to reflect upon how fragile human nature is, > how often it is prone to deception and dissimulation. And think of how these wicked inclinations can be exacerbated by jealousy, to which women are all too susceptible. One must not believe that we are dealing with a sort of Arabic *Decameron* or Gogol's *Dead Souls* with a Middle Eastern flavor (see reviews on this site); in the novellas of this second volume as well, prose is interwoven with poetry, the tales interlock with one another, the beauty of men and women prevails, and one flees from reality into the implausible. Is what we recount an illusion? In the opening of the immensely long tale *The Faces of Love*, which depicts a fabulous, boundless world reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's *The Enchantress of Florence* or Abdulrazak Gurnah's *Paradise* (see reviews on this site), the beauty of the young prince is sketched with verses steeped in narcissistic desire: > He is the fawn of the gazelle with a hesitant gait!/He need only take a mirror in hand:/faithful and flattering, it will reflect/the absolute idea of beauty that his dream casts upon it. The finest novellas are those featuring Caliph Harun al-Rashid (who reigned between 766 and 809). It seems that this ruler was > fond of anecdotes, current news, and gossip ; so, disguised as a common citizen, he would go out to discover how ordinary people lived and to play pranks at their expense. How dreadfully dull life must have been in the palaces of Baghdad! In *The Sleeper Who Does Not Sleep*, the caliph, posing as a merchant, makes his way into the home of the honest Hasan; after getting him drunk, he makes him drink a potent sleeping draught; taken to the palace, Hasan spends a night as caliph, believing it to be reality: he is taken for a madman and locked in an asylum. When he comes out, he continues to live no longer knowing whether he is in a dream or in reality. > Why did you instill confusion in my mind, why did you turn my brain upside down?. And "the successor of the Prophet" candidly replies that he does it for pleasure. In the novella *The Caliph and the Madman*, al-Rashid wants to understand whether a person locked in an asylum is truly mad; what emerges is a series of interlocking tales, in a Pirandellian atmosphere, in which the wit of the grand vizier—an ever-present figure in *The Thousand and One Nights*—tests the poor lunatic; it will later turn out that, rather than wit, one should speak of deceit, for the grand vizier wished to prevent the marriage between his daughter and the alleged madman. We leave it to the reader to discover the plot of *The Persian Sage*. Here we shall merely say that a remarkably handsome "cookshop keeper," > he is the stallion/of every grace , manages to win over the splendid princess thanks to a love potion concocted by the wise sorcerer. Let us revel in these delightfully erotic verses: > Side by side, close together, with my own eyes/I saw them, I would have loved/to see them sleep together/upon my very eyelids./They were two gazelles of the desert,/and two radiant stars in the night,/two morning stars, perfect boughs,/and two incarnations of divine Beauty. René R. Khawam, the editor of this edition of *The Thousand and One Nights*, concluded after extensive research that the two books in this second volume, *Wandering Passions* and *The Taste of Days*, complement the better-known ones presented in the first volume: *Illustrious Ladies and Gallant Servants* and *Inhuman Hearts*. Naturally, I am in no position to contest the editor's choices, particularly on an issue so fraught with ambiguity due to the difficulty of imposing order upon this crucial testimony to the Arabic poetry of the Caliphate of Baghdad. It is difficult to believe that we are facing a succession of nocturnal tales, both because of the length of the novellas and because of their realistic framework; poetry too loses weight compared to prose, and the narration no longer possesses the brisk pace of the tales in the first volume. One senses a certain weariness, a certain formalistic and repetitive quality, as though the political and military decline of the great empire were reflected in its song, both nostalgic and despairing. While in the tales of the first volume there is always an ending pointing toward a happy future, here every novella concludes with an invocation of Death, of > the Destroyer of Pleasures and Severer of Gatherings, (...) May God be merciful to us on the day of that appointed meeting. Why read it? It is wordy at times, it takes effort, but it is well worth it.

Najwa is a Sudanese young woman, the daughter of a wealthy and influential family. Following a coup d'état in which her father is imprisoned and sentenced to death, Najwa moves to England with her mother and brother. Here, her life changes radically: her mother dies, her brother is convicted of drug use, and she is forced to work as a maid for wealthy London families, mostly of Arab descent. She crosses paths again with a Sudanese friend with whom she had had a flirtation in her youth, one she had ended because of his accusations regarding her father's corruption. It is a fraught and contradictory relationship: the young man often proves selfish, self-centered, possessive, yet at the same time fragile, while continuing to voice criticism of Najwa's father. In the wake of her mother's death, Najwa is drawn to the mosque community and begins to pay closer attention to Islam, which evolves into a profound faith as her relationship with her partner unravels. Moreover, faith also offers a way to reclaim her roots—no longer national, but religious. Years pass, and Najwa goes to work for a wealthy Egyptian family, where she begins a relationship with a young student, who is likewise steeped in religious ideas. Yet by now the social divide is insurmountable, and their relationship ends the moment it is discovered. The book operates on two levels. The first, and more superficial, is tied to the Muslim milieu. The quest for roots through religion is an ever-present theme, though one left largely unexplored, both in terms of analyzing the underlying motivations for the protagonist's ideological evolution (from a largely indifferent background to deep religiosity) and in the depiction of the mosque community. The second, far more substantial level concerns Najwa's personal plight: her loneliness, her attachment to her family, her yearning to recapture—if only vicariously—the tranquil world of her childhood, and ultimately her ill-fated encounters with men. Najwa's fragility and her desires are ultimately transcended through the very serenity granted by her rediscovered faith. This enables her to take the most painful and difficult step: giving the young student's mother the "key" to persuade him to leave Najwa. > She does not know, she does not know that he has his own frustrations and ideas of the world. She does not know that he is not an extension of her. I tell her. And by telling her I lose him. I give the key into her hands . In this way, Najwa forfeits the hope of a romantic and family life of her own, resigning herself to a vicarious existence, like a nun or an elderly aunt. The novel thus chronicles Najwa's inner evolution from the carefree days of adolescence through life's disillusionments to a restored inner balance—one fostered by faith, but above all by a growing awareness of solitude as a deliberate choice. It is beautifully written in a lucid style, devoid of rhetoric yet felicitously expressive. It is somewhat reminiscent of Nadine Gordimer, albeit less dense and complex.

The true title of *The Miners of Alaska* ought to be *The Great Crossing of the Plains and the Rocky Mountains All the Way to Alaska*; indeed, the search for gold is marginal to the overall story, serving merely as an occasion for Salgari to depict the North American environment as it was related in the nineteenth century. To gain insight into the true history of the American West, and of the United States, I recommend Massimiliano Galanti’s book *La questione indiana* (Odoya, 2016). The formula is classic Salgari. There is the protagonist, Bennie the Great Hunter, described thus: > tall, muscular, with powerful arms, a broad chest, a forceful head covered with long, ringleted black hair that was already beginning to turn grizzled, with piercing eyes and a goatee trimmed to a point . In short, Buffalo Bill! Serving as sidekicks, in keeping with the traditional Salgarian mold, are: a Mexican companion of Bennie's ( > very dark-complexioned, chubby, (...) with pitch-black eyes, the true Hispanic-American type ) and two Italians, survivors of an Indian raid. Falcone has been scalped and miraculously survived; he has an intimate knowledge of the gold-rich mines of Alaska and possesses a crucial instrument for seeking the precious metal: a special sieve that allowed one to separate the gold from the dirt without wading into the water. Armando, Falcone's nephew, has only recently arrived in America, but will prove to be a skilled marksman and an excellent companion to Bennie in hunting and in clashes with the Indians. This group decides to set out for Alaska to capitalize on Falcone's knowledge and his useful implement. The long journey is a succession of adventures: not only escaping treacherous Indians, but also measuring oneself against a wild and mesmerizing nature. The pattern repeats itself with a certain monotony: Bennie and Armando wander away from camp to scout the surrounding area and track down game; they encounter treacherous terrain and must battle terrifying beasts, such as the great brown bear, wolf packs, and stampeding herds of bison. Everything is here: from mysterious dancing plants (tumbleweeds swept along by the wind) to accounts of cannibalism, all the way to the discovery of prehistoric animal remains. It is easy to smile at the travel accounts of nineteenth-century explorers, narratives from which Salgari drew copiously, naturally superimposing his own feverish and inexhaustible imagination. We must allow ourselves to be carried away by a fabulous century, steeped in prejudice and brimming with evocative charm: let us read our beloved author's descriptions of nature with relish. > The moon had set by then, and a dense darkness had fallen across the immense plain. (...) Bennie (...) gazed in all directions, tracking with his eyes the capricious fiery trails of the fireflies, and listening to the monotonous chirping of rejoicing crickets, the distant cries of coyotes, the lowing of cattle . If this reminds us all too much of our own landscape, what can be said of the > meadows formed of tiny mosses of a splendid emerald hue (...) the clearings were covered with expanses of stony, tenacious lichen, resembling dried mushrooms, or tall, pitch-black mosses, soaked with moisture . And from whom did Salgari draw this raw portrayal of the Alaskan miners? > More than human beings, they seemed beasts brutalized by hard labor and privation. They were all ragged, filthy, their shirts blackened by campfire smoke or soiled by mud from the pits, their trousers patched in a thousand ways, their boots worn through and leaving their toes exposed, hats defying description or hoods that had long since lost their fur: yet all wore belts bristling with revolvers and gleaming bowie knives . Were they not armed, they might well be our own miners from Mount Amiata or the mines of Porto Empedocle. What a contrasting attitude Salgari displays toward the redskins compared to the wretched souls prospecting for gold! The former treacherous, cruel, and superstitious; the latter greedy and desperate, yet not devoid of a kind of justice. A child of the nineteenth century, our beloved author could hardly avoid a touch of racism! Within Salgari's vast output, we are dealing with a minor novel, albeit sustained by the brisk pace of its adventures and the pursuit of the marvelous. Plot twists and gear shifts are lacking: the enemies are bound to succumb, pretty much all in the same manner—whether they be Indians, outlaws, or ravenous wolves: a rifle shot, an audacious and unexpected stunt, a prudent and shrewd strategy. Nor is there any dynamic between the characters: Bennie is a hero devoid of passion (did he ever have a sweetheart? did he suffer injustices?), and those who ought to serve as his foils are faded figures, lacking that vibrancy and irony that distinguish so many of Salgari’s minor characters. Why read it? It is packed with adventure; I particularly recommend the chapter recounting the wolf attack.

The book unfolds across multiple plotlines, difficult to trace back to a single narrative thread. A first path concerns the decline of the miniature painting technique, which had flourished in the sixteenth century under the influence of Persian and Chinese art. Ottoman miniature art justified the depiction of images to accompany books on the grounds that real individuals were never portrayed and no personal style existed; rather, figures and landscapes represented the world through the eye of God, constantly reiterating images and styles codified by the old masters and thus legitimized by the authority of the past. In truth, this approach served both as a justification and an ideal, since the miniaturist and the workshop to which he belonged would inevitably introduce subtle variations or innovatively assemble the iconography established by the great masters of the past. The Sultan decides to commission a book illustrated in the European style, introduced to the Ottomans via Venice. Given the sensitivity of the request—which risked provoking a fierce backlash from the orthodox—the execution of the book is not entrusted to the court workshop, but to an elderly artist, Uncle Effendi, who assigns individual illustrations to the workshop’s miniaturists themselves. The account of how the illustrations are executed is rendered by the author in a unique manner: from the perspectives of the various subjects depicted—the dog, the tree, the coin, the horse, Death, the color red. Through this narrative device, the author charts the history of miniature art, which has reached its twilight: following the Sultan’s death, it will be abandoned, deemed non-compliant with Islamic precepts. The history of this art form also opens up glimpses into the history of Islamic civilization (notably the Mongol invasions and the Ottoman-Persian wars) and into its predominant narrative themes, most notably the love story of *Khosrow and Shirin*. A second narrative arc takes the form of a murder mystery. One of the miniaturists murders a colleague and Uncle Effendi. Multiple motives intertwine: jealousy and envy, career ambition, and the conviction that a blasphemous book was being forged and had to be stopped. Here too, the author employs the device of narrating events from the viewpoints of different characters. The manner in which the investigation unfolds is striking: the Sultan entrusts the master of the miniature workshop with identifying the murderer among his own disciples, under penalty of torture and death for all of them. The master detects a peculiarity in the rendering of a horse—a distinctive trait that identifies the illustrator—and subsequently requests the Sultan’s permission to enter the treasury to study the antique manuscripts, thereby tracing the historical lineage of that stylistic mark and identifying the miniaturist through knowledge of his life and artistic development. In truth, the master has little concern for the investigation itself. Resolute in his desire to punish his disciples for betraying him by agreeing to collaborate on the book, his true interest lies in beholding the Sultan’s magnificent treasury one final time. An artistic heritage on the brink of vanishing, along with a history of struggles and creative breakthroughs, unfolds before the master, who resolves to blind himself in accordance with an ancient ritual of the great masters. A third narrative thread follows the romance between Black, returned to Istanbul after many years, and Shekure: a somber tale, for the woman does not truly love Black, consenting to marry him merely to secure her position and provide a father for her sons. These three narrative strands intertwine, drawn together into unity less by their plotlines than by a pervasive atmosphere of nostalgia and sorrow: a world is fading away. It is the great Ottoman Empire, and the confluence of civilizations and cultures rooted in the Islamic faith. Miniature painting cannot withstand the twofold assault of Western culture—which captures “the real” and asserts the artist's individuality—and religious orthodoxy. The master deliberately chooses to dismantle the workshop, realizing he can no longer rein in the aspirations of his disciples. The city’s streets and houses are desolate, love is reduced to mere expediency, and the children themselves appear as pale imitations of childhood. Black, who risked his life to unmask the killer out of love for Shekure, is destined to lead a somber, solitary existence beside a woman who does not love him. Why is it that we either do not change, or we change too fast, relinquishing what was handed down from the past? As the master says: > now I understand that thousands of miniaturists, drawing the very same designs in delicate secrecy for centuries, had drawn the secret and delicate transformation of the world into another world . It is not the plot events that engender this atmosphere of melancholy and decline, but the author’s style, which succeeds—through the juxtaposition of themes and the deliberate choice of adjectives—in creating a lingering sense of suspension and tender melancholy.

The novel chronicles the life of Jean Valjean, a convict who, following an encounter with a bishop (a saint), is transformed into a good and righteous man: he first becomes a wealthy industrialist, then, returned to prison, escapes in order to save and raise a young girl, Cosette, who, upon reaching adulthood, falls in love with a young revolutionary. Jean Valjean rescues the young man from certain death (during the 1832 rebellion), and then chooses to disappear so as not to jeopardize the couple's future with his status as an escaped convict. Yet goodness triumphs and, as the author writes, “the night was starless and profoundly dark.” Doubtless in the shadows, some immense angel had come forth, with outspread wings, to await the soul from the supreme shadow to the supreme dawn. As Victor Hugo wrote: “the book which the reader has before his eyes at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and in its details, whatever its intermittences, exceptions, and lacunae, the march from evil to good. From the unjust toward the just, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from putrefaction to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; destination: the soul. The hydra (evil) at the beginning, the angel at the end > This conception is based on faith in progress (which Hugo identifies with God, and therefore with a humanistic and Christian socialism) and on the uprising of the world of the wretched > driven by unstoppable social forces. From this point of view, the countless characters in the novel become archetypes > , representatives of a role to be fulfilled in the great transformation of the world, and thus devoid of any true depth: feelings and motivations are only ostensibly analyzed and explored; in reality, it is merely a succession of rhetorical devices (the interrogative form predominates) to illustrate contradictions and dilemmas that do not belong to the intimate sphere (and in this sense universal), but rather to a social and historical function. One need only think of the conversion > of Jean Valjean and the analysis of the crises of conscience the protagonist faces throughout the novel (the decision to appear at a trial to prevent an innocent man from paying for his crimes, and the decision to withdraw into the shadows so as not to jeopardize the young couple's happiness): in every case, one is confronted with a sort of divine illumination and moral imperative, while the depiction of the character's resulting misery (due to the loss of Cosette) is flat and schematic. Even more paradoxical and astonishingly devoid of any psychological or philosophical depth is one of the most dramatic episodes in the entire novel. Inspector Javert (Jean Valjean’s relentless persecutor) is caught in a vice between human law, which demands the arrest of the former convict, and his conscience, which compels him to release Jean Valjean, who had saved his life. His inability to break free from this dilemma drives him to suicide. It is clear that Hugo intends to attack bureaucratic, callous approaches to the enforcement of the law—a law that is often unjust because partisan (Javert’s final piece of writing, a mere list of recommendations for the chief of police, is incisive and remarkably effective). Yet one need only imagine what a Dostoevsky would have made of the contradiction between the human conscience and the imperatives imposed by institutional rules and norms to realize how far removed the French author is from the modern spirit, anchored as he is to a cold, moralistic vision of humanity and its struggles. His depiction of French history (from the French Revolution to the Citizen King) is likewise a series of epic events governed by Providence: the very defeat at Waterloo is attributed to a destiny bent on closing the Napoleonic era in order to inaugurate a new phase of social transformation that will lead to the great upheavals of 1848. Yet do individuals and social classes truly exist, or is everything already predetermined by an obscure, immanent force, at once religious and scientific: Progress? *Les Misérables* is a deeply dated work, enclosed within nineteenth-century culture, with little left to say to the man of postmodernism and globalization. As often happens with great authors (take Dante’s *Divine Comedy* itself), the most valuable parts involve components and approaches that cannot be traced back to the stated intentions. Victor Hugo is a Romantic author who ceaselessly pursues the grotesque and the visionary: stylistic traits that occasionally render the reading cumbersome, yet contribute to producing pages of great beauty and suspense. Consider the description of Cosette, an eight-year-old child sent to fetch water in the dead of night, watching the setting of Jupiter and feeling the surrounding nature seem to stir to capture her: the tall grasses swarmed beneath the north wind like eels. The rocks twisted like long claw-armed arms, seeking to seize prey…. > ; of the episode of the trap set by the criminals for Jean Valjean, so full of twists and unforeseen turns; and finally of the magnificent chapter ( Comment de frère on devient père > ) in which the two abandoned children seize the bread thrown to the swans to feed themselves. In a few pages, the author manages to capture the stillness of the Jardin du Luxembourg, the solitude of childhood, the solidarity among children, and the narrow-minded hypocrisy of bourgeois culture. The novel’s true masterpiece is the episode of the elephant: a striking, visually magnificent scene in which a monument built to glorify power becomes the sanctuary of three children. Then there is another protagonist of the novel: the city of Paris. The author’s toponomastic precision, the minute description of streets and houses (many of which had already vanished during Victor Hugo’s own lifetime), provide a romantic setting for the novel and its backdrop. This is prior to the grands boulevards, in the midst of a reticular city where it is easy to lose oneself and disappear. The pages devoted to the Parisian argot spoken among the wretched" are also of great interest, indicating an almost anthropological attentiveness on the author’s part. Yet is the idea of Progress truly authentic, or merely literary and political, concealing in truth a Romantic nostalgia for the Middle Ages and pre-revolutionary history? The novel is, on the whole, prolix, tedious in many stretches, and fundamentally a potboiler.

> Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale, In his ocean home will be, A giant in might, where might is right, And King of the boundless sea . This anthem closes a vast preamble in which Melville, like "a mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub," compiles an extensive catalogue of citations on the Whale, spanning from the Bible to world literature. Self-taught and an insatiable reader, Melville seeks to forestall the accusation of being a mere chronicler of seafaring life. We must not fall into this trap. *Moby Dick* is the greatest sea novel ever written; and it is so because Melville truly lived the experiences he recounts. > I, Ishmael, was one of that crew. (...) With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge . What misleads the reader is the pervasive, intense religious atmosphere; yet it could not be otherwise. For Melville, as for most of his contemporaries, the Bible permeates every facet of life: hence the metaphors, the reflections, and indeed the anxieties that define the novel. The narrative may be divided into four parts. In the first, the narrator and protagonist is Ishmael: still a youth, he resolves to ship aboard a whaler out of a vague yearning for adventure and knowledge. In the mid-nineteenth century, Nantucket stood as one of the premier American ports for fleets engaged in the sperm whale fishery; with a narrative style suspended between Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe, Melville crafts a portrait of it that is simultaneously realistic and hauntingly evocative. One is captivated by the figure of Queequeg, a cannibal with whom Ishmael forges a profound friendship. The pivotal moment is the sermon devoted to the biblical episode of the prophet Jonah, swallowed by the whale by the will of God and saved by God alone. It is no myth; it is the truth, thundered to the faithful (sailors and the widows of men lost at sea), that they may know that salvation proceeds solely from faith, from the literal, devout reading of Scripture. He who flouts the words of the Lord is doomed to self-annihilation and damnation. > The world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow . At last, the vessel sets sail on a long voyage. > We found ourselves almost defenseless upon the hostile ocean. (...) Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dread creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. (...) Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began . (...) As this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return. > The second part introduces the novel's dramatis personae: the mates and the harpooneers, delineated in chapters bearing evocative titles: Knights and Squires > . It is an effective depiction, for what revolves around Captain Ahab, the monomaniac "protagonist," is essentially a feudal system. He looked like a man cut away from the stake. (...) His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus > . Yet it is not his physical semblance that marks Ahab’s defining trait; it is his soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom > . A scene of mesmerizing power concludes this gallery of characters and constitutes a watershed for the entire narrative. Ahab reveals to the crew that the voyage's true quarry is the white whale: Moby Dick. Amid a crescendo of collective frenzy, only the first mate, the pious Starbuck, dissents, knowing as he does that it was Moby Dick who reaped Ahab’s leg. Vengeance on a dumb brute, that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous > . The pious Starbuck is right, the more so because what Ahab seeks is not mere vengeance; the captain repudiates his own destiny, even in defiance of God's will. They think me mad; I am demoniac, I am madness maddened!(...) The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. > The third part chronicles the circumnavigation of the globe's oceans and the pursuit, slaughter, and flensing of the whales. It constitutes a monumental treatise on marine zoology, authored by a scientist enchanted by, if not enamored of, these great cetaceans. Only intermittently does the plot resurface, now narrated in the third person, so that it may cease to be the mere impressions of a boy and become the chronicle of a detached observer. Certain scenes remain indelibly etched in the imagination: the sharks ravenous for blood while the whale is flensed; the valiant Queequeg plunging underwater amidst the sharks to rescue a fallen shipmate who, like the prophet Jonah, has tumbled into the dark cavity of the whale’s cavernous head; and like a divine obstetrician, he, the cannibal, delivers his friend into new life, pulling him forth from the cranial vault. And what can be said of the enthralling Chapter 87, entitled The Grand Armada > , in which the whaleboats pursue a vast pod of cetaceans, complete with nursing dams and their calves? Equally arresting are the gams with other vessels, they too years into their voyages, aboard which one frequently encounters fanaticism and collective lunacy. After all, there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men. (...) For, lurid-like, as the slaughtered monster slues you deeper and deeper into the panics of the herd, our whole panoply of reason falls from us; we live only in a delirious gasp > . At last, one arrives at the final section, an authentic tour de force. The White Whale is finally sighted: the desperate chase commences. A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. (...) From each soft side, (...) from each bright side, the whale shed charm upon the sea > . With that very elegance, yet within a terrifying vortex, Moby Dick hurls himself upon the whaleboats, and upon Ahab in particular. Oh, Ahab, cried (the pious) Starbuck, it is not too late (...) to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him > . What hast thou done, Ahab? How couldst thou contend with the great Leviathan? How couldst thou set thyself against the will of God, rather than surrendering to Him as did the prophet? Without ever losing sight of Melville’s principal design (to illuminate the whaling industry, so little understood and appreciated), *Moby Dick* lends itself to diverse interpretative lenses, and herein lies its modernity. One fruitful avenue of inquiry is to examine the novel through the prism of how humanity has depicted animals across literature and art. A fine study by Gianni Valente ( *Dall’arca di Noè a Moby Dick* > , Edizioni Blu 2004) provides compelling avenues of reflection for assessing the work. Ever since the Bible, our relationship with the animal kingdom has been fraught with ambivalence: symbols of vice and virtue > . We are all familiar with the sinister attributes of the biblical serpent, yet in numerous other passages of the Old Testament, animals bear a redemptive image: as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God > (Psalm 42:1). Animals serve as the expression of a wondrous, vital force; thus are they chronicled by Marco Polo, celebrated in *Orlando Furioso*, and delineated in the travelogues and cartography that accompanied the Age of Discovery. Animals are likewise the object of scientific, artistic, and moral inquiry (witness Leonardo da Vinci). Indeed, all these facets (emblems of vice and virtue, wondrous vitality, empirical science, and morality) converge within *Moby Dick*. The White Whale is an extraordinary monster, the supreme beast of Creation, an emblem of enduring fortitude and eternal solitude, a cruel and terrifying presence propelled by demonic fury. Simultaneously, the great sperm whale is anatomized, dissected with fastidious precision, the subject of dispassionate scrutiny. Viewed through the perspective of our relationship with the animal realm, *Moby Dick* is an unfinished project; it demonstrates the difficulty of establishing a harmonious footing toward our fellow creatures and toward nature as a whole. We project onto the animal our own rational constructs alongside our deepest phobias; we fail to apprehend it as an other > , endowed with an autonomous essence. It is an arduous text, and in many stretches, outright tedious. Its architecture is intricate, marked by an incessant shifting of narrative voice (Ishmael, the third-person narrator, the scientist > , Melville the declamatory orator, Ahab as Melville’s tormented conscience), and by an incessant layering of disparate registers—clinical, evocative, allegorical, and picaresque. The dense fabric of quotations, whose provenances are often vexingly difficult to trace, hardly eases comprehension. The prose is, naturally, laden with the nautical lexicon of the whaling fishery; yet this is not what renders the reading so demanding. Rather, it is the syntax—frequently tortuous and punctuated in a manner that arrests the cadence of thought. It must also be said that one has to let oneself go": surrender the impulse to decipher every nuance, abandon oneself to the evocative resonance of the phrasing, and pursue the musicality of its stride. Finally, the scientific and anatomical digressions regarding the whale are so frequent and protracted as to render the reading genuinely cumbersome; a word of advice: just as one did in one's youth with *War and Peace* and *Anna Karenina*, skip the pages outright, without the slightest pang of guilt. Why read it? It is magnificent; do not labor to absorb every word—heed your own instinct.

The novel opens with the arrival in Paris of Xie Qing, an unassuming and unambitious man, a truck driver who has spent his entire life in Wenzhou, a provincial city near the East China Sea. He finds himself in France having been called to identify the body of his ex-wife, Yan Hong, who died in a car accident. The French police would like Xie Qing to diligently complete the paperwork, collect the insurance payout, and leave the country as soon as possible. Xie Qing refuses, partly because he wants to understand what really happened (his wife made a mysterious phone call before dying), and partly because he wishes to truly know Yan Hong. Ever since their separation, sudden and inexplicable to him, Xie Qing > had never managed to rid himself of the resentment of one who feels cheated . For the reader, the premise seems to herald a tale of intrigue, bordering on a thriller, enriched by the quest for a bond severed yet rooted in childhood and youth. Unfortunately, the novel takes a turn. A wealthy and powerful Chinese woman, who has taken the naive and disoriented Xie Qing under her wing, convinces him to radically change his life. > You didn't ask to go abroad, you didn't even run the risk of leaving as an illegal migrant; you had the opportunity to leave China only because your wife died. And an opportunity like this was your good fortune! (...) A man who embarks upon no enterprise has come into this world in vain . Thus, the unambitious truck driver finds himself involved first in human trafficking, and then in major real estate speculation in his hometown. He partakes, by chance and with no great merit of his own, in the “great enrichment,” built upon criminal acts, corruption, and contempt for the old China, which is nonetheless yearned for with a false nostalgia. > Like a caterpillar that, having painstakingly crawled among leaves and shrubs, turns into a butterfly, Xie Qing felt profoundly different from when he first arrived in Paris. His metamorphosis had been completed when the ship laden with illegal migrants sank in the Strait of Otranto, sacrificing dozens of lives in the prime of their youth . The tragedy, for which he is partly responsible, accelerates the process of enrichment while transforming the protagonist into a cynical businessman. What emerged was no butterfly, but a blowfly! Alongside Xie Qing’s story, and his metamorphosis, the novel recounts the life of Yan Hong. > She was solitary, friendless; outside of work she read, wrote, or simply sat there reflecting. Xie Qing had never managed to discover whether the deepest darkness or an invisible light reigned in that mysterious inner world of hers . Through her painful tribulations, we readers know that within Yan Hong lies a yearning for authentic values, constantly nurtured by the memory of her father—an upright man and revolutionary who took his own life rather than betray the trust placed in him by a high-ranking Red Army general. Splendid verses give voice to Yan Hong’s inner world, her bond with her father, and, at the same time, the strength of her values. > But one alone loved the pilgrim soul and the torture of your changing face. Bend down, then, over this grate of glowing embers and murmur to yourself softly: Love, see how you flee to the mountains and hide your weeping in a swarm of stars. This ever-renewed yearning for the authentic impels Yan Hong to volunteer for the re-education camps for “educated youth” during the Cultural Revolution; to stubbornly seek out her father’s secret documents to hand them over to the general’s children so as not to jeopardize their careers in modern China; to accept, surprised and intrigued, the offer to move to Paris (mother of all revolutions!) from a “pathetic” yet powerful club of revolutionary nostalgics; and ultimately to refuse to live in a villa, choosing instead to work as a laborer in a textile factory and later as a street vendor on the Atlantic coast. She wants to live like her compatriots, immigrants and undocumented workers! And like *Anna Karenina*, Yan Hong refuses to be the Parisian mistress of a high-ranking Chinese government official, demanding love for herself and for the son she had with him. And, like Anna, in her quest for an authentic life, she meets her death. The novel narrates two stories, divergent ways of conceiving modern China: unscrupulous enrichment and the desperate refusal of that life choice, the assertion of different, ethically potent values. It is the search for a new moral vision, one that cannot take root in the old revolutionary tenets that once underpinned China's liberation and rebirth. In the background, the author recounts the plight of undocumented migrants, how they made their way to Europe, and how they live and work on our continent. At the same time, there is a continuous reference to the old China: a tender melancholy for a society that now exists only in the imagination. What compromises the novel—which is otherwise well-written—is the excessive space granted to its seemingly more captivating thread: that of human trafficking; not because it lacks interest, but because it remains on the surface, bearing the hallmarks of crime fiction and detective narrative, without delving deeply into the stories of the protagonists: namely, the undocumented migrants themselves. It is a section that feels contrived rather than lived. Why read it? The figure of Yan Hong is compelling, fascinating.

Il romanzo è ambientato a Roma alla fine dell'Ottocento. E' ancora forte la rottura tra la Chiesa e il nuovo Stato italiano, ma la frattura si va lentamente ricomponendo nel crescente clima di affarismo e nazionalismo che pervade la classe dirigente. Di umili origini, un tempo rinchiusi nel ghetto, «all'ombra delle nostre vecchie sinagoghe, isolati in un mondo ostile», i due fratelli Moncalvo, Giacomo e Gabrio, si sono affermati nella società, seguendo però strade differenti: Giacomo ha fatto una brillante carriera in campo scientifico, ottenendo riconoscimenti accademici anche se non economici, Gabrio si è arricchito enormemente in Egitto per tornare a Roma e divenire un esponente importante dell'alta finanza. Sono diversi approcci alla vita, ereditati da Giorgio e Marianina. Il primo è il figlio di Giacomo e, come il padre, è dedito allo studio e all'insegnamento, indifferente alla ricchezza, morigerato e intriso di valori morali. Marianina, figlia di Gabrio, è ambiziosa, amante del lusso e dei salotti dell'alta borghesia, pronta a tutto pur di ascendere nella scala sociale. Domina un comune «indifferentismo» religioso. I Moncalvo si sentono ebrei più per tradizioni familiari che per fede e pratica. E' un tratto ricorrente in molta borghesia ebrea, desiderosa di integrarsi e influenzata dai valori positivistici, nazionalisti e affaristici di fine Ottocento. A pregiudicare la fragile unità familiare è la conversione di Marianina al cattolicesimo per poter sposare un esponente dell'aristocrazia "nera > , so designated for its ties to the Vatican, and thereby attain the rank of princess, entering the ranks of high society. It is her parents' design, yet it is the young woman who pursues it with a determination and awareness astonishing for a spoiled, wealthy heiress. Over the course of the novel, Marianina is described as a Lucifer," a "Sphinx > , a personality both mysterious and baffling even to her own parents. To attempt to understand her character, one must dwell on an exchange between the two cousins. Giorgio is distraught with passion: she would have given him an hour of intoxication, and he, the rigid scientist, swept away by a gale of madness, asked himself whether, to attain this hour, it was not worth sacrificing his entire life." In his presumption, Giorgio believes he is offering with his love "a lifeline" to prevent his cousin from casting herself "into an abyss of cowardice and deceit," buying "a wretched coat of arms at the price of your body and your soul." > She shrugged her shoulders. You are raving (she said). (...) My heart belongs to no one. (...) We should have grown up in the old town from which our families originate, within the old enclosure that penned in the people of our race, (...) narrow in ambitions and ideas, trusting only in the mission of our people.... Then, yes, we could have married and been happy.... Today it is impossible . The emblem of a daring feminism, Marianina is a personality of the future, a modern and liberated figure. The novel ends with Giacomo's bitter reflections on late-nineteenth-century Italian society as a whole. > Almost everywhere there was a debasement of character (thinks the austere professor), a shipwreck of convictions, a cynical contempt for the heroic virtues of renunciation and sacrifice, a frantic scramble toward ephemeral honors and sudden riches... This was likely Castelnuovo's objective in writing the story of the Moncalvos, and this moralizing stamp has led many critics to label the novel as "ideological": a juxtaposition between the heirs of Risorgimento values, by then unraveling, and the new, cynically upwardly mobile social class; all steeped in melodramatic tones (witness the figure of Giorgio) and D'Annunzian inflections (how remarkably Marianina resembles Sibilla Aleramo!). It is an engaging depiction of Giolittian Italy; moreover, the novel illustrates the Jewish bourgeoisie's inclination to embrace dominant values to the extent of turning a blind eye to the racial components of Fascism. For this alone, the book would be worth reading. The enigmatic figure of Marianina offers something more, granting us a glimpse into a complex and fascinating character. The literary style is spare, distinguishing itself from the prevailing rhetoric of late-nineteenth-century Italian literature. It is a virtue not to be underestimated. Why read it? Historically compelling, with a magnificent portrayal of Marianina.

In the neighborhood of Belleville lives the Malaussène tribe, and with them a myriad of characters. Belleville is a Parisian periphery, ravaged by the postmodernist manias of architects, the stupidity of politicians, and the greed of speculators; but it is also a magical place, a sort of Sherwood Forest, where Robin Hood is Benjamin Malaussène and the Sheriff is embodied by those who seek to evict long-standing tenants to demolish the old buildings and erect new ones for corporate offices and the wealthy bourgeoisie. > If one day you ask me what happiness looks like, and you will ask me, I will answer: like here In Belleville, where it is possible to screen the last film in the history of cinema (a film destined to be destroyed afterward) in a forgotten theater, where it is possible to tattoo all the streets of Belleville onto a person's body as a living testament to the neighborhood. In Belleville there is also an illusionist, who makes you see things that are not there; in Belleville > angels, who at times grow bored, are drawn toward us by the warmth and the surging of feelings and are personified in a detective nun. The novel features countless characters and a wealth of intertwining events: murders, disappearances, love affairs, bizarre twists of fate, persecutions. At the center, hero-like, stands Benjamin Malaussène, a fixed point in a magic lantern, in a kaleidoscope full of lights and illusions. There is no real plot, and the novel is difficult to follow. I must confess that I was unable to read it to the end, having lost my way among so many characters and so many words. Yet perhaps this was the author's very purpose: to demonstrate that no rationality governs existence, and that everything unfolds along a tenuous boundary between reality and imagination. Why not read it? Quite frankly, it is deeply muddled and verbose.

"I wonder: is there, in the listener, / a place where my voice may rest? / A harpoon, / tiny and concealed, / to hold memory fast before it scatters." (from Francesca Mannocchi, “The Harpoon of Memory,” from the collection *Crescere, La Guerra*, 2026). Is it possible to anchor ourselves to something within, so as not to forget "the particles of blood-soaked dust and the sickly-sweet smell of decay exhaled by unravelling lives and desertified soils"? Is it right to "live within the serene depths of the sea, where cries and weapons cannot be heard, and the stench of death does not reach"? Amal, the protagonist, lives between these two sides of consciousness: a dilemma not of her choosing, yet one that ensnares her entire life. She was born into a happy family, in a Palestine glowing with olive trees and vibrant hues: an ancient society that weathered the various empires that dominated it, forever anchoring itself to the land, its genealogies, and its sweet, centuries-old narratives. "Amal with the long vowel means hopes, dreams, (...) we place all our hopes in you." So her father told her when Amal was still a child, but he added: "we come from the land, we give our love and toil for it, and it feeds us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a sense, it owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to it." Amal's life is punctuated by the tragic milestones of post-WWII Palestinian history: the Nakba (the catastrophe) of 1948, with the forced exodus of 700,000 Palestinians and the Jenin refugee camp, where up to 50,000 people were interned, and where Amal’s family was forced to live in the narrative; the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, when several thousand Palestinians were slaughtered by Lebanese Phalangists under the compliant gaze of the Israelis, and where Amal lost her husband and her brother's family; the Second Intifada in 2002, when Israeli troops assaulted Jenin, massacring hundreds of civilians, and where Amal met her death. After the Nakba, Amal had the opportunity to go to the United States on a scholarship, resigning herself to being called "'Amy', Amal without the hope, (...) a word drained of all meaning. A woman hollowed out of her past." In her heart dwell the profound sentiments of longing and abandonment: longing for "the sun that embraced everything it touched while the sumptuous aroma of lamb and cumin dispelled anguish, (...) the air filled with joyous sounds from people drunk on the fruit of trees that had survived across centuries, piercing the fog of exile"; abandonment, through the estrangement from her brother Yousef and her childhood friend Huba, the inability to understand why her mother had never embraced her as other mothers did, and the yearning to see her missing father once more: "I closed my eyes and kept them that way for as long as I could, opening them only as much as was necessary to banish the images from my mind." Amal returns to Palestine, reunites with her brother, and reclaims the familiar sights, sounds, and colors of her people. She falls in love with Majid, marries him, and becomes pregnant. Everything is suffused with Love and a serene anticipation. This is mere months before the 1982 massacre, preceded by the Israeli army's siege of Beirut. As an American citizen, Amal can return to the United States, while her husband remains behind in Lebanon to lend his medical skills to hospitals in critical need; and it is there that Majid meets his death. Amal, once again "Amy," gives birth to a daughter. The Palestinian tragedy recedes once more into memory, yet it seeps deep into Amal's heart, barring her from bestowing Love upon her child. "God forgive me, the more she grew, the more I feared being close to her, touching her. I was afraid of passing on to her my icy hardness, that my touch might have hardened her, that it would be the wrong complement to her soft, unconditional tenderness. So, I fulfilled the duties of motherhood, containing the ardor of my love behind the cold walls of fear and long hours of work." Only a feminine sensibility could grasp the sheer depth of pain inflicted upon a refugee's heart by the loss of what is gone: one's homeland, one's culture, and one's loved ones. It is no coincidence that the author titles the final section *Nihaya* and *Bidaya*, with the seemingly contradictory subtitle "an end and a beginning." In Arabic, *Nihaya* means "end," and Amal knows that in returning to Jenin in 2002 she is going to meet her death, for this is her destiny, foretold by her father. *Bidaya* in Arabic means "the beginning of a story." During the Israeli siege of Jenin, "I kept my daughter sheltered in a dream entirely my own, falling in love with her as though I had just given birth to her anew. We spoke for nine days, dismantling the unspoken words of a lifetime. As death rained from the sky and bullets struck the outer walls of the house, Sara and I laid bare the grief and bitterness each of us held so dear, finding our shared sorrow for Majid despite, or perhaps because of, the terror we felt." And so, as the poet sang: "if in the twilight of memory we / should meet once more, / we shall speak together again / and you shall sing / to me a deeper song. / And if our hands should meet / in another dream, we / shall build another tower in the sky." The writer has struck a difficult balance between Grand History and the "small" stories of the human beings who are simultaneously its protagonists and its victims. We traverse the tragic fate of the Palestinian people, horrified and at once embarrassed as Europeans. The author does not shrink when forced to delve into the horrors of persecution; she does so almost like a historian, albeit an engaged one, and when she fears losing composure, she relies on the pen of a great journalist like Robert Fisk, who penned monumental reportage in his *Pity the Nation* (*The Martyrdom of a Nation*). Beside the dramatic events of "Grand History" lies the world of emotion: on one hand, that which is universal and eternal (such as the bond between mother and daughter); on the other, how such emotions are shattered by events unfolding beyond the pale of fundamental human relationships. Horror induces indifference in those who can keep their distance; for those trapped within it, however, grief leads to emotional desiccation, to a feeling of incapacity to bestow Love, to the dread of passing on one's own barrenness—the necessary armor—to someone untainted by it. And yet, one cannot withhold the truth from those one loves, for sparing the beloved means betraying them. In the relationship between Amal and Sara, one senses the author's own fraught experience, confronted with the dilemma of whether to shelter her daughter or make her part of her people's destiny. Within such an intense narrative, the father's friendship with an Israeli and Amal's reunion with her brother—abducted as a young boy and adopted by a Jewish family—feel redundant. Did the author wish to grant humanity to the "enemy"? Eighty years of war have inflicted suffering upon the Israeli people as well: one need only think of David Grossman's *To the End of the Land* (see the review on this site), but let each people bear the duty of mourning their own fate. The prose reflects the balance of the narrative. Shifting deftly from passages of intense lyricism to analyses of remarkable psychological depth, the language is rich in cadence, interweaving the musicality of Arabic with the resonance of English. The lexicon is played like a piano keyboard, with a harmonious and evocative command of words, particularly verbs—words consistently woven into elegant, fluid grammatical structures. It would be fascinating to know the linguistic gestation of this novel, especially considering the author's scientific background and how she came to write this book spurred by a surge of indignation—a cry that lends vigor to the entire narrative. If one truly feels something within, one can become a great writer without being one by profession. It is a welcome sign of hope, and a lesson for many Western—and Italian—authors! Why read it? It is a masterpiece, a stinging slap in the face to our timid and hypocritical selves.

A teacher who has always led a quiet, monotonous life is thrown into turmoil by the murder of a young woman who had been staying with him for several months. One evening, in fact, the protagonist finds himself home alone, as his wife has gone out to play cards with friends. The girl returns home, gives an absent-minded greeting, and goes straight to her room. In the morning, she is found dead. The suspicions of the police, as well as those of the neighborhood, turn immediately toward the man. The protagonist sees his world collapse; he feels ostracized by the community, whose members felt bolstered listening to the pastor's words, writes Simenon: > they felt they were the law, they were justice, every new sentence uttered over their heads made them stronger, while Ashby, in their midst, grew weaker and more isolated . The police also delve into the protagonist’s past, discovering that his father was a drunkard who squandered the family fortune before committing suicide. This inquiry casts the protagonist back to the anguish of his youth—to the prospect, that is, of becoming like his father: > what struck him was not so much this or that particular vice, a definite danger; what drew him was something vague, belonging to certain quarters of big cities, to certain streets, certain lights, even certain smells . The fear of being inexorably drawn toward vice and depravity had driven him to seek security, peace, and order, to the point of marrying a woman for whom friendship prevailed over passion. Feeling unjustly accused, abandoned by friends and community alike, along with the resurfacing of his past, are elements that bring this fatal attraction back into the open, shattering the shell the protagonist had fashioned for himself. Inexorably, as if driven by a fateful force, the protagonist murders a young woman, committing the very crime of which he had been falsely accused. This is only ostensibly a detective story. In truth, Simenon masterfully outlines the falsehood of life within a hypocritical community that ambiguously casts out one of its members merely because he is suspected of a crime. To everyone, it seems only natural that Ashby had become infatuated with the girl and killed her in a fit of murderous passion. Yet Simenon’s skill also lies in crafting a protagonist torn between two opposing forces: social order and the lure of lust and violence. When the rules of social coexistence—in which the protagonist believed and which had served as a bulwark against his own impulses—dissolve and reveal their utter vacuity, he gives free rein to his true inclinations. A profoundly relevant theme is thus explored: the relationship between communal ties and the complexity of individual feelings and dispositions. The crime is nothing more than the catalyst for a polarity rooted both within society (solidarity versus hypocrisy and confinement) and within the individual (the pursuit of peace and stability versus the urge toward transgression).

The protagonist is a renowned man of letters. > He had never known idleness, never the carefree negligence of youth . He had led > a life of self-conquest and of "in spite of all," a harsh, tenacious, and temperate life, which he had shaped into a symbol of a delicate heroism commensurate with the times . Yet deep within him there had always been an inner restlessness, “a strange expansion of the soul,” channeled by an unyielding daily discipline toward ideal perfection in art and the representation of elevated moral values. Now in his sixties, at the pinnacle of his fame, during a walk through the city streets he happens upon a foreigner whose gypsy-like, exotic features leave a deep impression on him, stirring within him > a youthful thirst for distant lands, a longing so intense, so new, or at least so long set aside and unlearned... he questioned his heavy, weary heart to discover whether a new enthusiasm, a new perturbation, a belated adventure of the sensibilities might still be in store for the indolent traveler . It is therefore not merely a desire to travel, but a dream-like vision of > all the wonders and horrors of the multiform terrestrial globe . With this “enigmatic desire,” his destination could only be Venice, > the flattering beauty, the city, half fairy-tale, half foreigner’s trap, in whose miasmas art once bloomed in voluptuous profusion, and which inspired musicians with lulling, caressingly languorous notes . He takes up lodging in an elegant hotel, frequented by the wealthy and variegated bourgeoisie of early twentieth-century Europe. He spends his days contemplating the sea, visiting “on warm nights” St. Mark’s Square and the *calli* of that marvelous city. > The pleasantly constant rhythm of that existence had already held him in its thrall, the soft and luxurious sweetness of that way of life had swiftly seduced him . When, as he lost himself in the “vast expanses of the sea,” > the horizontal line that marked the boundary of the earth was suddenly intersected by a human figure... he saw the beautiful boy pass before him on the sand and from that moment > mind and heart were intoxicated; the demon that delights in trampling human reason and dignity guided his steps . He, an aging man, a man of letters acclaimed for his classicism and for the rigorous rules of his art, becomes infatuated with, and ultimately falls in love with, the splendid youth, and > his soul savored the lust and the frenzy of dissolution . After all, > what value could he still ascribe to art and virtue, faced with the advantages of chaos? Falling in love is accompanied by the draining of energy in an already frail body, by “an ever more violent anguish,” by a “sense of the absence of any way out and of all hope”: he moves toward a voluptuous death. Before the expanse of the sea and the beloved boy gazing at the horizon, “an absolutely isolated and unrelated figure,” the protagonist lets himself die, as if absorbed in a deep slumber, “hovering into an immensity full of promise.” The novella, clearly autobiographical, can be interpreted in three distinct ways. The first interpretive key is the simplest. An elderly gentleman discovers, at the end of his life, his own homosexual orientation, perpetually repressed to conform to narrow-minded bourgeois norms. The author seems intent on lending this revelation the sense of a moral dissolution, yet in truth the protagonist willingly lets himself be carried away by passion, seeing it even as a liberation. > Joy, surprise, admiration could openly depict themselves there when his gaze met... the beloved image . And he was overcome by the desire > to kiss the sweet lips of his shadow, coquettish, curious and faintly anguished, seduced and seducing . It is an explicitly erotic and sexual desire. The second interpretive key, conversely, regards the novella as a spiritual construct, a sort of meditation on the author’s artistic journey. We will never know whether Thomas Mann was homosexual, but it is clear that the dichotomy of “reflection and restlessness,” “order and eros,” constituted the undercurrent that gave life to a literary oeuvre outwardly nestled within the riverbed of the typical bourgeois novel. In this sense, the boy embodies this contradiction between classical beauty and decadent disorder: the failure of that civilizing mission (we are, after all, on the eve of the First World War) which the writer entrusted to Germany. Yet this was also a phase in which the bourgeois novel was opening itself to new ventures, searching for innovative forms capable of narrating the European conscience, now in crisis. > The face, pale and gracefully impenetrable, framed by ringlets of honey-colored hair, with its straight-descending nose, charming mouth, and expression of sweet and divine gravity, recalled Greek sculptures of the golden age , but > care had been taken never to touch with scissors his beautiful hair, which curled over his forehead, above his ears, and even more thickly at the nape of his neck . And finally, the last interpretive strand, undoubtedly the most complex, is the oneiric, composed of dreams and imagery. Here the author abandons himself to fantastical visions, which find their transposition into reality through the description of Venice. And what if Venice were the synthesis of these three interpretive strands? Voluptuous decay, forms both classical and unbound at once, dreamlike wonders—these are the traits that make the city the mirror of the poet’s disheveled soul. Venice is not merely a background context, but the dominant protagonist of the narrative. Why read it? It is magnificent, above all for its writing—alluring, baroque, multiform, yet wholly consistent with the novella’s aims and its overarching narrative design. A true masterpiece!

I read Recami’s *La Casa di Ringhiera* in one breath (see review on this site), finding it one of the finest noirs in the vast panorama of Italian literature: the felicitous conjunction of a comedy of manners with the pacing typical of the best detective fiction. That is why, as soon as I read the review of *Il mostro del Casoretto*, I rushed out to buy it, anticipating the pleasure I had experienced with *La Casa di Ringhiera*. Perhaps because my expectations were so high, the disappointment proved all the more painful. The book is a collection of short stories which, with the exception of the last, feature the pensioner Amedeo Consonni, the grandfatherly detective. In the first story, *Il mostro del Casoretto*, Consonni is accused of sexually molesting a young girl; to punish him, the child’s relatives lock him in an abandoned farmhouse to make him pay. Consonni manages to break free, but is persuaded by Angela—whom we discover to be his aging sweetheart—to return to the scene of his captivity so the police can catch his tormentors red-handed. It is a flimsy plot, relying on salacious situations rather than narrative twists and social atmosphere. The second story, *Chi ha pane non ha denti, chi ha denti non ha pane*, is undoubtedly the most pleasant of the collection. Here we find the return of several characters and situations already familiar from *La Casa di Ringhiera*: Mr. De Angelis holds a grudge against a neighbor’s dog that keeps urinating on the wheels of his BMW, and decides to lock the animal inside an abandoned cold-storage unit in the building’s basement. It will be Gianmarco and Margherita, two children from the tenement, who inadvertently free the little dog, sparing De Angelis an indictment for pet theft and animal cruelty. It is a light and wry tale, in which Consonni returns to being the kindly grandfather figure. Later, perhaps at a loss for how to further develop the world of the tenement, Recami departs from the Lombard setting, moving the stories to Florence and Sardinia, with Consonni cast as the victim of misunderstandings. It is pointless to dwell on these stories. The verdict cannot be anything but harsh. The stories lack both plot and character development. Consonni emerges reduced to the figure of a lecherous, rather foolish old man who takes Viagra to engage in sexual intercourse, with the sole result of being caught in his underpants with an erect male member (why insist on such vulgarities?). His girlfriend Angela is a stout woman still in pursuit of sex, and the relationship between Amedeo and the lady bears none of the grace found in the poems of an elderly Ungaretti, still capable of falling in love: > you appeared at the doorway/in a red dress(...) it was on a Monday/to hold hands/and speak happily/no refuge was found/save in a sad garden/of the convulsive city . (September 12, 1966, from the collection *Ungà 1966-1968*). How difficult it is to chronicle the affections and dreams of us old folk! Why read it? It is a disappointment.

The novel unfolds in London over the course of a single day, in the years immediately following the First World War: for most of the time, the characters move, reflect, and dream in the streets and parks of the British capital, readily recognizable locations. One’s mind immediately turns to Joyce’s *Ulysses*, a comparison valid only due to the "anti-novel" nature of Woolf’s book, just as with that of the Irish writer. While the latter intends to write an "Homeric poem"—and thus a mythic one—grounded upon a fiercely realistic premise (Dublin and its inhabitants are flesh and blood before Bloom), Woolf operates within a stream of consciousness in an interior space and time, transcending external context, present, and past. As the writer remarked in a 1919 essay > life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end . (from the introduction by Sergio Perosa, Oscar Mondadori Edition, 1979). It is > a magical suspense like that of a swimmer before diving into the deep, bright sea beneath him, with waves threatening to break, yet gently parting only the surface, stirring it, hiding and covering it as if spreading pearls over water lilies. We should not expect a plot; we must instead look for flashes of suggestion and poetry within a story that is simple, mundane, and intense all at once, because it speaks of the recognition of oneself. There is a first core, consisting of Clarissa Dalloway, an English noblewoman in her fifties, well-married with offspring, who awaits the return of an old flame from India. Is it the moment to reflect on her past, on missed opportunities? Only in part; in truth, Clarissa, entirely absorbed in her role, is particularly disturbed that her husband has left her at home to attend Lady Bruton's renowned gatherings. Walking through London’s noisy and crowded streets—so deeply loved by her for that very reason—Clarissa > felt the oddest sense of being invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, being Mrs. Dalloway, not even Clarissa any more, only Mrs. Richard Dalloway . In those moments, a contradictory feeling overcomes her: of estrangement from life and, at the same time, immersion in it, in its background noise without the filter of imagination and poetry: in this frame of mind, locked within her own consciousness in a baffling autism, Clarissa recognizes herself, her prosaic contentment in a solid and socially accepted life. Ultimately, what has she suffered? The absence of an erstwhile presumed lover. Far more dramatic is the second core, unfortunately merely sketched out. It is the tale of Septimus’s madness and the desperate love of his wife, Rezia. The man fought in the First World War, witnessed massacres, was present at the death of his closest friend. He suffered profoundly; what point is there in living on? > Rezia put on her hat, and ran through fields of wheat, where could it ever be?, up a hill, somewhere near the sea, for ships could be seen, gulls and butterflies; and they were sitting on the top of a cliff, (...) and the caress of the sea, which seemed to cradle them in the hollow of a shell, and murmured in her ear; and she lay upon the beach, strewn it seemed to her she was, like flowers scattered over a grave. He is dead, she said, smiling at the poor old woman watching over her . The narrative style is highly poetic and constitutes the novel's defining feature. Plot and characters dissolve within consciousness, serving merely as an occasion for a richly evocative prose, abundant in metaphors and heavily reliant on reverie. Woolf fails to give realistic depth to the narrative, and whenever she abandons the poetic style, she easily lapses into melodrama, as in the cited conclusion of Rezia’s ravings. The writer rejects involvement; she pursues, regrettably, philosophical and psychological aims prevalent in her time, seeking detachment from her characters and their story, and in doing so, she pulverizes and renders sterile the entire narrative. Why not read it? Boring, prolix, inconclusive.

*Il Mulino del Po* is defined by its author as a historical novel, chronicling the fortunes of a family of millers from Ferrara between 1815 and the First World War. Bacchelli’s aim is to narrate the history of Italy from the perspective of the humble, > to win for poetry a century, a moment of the mighty humility of the common people, civilized in Italy with a civilization of their own, at times evasive and secret, yet always unmistakable and never crushed by so great, so illustrious, and yet so heavy a burden of history . In the first volume, *Dio ti salvi*, Lazzaro Scacerni finds himself, despite himself, swept up in the great rout of Napoleon's army in Russia. During the disastrous retreat, a dying Italian officer reveals how to recover a cache of precious sacred objects looted from the churches of Ferrara during the Jacobin era. Having returned to Italy, Scacerni uses the proceeds from selling these objects to build a watermill, the *San Michele*, thus becoming a miller of the Po. Until 1860, the Po served as the border between the Papal States and Austria, a hotbed of smuggling frequented by thieves and scoundrels. Scacerni is blackmailed by a fence and gang leader, the Raguseo, to whom he had sold the precious items. Just as he resolves to kill the Raguseo, the latter is murdered. Scacerni saves both himself and his soul. > The question arose explicitly during the long, brooding hours beside the millstones of white and yellow flour, as he reflected on all that God had wrought to save him: and why did He do it? Yet he understood there was no answer, save in an act of grace . The second volume, *La miseria viene in barca*, centers on Giuseppe—nicknamed Coniglio Mannaro—son of Lazzaro, and Cecilia, daughter of the Matto di Paneparso, another Po miller. On a stormy day, Cecilia’s mill is swept away by the tumultuous current and saved by Lazzaro, who virtually takes the girl in as his daughter. Coniglio Mannaro rejects his father’s trade and, greedy for money, embarks on a career as a broker, often by dishonest and unscrupulous means. Cecilia, by contrast, is rugged, wild, and upright, devoted to the mills and the Po. Coniglio Mannaro tricks Cecilia into marriage, and she bears him seven children. The two spouses remain forever estranged, deeply divided by their values and allegiances: Cecilia bound to the river and the children, Giuseppe to the land and to money. Above all, she is revolted by her husband’s dishonesty in personal relationships and business dealings. But retribution > would come from the river; of this she was certain, born as she was in a land where everything—the land itself, good and evil alike—was given and taken away by the river, so that river and fortune were one and the same . Indeed, during the great flood of 1872 (among the book’s most gripping pages), Coniglio Mannaro loses his lands, swallowed forever by the waters of the great river. In a dramatic scene, amid the height of the storm, Cecilia rescues her husband, who, driven mad, had lingered on the embankment and was about to be swept away by the raging waters. In the third volume, *Mondo vecchio sempre nuovo*, Cecilia, battling poverty and hunger, is forced to send two of her daughters into domestic service. One of them, the fair and virtuous Berta, goes to work for a peasant family, where a young man, Orbino, has long been in love with her. In a magnificent chapter, *I giorni della ghirlanda*, which ought to be read in every school, Bacchelli retraces the cycle of rural life throughout the year up to the harvest festival. These pages reveal the author’s profound love for the countryside and the life of the peasantry. Yet alongside the passage of the seasons, the love between Berta and Orbino matures—a modest, well-guarded love, for the two youths have resolved to "fare la prova" (as consummating love before marriage was called back then) only once their union has been sanctioned by their families. A curse weighs upon the destiny of the Scacernis, born of an original sin. It is an era of struggle in the Ferrarese countryside between landowners and the peasant league. Cecilia sides with the masters, solely because she is a woman of the river, bound to tradition, who refuses to take orders from the peasants. Not only must the two young lovers part, but the hatred toward the Scacernis leads to slander against Berta to such a degree that, in a moment of madness, her brother murders Orbino. As in a Greek tragedy, on the banks of the Po, one witnesses the ritual purification of the poor youth's corpse by his unconsummated, chaste bride. For Bacchelli, this is a metaphor for life and death. > The world is no more than misfortune, against which rebelling is even more futile than suffering. To be born is nothing other than to come here to die, as vain as the flowing of the river.... like the river giving up corpses, man's hour dissolves into the time that bears it. There hope falters, charity dies, faith is lost . Just as the saga of the Scacerni family comes to a tragic close, so too ends the history of the mills of the Po, supplanted by steam mills. And with them dissolves the hope of Bacchelli the man and of his world, that of the peasantry. > A family, a people, a land: I did not invent them, I came upon them.... he who has told their tale suddenly feels the void . It is a great book, open to multiple readings. First and foremost, there are the great river and the Ferrarese landscape. This is the most compelling aspect, not merely as a historical testimony, but for the author's ability to depict both the world of the waters and that of the peasantry. Secondly, Bacchelli creates an expansive historical fresco of Italian history, grounded in the contrast between the waning values of the Risorgimento and the resilience of the Italian people—a strength the author traces back to the Catholic faith. And here Bacchelli’s nostalgia emerges unmistakably for a world that modernity has weakened, engulfed, and radically altered: that temporal realm of the popes, which may have been hypocritical, antiquated, and rife with privilege, yet allowed poor folk to survive without being crushed by an extortionate landlord, by taxes, and by the trade union leagues themselves, which the author sharply criticizes. Finally, there is the religious theme: God’s mercy is mysterious, yet it unfailingly operates to grant the righteous their due. Why read it? Reading the work in its entirety is very heavy going, as Bacchelli struggles to sustain the narrative momentum; nevertheless, certain passages, particularly those bound to the natural environment, are strikingly beautiful and insightful. It is best read as a curated selection of excerpts.

This is a short story, divided into three chapters. In the first, the corpse is discovered and, as in classic detective fiction, the inspector arrives with his assistant. The author seems to take pleasure in reconstructing the dynamics, well-tested by crime literature, between the seasoned superior and the young officer. From the outset, however, certain peculiarities emerge. The inspector claims to have arrived too late to save the victim (did he know then that he was about to be killed?), who deserved, according to the inspector, to be murdered, being a blackmailer who had numerous affairs with women. Solving the case is difficult, he then adds, “as there are five hundred men, and other women, with a motive.” It must be said that the reader is left disoriented by the first chapter, sensing something unusual yet not quite able to grasp the direction of the story. The second chapter opens receptive to any development. The inspector visits the alleged killer’s house (and, tellingly, goes alone, without his assistant), and here the narrative turns into a continuous oscillation between past and present. The inspector addresses the suspect, who does not reply, reminding him of bygone events: the man had once been in love with a woman who ultimately chose the victim over him because he was wealthy and powerful. The story now abandons the order and rationality of a detective tale, increasingly becoming a sequence of images from the inspector’s mind. The memory of his life resurfaces: > a succession of images drifted through his mind, of days and nights of great passion, tenderness, and continuous peace. He forgot the days during which he had watched the slow disintegration of his own personality and corruption; he even forgot that he was Detective Inspector Mason of Scotland Yard . Yet the bond between past and present is like a mirror in which one is reflected, and through which one can view the present from the past and vice versa. At this point, the mystery grips the reader, and, as in all detective novels, the solution is simple: the inspector is the murderer. One realizes that the second chapter has conveyed the inspector’s thoughts, and that the entire sequence lasted only a few minutes. The third chapter details the mechanics of the crime as well as the evidence that pins down the murderer. A brief yet fascinating story, albeit a challenging read. First of all, the theme of reality’s ambiguity emerges, which only in death finds a consistency beyond imagination: “after all, everything was reduced to a biological fact.” Secondly, the story is a display of virtuosity, both in terms of narrative structure—capable of generating disorientation and suspense in the reader—and in its writing technique. The author readily resorts to idioms and vocabulary belonging to colloquial speech, which does not always make the text immediately accessible: this contributes to the mysterious allure of the story. Why read it? To appreciate the author’s narrative technique.

To comprehend this literary "gem," one must return to an earlier novel by the author: *Aniko*, a review of which can be read on this site. Aniko has abandoned her people, the Nenets, to live far away, leaving behind Aleska, her childhood companion, and her father, Petko. The tale begins with the decision of Aleska’s mother to find a wife for her son. > Her husband had died, (...) yet the hearth had not gone out after the master's departure. There remained another task to accomplish (...): to engender a living current that would not scatter or dry up like a puddle in spring, but would continue to flow like a river within its banks. At twenty-six, her son was not yet a true man. (...) He had to be married at all costs.  Aleska's heart, however, is weighed down by his love for Aniko. If as a child he felt > like a defenseless fledgling with wings not yet formed , now he is > a spiteful, wounded vulture. He felt like a bird of prey that, spreading the talons of self-regard, leans against the deaf wall of life without anyone being able to understand his sorrow. At night he dreams of Ilne (as Aniko is called in the book), of her seductive smile, and he possesses her. (...) When he realizes that it is merely a dream and not reality, he is consumed by longing. Longing is like a black, hairy spider. The touch of its legs poisons the soul. The novel recounts Aleska's liberation from awaiting Aniko's return, and it does so within a society—that of the Nenets—now in dissolution, yet still anchored to old values, to the stubborn determination to preserve its own culture. At the center of this world lies the hearth, the fire kept perpetually alight—the woman's duty and prestige; hers is the task of bearing and raising children, hers the burden of preserving and passing on Nenets culture. Hence arises the enormity, for the old mother and the entire community, of a man who refuses to marry, obstinately bound to a "distant" love. The two narrative planes, the individual and the collective, overlap, alternating oneiric moments with choral tales. In the dream, > Ilne stared at him and smiled. She was no longer the same Ilne who had invited him to follow her. A sly, knowing smile, which he had never seen on her face and which for some reason unsettled him, never left her lips. (...) He realized that he wanted to wipe that smile from her face; (...) hers was an invitation to a game of love that was nothing but an illusion. If Aniko turns into a painful remembrance before fading from Aleska's heart, with the surrender of her sledges old Petko declares before the community that Aniko will never return; there is no need to keep the dowry, > ten abandoned sledges (...), like orphans, guilty before men and life. (...) The chum was silent, as though immersed in sleep. Yet the young man knew that, motionless, the two women (the mother and the young bride) awaited him, kneeling before the fire. (...) Parting the tent behind his shoulders with a wide gesture, he entered. Thus enters a boy who has become a man. There is a hidden protagonist, and it is Aniko. She appears suddenly, unexpected, with a sort of declaration of love in which Nerkagi seems no longer able to restrain her own "I," in a novel where the narrator is "omniscient." > I love old trees, says Aniko, (...) I love them for all the summers gone by, for the mystery of life they conceal, for the murmur of the leaves that might be mistaken for a song or a lament, a confession or a tale. Ancient trees resemble the old. And it would be wonderful to be certain that they, indeed, are still the keepers of that Golden word of truth, forgotten by mankind heaven knows when. Moreover, in this deceptively simple narrative—much as Dante stands behind the figures of the *Commedia*—there are certain characters behind whom Nerkagi conceals herself. To be sure, one of these is Aleska's mother, the emblem of a stubborn attachment to tradition; yet there is another figure, so delicate as to seem superfluous to the plot. It is the young bride rejected by Aleska, reverent toward the mystery of her husband's soul. Through a splendid simile, Nerkagi thus sings the sorrowful and resigned plight of an unreceived bride: > the girl's world was like that of a tiny flower blossomed by the will of fate at the bottom of a ravine, where the rays of the sun penetrate only in the early morning and the hostile stones exude cold. Covered in a slimy moss, they emit a foul stench and envy the beauty and sweetness of the flower's petals, blind to the light that its corolla radiates into the darkness. I have remained silent for too many years, the author confesses, and now it is time for the moss to turn white. The style is a gentle flow of words, at times elegiac, at others lyrical, rich in similes drawn from the natural world, from trees and animals; a seemingly motionless nature that contrasts with the shifts in the Nenets world and the enigmas of the human soul. Such is the sweetness of the prose that a kind of metamorphosis takes place within the reader, allowing one to measure oneself against the mystery without deciphering it. Why read it? Outside of time and space, it is a hymn to our human condition.

> In Italy, Neela had a job, a daughter, a home—in that order, but without any of the three truly belonging to her. (...) She had applied herself with unflagging constancy to fashion a new shell; certain things are not learned through the eyes, but with the gut. Behind that thick layer of greasepaint, Neela felt inhabited by a monstrous underworld pressing to surface, which she relentlessly forced back down. After many years in Italy, after a lifetime of toil, she had some money, which in Ceylon, her native land, afforded her a solid financial standing. She decides, then, to return home. This choice appears incomprehensible to her relatives in Ceylon—a country devastated by civil war, military repression, mounting poverty, and the fallout of climate change: a country vastly different from the one Neela had left behind, now transformed by Western patterns of consumption and by new beliefs and customs. The author is not interested in Neela's future, whose life seems dictated by the immutable fate of the emigrant. The novel's central theme is the impact of this departure on Ayesha, Neela's daughter, the "dirty water"—so called because she has become Italianized, while remaining in search of a link to the past, both her own and that of her family. These two existential dimensions are not approached through a predictable sociological lens revolving around the question of identity. With great narrative dexterity, the writer unfolds the chronicle of Neela’s family and that of Ayesha in parallel; unlike her mother, Ayesha cannot return; unlike her aunts and cousins, she cannot place her trust in ancient remedies, in the wisdom of a magical world still populated by spirits and Buddhist rituals, nor lean on anti-colonial and revolutionary ideologies. Where are the roots of a "dirty water" to be found, obliged to survive within a post-capitalist society? Fond of metaphors, the author turns to the image of tropical trees that grow from seeds > that burrow into the cracks in the bark of other trees, choking the host with their own roots. (...) The relationship I wove with my life elsewhere was like this: an existence growing atop another like a parasite. While one sought to take over, dragging along its roots, exposed like raw flesh, the other, underneath, continued to survive on the verge of rot. I felt like a Persephone dividing her time between two worlds. She had sold herself for six pomegranate seeds; what had I sold myself for? The suspicion often arises as to whether Uyangoda is actually speaking of Italy, using Ceylon just as Montesquieu wrote of France by imagining a Persia that existed only in his *Persian Letters*. One derives the same impression when reading Igiaba Scego, particularly the latest book reviewed on this site: *Cassandra a Mogadiscio*. While it is true that the most captivating section of the novel consists of the chapters devoted to Ceylon, the author invariably brings us back, with unsparing starkness, to the existential and psychological drama of Ayesha: a woman so close to us, yet so distant because she is "dirty water." And it is precisely in this "coming and going," between an idealized island and our own daily alienation, that the substantive weight of the novel resides. The narrative structure is well crafted, relying on the first person when dealing with Ayesha, while shifting to the third person to chronicle the family histories: this approach generates a peculiar alternation between the subjectivism characteristic of the contemporary novel and the objectivism that arises from an urge to address the world and "universal" existences. The prose is fluid yet dense; one senses a philosophical undercurrent, especially in certain passages rich in meditation and abstraction. All of this enhances the allure of the reading experience. The plot cannot help but be fragile, given that everything has already been laid bare from the opening sentences of the book. Why read it? A demanding, yet fascinating novel.

> Transform yourself into words: (...) if running around a single name it is always you and me at stake and always the same the potent weapons of mourning and affliction that even in dreams chase my smoothness to ruin (Cosimo Ortesta, from *Il progetto di un freddo perenne*, 1988). Reading this novel brought this line of Ortesta’s to mind: names follow us throughout our existence, speaking of ourselves, of the bond we share with others, and of all the feelings, even painful ones, we carry with us; as Lahiri writes, “names die over time, they perish with people.” Gogol is the son of a Bengali couple who moved to the United States; the name was bestowed upon him at birth while awaiting the “true > name that was supposed to arrive from India, but never did: a pet name, then, chosen by his father out of his passion for Russian writers. Gogol hates even signing his name at the bottom of his drawings in art class. He hates that it is at once absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is—that is, neither Indian nor American, but above all not Russian > . Being named Gogol is the mark of his ambiguity, of an identity suspended between two worlds, two different cultures, histories, and traditions. And Gogol attempts to break free from this indeterminacy, to escape the name, stubbornly pursuing separation from his parents and from the large, noisy, crowded Bengali community, with its clothing, cuisine, customs, and language—strenuously defended precisely because they live far from their homeland. He is weary of returning to Calcutta to visit relatives, a journey so eagerly anticipated by his parents. And above all, he no longer wants to be called Gogol. He goes to study far from home, earns a degree in architecture, finds work in another city, changes his name to Nikhil. The protagonist's attitude does not shift even when he learns the true reasons that led his father to give him that pet name. One evening, the train bringing Nikhil home is severely delayed. His father waits for him at the station in a state of great anxiety: he reveals to him that he named him Gogol because, as a young man, he was one of the few survivors of a catastrophic train accident; the book by the great Russian writer had saved him. Is this what you think of when you think of me, Gogol asks him, Do I remind you of that night? Not at all, his father says at last, with a hand on the boy’s hip, an accustomed gesture that had embarrassed Gogol up until that moment. You remind me of everything that followed > , that is, of family, work, and hard-won prosperity; and the name bestowed upon his son holds many meanings, not least what Dostoevsky said: we all came out of Gogol’s Overcoat > . The enigmatic phrase cannot yet be understood by young Nikhil, who resumes his flight from his roots. He meets Maxine, a classic daughter of the upper-middle-class liberal > , with beautiful homes, beautiful objects, solid points of reference. A guest at the house where Maxine’s parents—so cultivated and accommodating—spend their holidays, by the shores of a splendid lake amid woods and green meadows, Gogol understands that this is a place that will always be here for her. It makes it easy to imagine Maxine's past, her future, to picture in his mind her growing old. (...) Through the windows, he sees that dawn is slowly emerging in the sky, only a few stars are still visible, the silhouettes of the surrounding trees and buildings gradually become distinguishable. A bird begins to sing. And then he remembers that his parents cannot reach him: he hasn't given them the phone number. (...) And here beside Maxine, in this welcoming wilderness, he feels free. > The flight is cut short when his father suddenly dies. The rush to the morgue, the identification, gathering the few possessions his father had with him, the return home to his now-solitary mother, the Indian funeral rites surrounded by the entire Bengali community, brutally pull Gogol back to his condition of being neither Indian nor American, nor even Russian. Maxine invites him on a vacation together (because it might do you good (...) to get away from all this”); Nikhil replies to her: “I don’t want to get away > . And just like that, he is Gogol once more; he lets his mother guide him into a marriage with a Bengali girl, in a lavish and crowded ceremony he would have scornfully refused only a short time before. Reclaiming one's identity is not so simple. We cannot delve deeply into the story of the girl Gogol marries—a tale within the tale. We can only outline a few fundamental traits: she has a name unpronounceable in American and is therefore called by a pet name; she too fled her family, went to Paris where she acquired a third language (neither American nor Bengali), returned to the United States to teach French literature at university, surrounds herself with refined intellectuals (so removed from Gogol’s straightforward technical background), has had many men, betrays Nikhil, returns to Paris. Gogol is a romantic, and as such engages in a love affair—intense at least for him—genuinely believing he has found solid roots in a modern Anglo-Bengali family. The betrayal and separation abruptly throw him back into a state of limbo. He wonders how his parents managed, leaving behind their respective families, seeing them so rarely, without a place to reunite, in a perennial state of waiting, of nostalgia. (...) Gogol knows that his parents lived their lives in America despite what they lacked, with a strength he fears he does not possess.” What's in a name? Shakespeare wonders in *Romeo and Juliet*: “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet > . The novel does not tell us whether Juliet is right. In the old house his mother is vacating to move to Calcutta, Gogol finds the stories of the great Russian writer once again: a book his father had given him as a teenager, which he had abandoned on the shelf with a mixture of indifference and annoyance. And he finds a dedication: the man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name.” Here is Dostoevsky’s enigma: “the name he had so detested was hidden and preserved here. (...) Those who had given and preserved the name of Gogol were far from him now. One dead, the other, a widow, on the verge of a different kind of departure, to live filled with nostalgia, like his father, in a world apart. (...) Once or twice a week he will hear the name Gogol over the telephone wires, or written on a screen. (...) Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he lives, Gogol Ganguli, once and for all, will vanish from the lips of those who love him, and so, cease to exist. It is an intense and complex novel: fluid, elegant prose, a spasmodic attention to detail. Places, objects, food, clothing are meticulously described, unlike the characters, who are not treated superficially, but rather deliberately kept always waiting” for something else, or yearning with nostalgia for something else. The author seems to be saying: everything is vacuous except places, naturalistically rendered yet rich in myth, suggestion, transmitters of values and worlds. At times one loses the thread of the plot, but what does it matter? The allure resides in the writing, and it is up to the reader to reassemble and interpret the whole. Why read it? A masterpiece, fascinating and dense with meaning and resonance.

The novel is set in Paris in the years immediately preceding the fall of Napoleon III’s empire. Nana is an eighteen-year-old girl endowed with a peculiar charm that stems, far more than from beauty itself, from her sensuality, youthfulness, and demeanor. From the outset, Zola presents her as a goddess, a deity of vulgarity and scandal. > Nana, very tall, very robust for her eighteen years (in other passages of the book Zola uses the adjective stout), in her white goddess’s tunic, her long hair simply laid bare over her shoulders, walked down toward the stage with an easy demeanor, laughing at the audience. Nana was naked. She was naked with a quiet audacity, confident in the power of her flesh. She was Venus rising from the waves, veiled by nothing but her hair. No one was laughing anymore; the men’s faces, rapt, grew tense, their mouths parched and irritated . For Zola, Nana is an innocent woman, audacious yet fraught with ambiguity and a sensuality that made her “a devourer of men.” The novel opens with a variety show at the theater, where Nana appears amid music, gaudy sets, and foul-mouthed, envious actors and actresses. Nana is, in a sense, a nineteenth-century “showgirl”—a performer, and a mediocre one at that, who is simultaneously the kept woman of wealthy bourgeois gentlemen. In this first part of the novel, the figure of Nana allows for a depiction of nineteenth-century society, where wealthy and prominent figures move from the tedious conversations of austere salons to the life of the theater, if not directly to brothels, squandering their fortunes on mistresses and prostitutes. Hypocrisy and deceit reign supreme. Yet this world does not suit Nana. She seeks, in some way, genuine passion: she beds numerous men, including penniless youths, alienating powerful lovers and thereby squandering influential connections. In the central section, which functions as a sort of caesura between the first (more descriptive) part and the second, more dramatic and complex one, Nana descends into the underworld: she becomes a streetwalker, engages in lesbian affairs, and loses herself in depravity. She does so with voluptuousness, not with revulsion. What ultimately compels her to change her life will not be disgust with the streets, but betrayal and abandonment by the man she loves, who beats her, robs her, and finally casts her out. Nana then resolves to return to high society, but “in grand style,” courting the envy and admiration even of respectable women. She becomes the mistress of a powerful aristocrat, resides in a sumptuous mansion, and squanders fortunes on jewelry, furniture, horses, and carriages. She stands at the very center of French polite society. Yet this life does not suit Nana. As she screams at the aristocrat, who has just uncovered yet another infidelity, > get it through that thick skull of yours: I intend to be free. If I like a man, I go to bed with him . Nana moves like a destructive force, squandering wealth, ruining powerful bourgeois and aristocrats, driving both young and old to suicide. Is she the personification of a social vengeance of the poor against the rich? Or simply the expression of an irrepressible craving for luxury, sex, and depravity? Nana is likely both. Her story ends tragically with her death from smallpox, on the very day France goes to war and the Second Empire begins to crumble. Disfigured by the disease, Nana is abandoned by her friends, who prefer to join the jubilant demonstrations for the departure of troops to the front. Zola is a great social writer, perhaps the greatest of all time. The primary purpose of his novels is to portray and condemn the society of his day from the vantage point of emerging social forces. In his work there is always a social critique that, while lending his novels immense emotional and ideological impact, often desiccates his characters, reducing them to stereotypes of a social class or a societal role. In *Nana*, there is something else. It appears that Zola begins within his conventional frameworks, but gradually Nana’s figure takes shape autonomously. She is no longer merely the representative of a social class. She is a woman who wants to live intensely, a woman who despises men and desires to destroy them for the suffering they have inflicted upon her. It is no coincidence that the turning point of the novel is precisely her abandonment by the lover with whom she had forsaken polite society to endure a life of squalor. Nor is it insignificant that the only person to exert any real influence over Nana is her friend Satin, with whom she shares a loving relationship. From a literary standpoint, Zola alternates passages of extraordinary beauty (the novel’s zenith being the description of the race at the hippodrome) with overwrought pages, somewhat striving for effect and melodrama, as seen in the concluding chapters. What endures, however, is an undeniable ability to convey to the reader the profound essence of events through a chromatic, almost painterly use of language, especially of adjectives.

As the editors, Alda and Elena Croce, have noted, Southern Italian literature is strongly influenced by the great French authors, such as Zola, Flaubert, and Maupassant: heedful, therefore, of social conditions, yet marked by a peculiar accent—a blend of ironic, fairy-tale fabulation and melodramatic tones. The survey is limited to 10 writers, some of them well known, such as Capuana, Serao, and De Roberto; how representative it is remains unclear, but within it one can single out two singular pieces. Salvatore Di Giacomo is a prolific Neapolitan writer, journalist, poet, and scholar. He favors tragic spectacles, mixtures of ferocity and goodness; his characters are harlots, *camorristi*, and beggars; his settings are filthy, picturesque alleyways. The short story *La Taglia* offers an effective portrait of a dramatic and forgotten chapter of our history: the great brigandage between 1860 and 1870. We find ourselves in a "disconsolate little village" over which weighed "a silence of death": today the sacking of the mayor's house, yesterday a severed ear to extort a ransom, then a herdsman roasted over firewood like a ram; a horror to which the soldiers react, > without the stir of a trial, without lawyers or courts. Down there, behind the little church, they shot them on the dirt ground . Mariangela is seized by labor pains, surrounded only by her children because her husband has gone off to capture a ruthless bandit on whose head a bounty has been placed; it is a poor wretch's desperate bid to escape destitution. > The toddler had crawled up to the doorstep. (...) The other, the red-haired one, grabbed him from behind and pulled him onto his chest. The naked infant shrieked, growing restless, with his little hands trying to fend him off.(..) The July sun burst inside with a blaze that scorched the flesh and took away one's breath;(...) the broody hen pecked among the scattered grains, (...) a little dog braced its paws on the rim of the pitcher and stretched its dirty snout into it, (...) outside, a heavy silence... The woman is in labor; the eldest boy, the red-haired one, runs off terrified to look for his father. As he makes his way into the brush, he finds a lizard, which he slips into his pocket. He calls desperately for his father, then catches sight of him: > the murdered man's face was barely visible, (...) flies swarmed all over him, (...) a hand stuck out, all bruised and bloody, open. (...) Tata! Tata!, called the little boy, Tata, mama is crying and wants you!... Oi, tata! He grew restless. He lay flat on his belly on the low wall, brought out the lizard, tied a string to the bloody stump of its tail and made it walk, jerking it back with sudden tugs, yelling after it: Ah, Ah!... Isce!... > Vittorio Imbriani, also a Neapolitan, was a university professor, patriot, and combatant, but also an imaginative writer attentive to popular literature. Bearing witness to this is the tale *Le tre Maruzze* > , a true rarity, having been published in an edition of only twenty-eight copies in 1875. In Neapolitan maruzza > means snail; in the story, these little creatures are the guardians of three precious gardens: a rose garden, a wondrous field of maize, and an orange grove. Don Peppino, a young peasant, rescues three filthy beasts (the grass snake, the lizard, and the sewer rat), in truth three fairies, who, as Parini sings, make lovers blissful and in the blink of an eye mingle earth and sea at their whim > . And indeed the good man becomes the King’s gardener, held in high esteem because Don Peppino is sincere and faithful. One day, the Queen and the other Royal Highnesses, piqued and envious at hearing repeatedly that Don Peppino was the only one who never lied, proposed a wager to the King: to tempt the gardener by every means, and if Peppino were to blurt out > a lie, the King’s head would fall; otherwise, those of the Royal Highnesses. Don Peppino resists the princes' overtures, but when the Queen offers herself in exchange for a rose, as Girolamo Fontanella sings, the mawkish versifier, > upon the happy lover she falls and joins breast to breast, mouth to mouth, and heart to heart . And what is to be done now? Telling a lie means incurring the Sovereign's wrath; telling the truth will mean the King loses his head. What weighs most heavily on Don Peppino is the grief of the three fairies (now in the form of a spade, hoe, and shovel), because the man could not resist and “tomorrow will tell the little lie.” But to the Sovereign’s question: “How fare my little snails?” Don Peppino replies: > Mouth of Truth no Lie shall tell, your wife came asking for them; she offered what I might ask, and three she obtained. As price for the first, I kissed her; (...) Spade, hoe, and shovel, that know all, as I have told you shall bear witness to the truth . What moral is to be drawn from this fairy tale? While the powerful amuse themselves with pointless games and foolish wagers, the poor man acts wisely, even if he too has allowed himself to be deceived. Could it be true? "...Cuccurucù...". I have chosen only two stories, because the others add little to literature or even to the narrative of our *Mezzogiorno*. Journalism, the fantastic, and melodrama mingle together, giving us a languid and pessimistic vision of the South. The only story of great power is Federico De Roberto’s (*La Paura*), set in a World War I trench and dealing with foretold death; several soldiers must advance to an outpost, fully aware that they will surely die. It is death, > crouching, watchful, poised to spring and seize; if one must go out to meet it, staring into its eyes, the eyes grow dim, the legs give way, the veins run dry, every fiber trembles, all of life ebbs away. It is a tragic and intensely timely page; yet we are in 1927, a world away from the weary and repetitive tales of the late nineteenth century. Why not read it? Nothing evocative or stimulating.

The book chronicles the events surrounding the birth of Rome through the story of two brothers, Servio and Plistino. Enslaved, they flee to find freedom in Rome, which was then coalescing around the figure of Romulus. The two brothers make their fortune, but Servio is unable to have children, and Plistino’s descendants perish in a plague. Servio and his wife resolve to adopt one of the brothers of Plistino’s wife so as to perpetuate the family name. The novel features all the most celebrated episodes of the founding of Rome, yet the style and storytelling elevate when dealing with domestic themes: the love between spouses and the bond with children, death and grief, a religion centered on the veneration of ancestors, adoption as the expression of a love that transcends ties of blood, and the values of justice and freedom. The pedagogical intent is less pronounced here than in *Storia delle Storie del mondo*, yet the prose retains that affectionate, gentle, and at times lyrical tone distinctive of the author. The narrative structure is often fragmented, lacking the momentum required to keep the reading from growing tedious at times (particularly in the middle section).

The book, autobiographical in nature, recounts the relationship between the writer and his disabled son. The chief merit of the narrative, structured into self-contained chapters and thus devoid of an overarching plot, lies in its spare style, which eschews easy sentimentality and false solidarity. The disabled boy functions almost as a mirror to the author, the embodiment of a personal history fraught with friction—evident, for instance, in his relations with his wife and with the school, the writer’s own workplace. In reality, it is a tedious book, at times reduced to aphorisms and assertions that are ends in themselves, detached from any narrative framework. Even the portrait of the son falls flat, devoid of nuance and consequently bent on projecting a positive view, despite the grave misfortune.

> A lightship has no propeller, no engine; on the bridge there is no helm: it can do nothing but sway, somewhat forlorn, an animal tugging in vain at a chain On this ship that will never sail and will never see distant lands, the crew members vanish > into the dark labyrinth where all the days of their working lives were digested into an almost inextricable mass of memories . Into this sort of prison, into a fragile balance of lives and memories, bursts a young goat. The cook brings it aboard, intending to slaughter it to make a savory dish. > Such an animal on a ship (the peasant woman shouted at him), watch out, because it'll want to escape. (...) A goat always wants to get away , but on this ship we are all prisoners, says the cook. It is only natural to wonder why the cook wanted to bring the young goat on board; its meat is certainly exquisite, but culinary motives are irrelevant; in the man’s childhood lies an image that resurfaces ceaselessly. While still a child, a household servant induced him to slit a chicken's throat. > Blood spurted from the neck, the chicken flapped its wings violently. (...) he ran inside looking for his mother. (...) He put his thumb in his mouth and rested his head against her chest. The finger had the sweet taste of the chicken's blood. (...) He closed his eyes . The cook does not have much butchering experience, let alone with goats, but no matter: in his subconscious, he seeks to repeat the childhood ritual through which he conquered fear and reclaimed his mother. The cook does not realize that he is not the only one subject to the dark fascination of the young goat. Days of dense fog set in, which > deadened the wind, dissipated sounds, petrified the motion of the waves, encircled the lightship. (...) Now it was a defenseless animal, chained, surrounded, (...) invisible to passing vessels . The danger of a collision is palpable, the tension among the crew is at its peak; there is nothing to do but wait, peering into the gloom of the fog. To anyone who has not been hardened by years of waiting and is unable to repress fear, the young goat—a frisking, restless creature—might seem like the devil, who has brought disorder to a life as regimented as that of the lightship. There is a sailor who > sometimes heard things that weren't there and struggled to shake off the thoughts that plagued him . His duty on board is to take readings for the Meteorological Service, but the meticulous, detailed records have become "a shadow bookkeeping of his anxiety and unease." He convinces himself that the young goat is the root of the evils afflicting the crew, of that dark fog enveloping the vessel: a condition that prevents him from filling in his daily log. He decides to put the goat to death in a ritual to exorcise the evil. But if the animal is the devil, how can a mere sailor be expected to save the small community? Whether due to the author's limited grasp of maritime life or the translator's difficulty in rendering nautical terminology into Italian, the lightship remains in the background of the narrative; it can only be brought to light as a metaphor for evil and the fragility of the human soul. At a certain point, the cook contracts malaria and plunges into a fever-induced suspension of consciousness. A respite for memory at last, says the author! What is this obsession with memories, never real but always imagined? Would it not be better to dissolve into the void of the present, without past or future? Saint Augustine maintained that nothing exists except the present, since the past is memory in the present and the future is merely today's anticipation of what is to come. Giving the tale a philosophical reading, one might conclude that the young goat is the lockpick used to drag the past into the present—everything dark within the human soul that originates in memory. The writing is stark: short sentences with frequent full stops resulting in a fragmented narrative, sketched and somehow suspended characters, a simple, even banal plot. It reads like a cold, journalistic report of an affair that is not meant to have an explanation, unless one settles for a few psychological traits, which are, moreover, underdeveloped. The allure of the maritime world is entirely absent, both in language and situations, save for the descriptions of the dark, terrifying fog. Why not read it? It is fragile from a narrative standpoint, useless when it comes to content.

The year is 900 AD. The Vikings, a people native to Scandinavia, lived off crops, herring fishing, and, for the more restless among them, sea raids—chiefly toward England and Ireland, where they found fortune by the sword, and where many eventually settled. They were beginning to be touched by the preaching of priests, “shaven-headed men,” who sought to convert them to the Christian faith and to soften their customs, still crude and violent. The novel recounts the deeds of Red Orm: the youngest son of a wealthy farmer, who, as soon as > spring arrived and the smell of tar began to permeate the air , would turn his gaze toward the sea and, out of the sheer joy of setting out, “would even compose a verse or two.” Orm was his mother’s darling, and she did not want him sailing off with his father on perilous voyages, fraught with storms and enemies. Circumstances dictated otherwise. In an attempt to defend his flock, he was captured by a ship of Vikings sailing “southward,” toward the Frankish realm and wealthy Andalusia. Thus begins the first part of the book, recounting Orm’s long voyage. It was an expedition into worlds still unknown yet already dreamed of: rich lands ripe for plunder. The Vikings had no fixed destination, and thus the book is not a Nordic version of the *Argonautica*, as Michael Chabon suggests in his introduction. Events carried the voyagers along, and they displayed courage, vigor, a knack for seizing opportunity, and a thirst to discover new places and customs. The account of this long journey is also the story of Orm’s coming of age: from a spoiled, impulsive boy, he grew into a seasoned man and a leader of men. And so, upon returning home, Orm was fully an adult, claiming mastery over his own fate. The account of his homecoming opens with one of the most compelling chapters: the Christmas feast at the king’s court. The clash between tradition and Christianity, between ancestral values and new ideals, emerges with brutal clarity. The long banquet in honor of Christmas culminated in a series of bloody duels, in which Orm himself was embroiled, defending the necklace bestowed upon him by the Caliph of Cordova. And it was precisely during his prolonged convalescence that love blossomed between Orm and the king’s daughter—a love that spurred the now-mature youth toward further spiritual growth. To win the woman he loved, Orm chose to surrender the necklace and convert to Christianity. It was a momentous choice, for it forced him to take refuge near the great forests, > where kings never come. It is there that I shall build my church . Many interpretations can be ascribed to the novel: a hybrid of fantastical narrative and social chronicle; a chronicle of the transformation of Vikings into Normans, conquerors of England and key players in the late Middle Ages; the spread of Christendom and its attendant ethical and cultural dilemmas; nostalgia for Viking society, crude yet authentic; the wandering of young men in search of their destiny and the pursuit of the new; the portrayal of a man’s long and turbulent life. Yet the novel’s truest essence is adventure, seasoned with a healthy, dry irony—a detachment that keeps us from taking the heroic figures, incredible exploits, and wondrous discoveries too seriously. As Michael Chabon writes in the conclusion to his introduction, > adventure is a dish best consumed in the comfort of one’s own home . Why read it? The narrative is at times episodic, yet it remains a captivating, epic, and popular tale.

> To you, islands, to you may my guardian god/Lead me! Yet from this faithful heart/Even then the Neckar shall not fade,/Nor the sweet meadows and the willows of its banks. (*“Ode on the Neckar Valley”*, 1801). Thus Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), one of the founders of German Romanticism, sings of Tübingen and its river, the Neckar—to him a cherished realm, an emblem of peace and serenity. Yet Tübingen is also the city where Hölderlin spent the long years of his madness, from 1807 until his death. Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) returns to the great poet in this short story, imagining two young men paying a visit to Hölderlin in 1823. One is the young student Eduard Mörike, residing in Tübingen to study theology and become a Protestant pastor. > To the young man in his twenties, beloved by his friends for the inexhaustible vivacity of his genius, it happened not infrequently, in certain serene moments of happiness, that the entire landscape would suddenly take on the contours of an enchanted painting, upon which he gazed with rapt eyes, sensing the world’s enigmatic beauty as a warning and almost as a subtle, concealed torment. The other is his friend and contemporary Wilhelm Waiblinger: he, too, officially a student of theology, brazenly declares his wish to > flee far from you, predestined race of obese petty priests, (…) rushing into a tavern to drown my soul in beer and wine. (…) What a clown I am, what a mangy egoist and dissolute drunkard! The former embodies purity, diaphanous and cowardly; the latter, dissolution, corrupting yet vital. Mörike (1804–1875) would end up a country vicar, trapped in an intractable conflict between sexuality and spirituality; Waiblinger (1804–1830) would die young in Rome, author of poetry and prose marked by an intense visionary world. The two young men, still oblivious to their own future, go to fetch Hölderlin to guide him to a cloister from which the now-demented poet can contemplate the placid flow of the Neckar. Poetry does not save man, the figure of Hölderlin seems to say to the two youths: > there, now, sat the man with the divine brow and a gaze ever filled with touching purity, the ghost of himself, plunged back into an empty, helpless childhood. And when > the tall, solemn man, led by the hand by his nurse, walks away to return home, the two young men part ways as well, and it will be forever: Mörike, a *slender adolescent* who still believes in poetry, and Waiblinger, determined to gamble his fate. Looming over them is what is perhaps the demented Hölderlin’s last poem: > The pleasant things of this world I have enjoyed. /The time of youthful hours, how long, /oh, how long since lost!/ April and May and July a distant season/withered away./I am no longer anything, no longer do I love life. (Probably written in 1811). The story is Hesse’s tribute to poets who likely contributed to his intellectual formation; as if Montale were to imagine D’Annunzio and Pascoli paying a visit to Carducci. There is also a reflection on Poetry, when Hesse wonders > why were they sitting here so unhappy and cheated, those poets of exaltation, the old man and the young (Hölderlin and Waiblinger), and why did he himself (Mörike), (…) sit beside them so sorrowful and discontented? (…) Was it truly the fate of poets that no sun could shine in their eyes without them having to amass its shadow in their souls? Why read it? Fluent, and a fine introduction to Hesse.

The novel bears the subtitle *The True Story of Enaiatollah Akbari*. It is, in fact, Akbari who recounts his journey from Afghanistan to Italy to Geda. Whether this is a literary device or an actual interview matters little; the journalistic reportage format lends the requisite credibility to the boy's tribulations, to his dream of freedom and peace. Akbari lives in northern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan: he belongs to a Shia ethnic minority persecuted by the Taliban. Still a child, he is forced to witness the execution by firing squad of his schoolteacher, who stubbornly insisted on keeping the school open. To escape Taliban repression, Akbari's mother takes him to Kandahar and entrusts him to an acquaintance who gets him across to Quetta, Pakistan. In this city, Akbari must find a way to survive, taking on even foul jobs such as unclogging sewers, submerged in waste. Quetta serves as a sort of crucible of formation, where Akbari learns to navigate adversity, picks up new trades—such as petty street theft—and meets other boys with whom to play soccer and dream of a better future. He has heard of > a lot of kids going to Iran. (...) I would hear these voices in the air, as if broadcast from a loudspeaker in place of the muezzin’s prayer; I sensed them in the flight of birds, and I believed them, because I was little, and when you are little what can you know of the world? Listening and believing were one and the same. I believed everything they told me. And above all, when one is still a child, one believes friendship gives such strength that any hardship can be overcome. Unfortunately, one later discovers that *in the sea there are crocodiles*. Akbari will realize this upon traveling to Iran and then to Turkey, always thinking he has found the right place to live. While the pages devoted to Quetta are still imbued with a sense of adventure—the places, people, and events portrayed as if in a dream of reality from which one might escape by returning home—later, in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, everything turns raw and vicious, and Akbari himself becomes harder, disillusioned, and ready to save himself even by abandoning his friends. Consider the sea crossing by dinghy to reach the Greek coast, when, amid the waves, they lost a friend:. > we kept rowing and shouting Liaqat's name. And rowing. And shouting. (...) Nothing. The darkness had swallowed Liaqat. At that point—I don’t really know how it happened: it must have been the exhaustion, it must have been the despair, it must have been that we felt too small, yes, infinitely too small not to succumb to it all—at that point, it just happened that we fell asleep. Now alone, Akbari manages to reach Italy, a wonderful, still welcoming Italy, where an unaccompanied minor received care and foster placement—and that was only fifteen years ago! In *Anime scalze* (see the review on this site), Geda writes that > life is a billiard ball: every collision makes it change direction; and if you are strong and lucky enough, you can go anywhere. Beyond the account of the journey—in which the most compelling aspect is Iran's role as a hinge and immigration country—Akbari's story is a coming-of-age novel that transcends its specific events. One reaches adulthood by facing and overcoming hardships, by learning from circumstance, not without a certain measure of opportunism and pragmatism. It is the happy ending that trivializes the narrative, imparting a cloying tone and thereby compromising the sheer drama of child migration. The novel maps out migrant itineraries, yet everything comes across as too easy, devoid of suffering other than the physical. Separation from family, parting from friends left to their fate, the abandonment of one's roots—all appear effortless, easy to overcome. Why not read it? In the end, it is banal.

In Greek mythology, Nemesis is the goddess of just and fatal retribution for unpunished transgressions. How many times have we thought that illnesses, accidents, misfortunes were fateful events that had to originate in some guilt? We inevitably have to find someone to blame in a tragedy; we cannot accept that what happens is not a necessity, that it lacks a reason; we refuse to admit that God > is the echo of all our vain crying. (...) He who knows the before and the after and the reasons for everything, and yet unfortunately cannot tell them to us for this single, so futile reason!: that He does not exist (Sebastiano Vassalli *La Chimera*). Philip Roth addresses this, and he does so by recounting the polio epidemic that swept through an American city in 1944, at the height of the Second World War. > Because this was a real war, too, a war of slaughter, ruin, loss, and grief, war with the casualties of a war, war upon the children of Newark . Bucky Cantor is a very young athletic director, a javelin champion, a solid and strong young man; he was kept from going to war by a severe visual defect. Motherless, abandoned by his father, he was raised by his maternal grandfather with a devotion to hard work, moral values, and an outsized sense of responsibility. He is a summer supervisor. With the schools closed, his duty is to look after the boys and girls of Newark’s Jewish neighborhood, and he does so with great commitment, coaching them in sports, training them in team games, and teaching them loyalty and determination. His qualities are widely recognized by both the pupils and their families. An epidemic of polio, then incurable and without a vaccine, spreads across the neighborhoods and begins striking even the children entrusted to Bucky’s supervision. The polio cases, some severe and fatal, multiply, and the young man cannot comprehend the reasons behind the calamity: he is shattered, convinced that he is not doing enough, yet he strives to maintain his composure and convey it to the children. His girlfriend is spending the summer at a camp on the shores of a lake. She has secured him a post as a swimming instructor, a discipline in which Bucky excels. Why not leave a city tainted by polio and instead spend the summer in a safe, idyllic setting alongside the woman he loves? Bucky hesitates; already burdened by guilt for not having been drafted, he is loath to abandon his boys, but ultimately he accepts. Yet he cannot escape guilt (which guilt?). A few days after his arrival, the first cases of polio break out at the camp; is he, then, the contagion bearer? Does the responsibility lie with him for the children who died or were severely disabled under his watch in Newark? Did he bring the terrible pestilence to the camp? He must serve his just punishment; and he will do so with stubborn resolve, forgiving himself nothing: he too contracts polio, remains crippled for the rest of his life, rejects the devotion of his girlfriend—who loves him regardless—and condemns himself to a solitary existence. > He smiled (...) with a smile closely resembling a pained wince, indicating fatigue and not joy. There was no light in him. What was missing was the energy and the competence that had once been at the center of his character. And certainly his athletic component was completely gone. It was not merely that an arm and a leg were useless. His original personality, all that vital purposefulness that would have struck you the moment you met him, seemed torn away as well. It is a tale that is read in a single breath: the prose is fluid, the narrative tempo pressing despite the philosophical digressions. Roth skillfully succeeds in tracing the protagonist’s trajectory: everything is already written in his fate, in the sins of his father, and yet for the reader it comes as a surprise to realize how futile it is to struggle, and how virtue counts for nothing when an invisible hand, a cruel God, pulls the strings of our lives. Are we, then, not free? Roth attempts to salvage this in the final chapter, through the confrontation between Bucky and another young man also disabled by polio, who nevertheless managed to lead a normal, happy life. Unfortunately, it is a somewhat tacked-on, redundant, and prolix chapter: a misstep in the narration, an effort to offer, at all costs, a conclusion that is not entirely bleak. The novel closes with a mesmerizing description of Bucky throwing the javelin—an exaltation of the beauty of an athlete’s motion, but also the melancholic acknowledgment of a gesture no longer possible: a breathtaking stylistic gem. Why read it? It reads exceptionally well and prompts profound reflection on good and evil.

We find ourselves shortly before the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939); a group of young women comes together in a nunsʼ boarding house in Rome. An intimate and intense friendship develops among these young women, despite their different social classes and diverse personal experiences. It is as if the external social structure were momentarily suspended, allowing them all to live with a freedom and sincerity unthinkable out in society. > They went on confiding in one another: at first they seemed to feel a certain shyness about their aspirations, then, little by little, they laid themselves bare, even moving closer, touching each other to communicate better, until Silvia observed: ---still, it is wonderful to talk like this among ourselves, all women: if a man were here, we would never have dared speak (...). We women are sincere only among women. There is a singular solidarity among us. It is a feminine world, conscious of its exceptional condition and nonetheless waiting for what comes next, when they leave the boarding house. > Here we chose one another from among so many, one might say, out of genuine affinity. Yet it is only the continuous, daily familiarity that binds us; as soon as that falls away, an unbridgeable distance opens between us . And yet something will remain. > Who can forget having been mistress of herself? (...) Those who stayed behind, who passed from their motherʼs hands into their husbandʼs hands, do not forgive us for having seen new things, new faces, for having had the key to our room, coming and going at whatever hour we pleased. And men do not forgive us for knowing as much as they do . Disrupting a state so rich in reciprocal humanity (as Confucius would say) is the arrival of Emanuela. > I donʼt understand what she is doing here--Silvia remarked from the bed--she doesnʼt study, did you notice? and one comes here to study . Emanuela is at the boarding house in Rome to be close to her daughter, born of an extramarital affair. The young woman does not intend to reveal her peculiar situation to her friends; she pretends to be like them because she wishes she were—unencumbered, still with all of lifeʼs possibilities before her. > I belong to your group. An oath sworn upon the common table, like the musketeers. Eight for one, one for eight. And now I know everything about them, who with others are so secretive and elusive. And what do they know about me? All lies. The flawless harmony among the young women falters, as if an alien presence, that of Emanuela, were setting fire to the dormant embers of individual destiny. The first to leave is Xenia: she flees the boarding house after failing her degree examination, disappears without a trace, and goes to live in Milan, becoming a cynical woman who uses men for her own gain. > To her, of all pleasures this alone seemed an ineffable delight: to enjoy herself, her own company, her own image . Then Milly dies, gravely ill: «Her companions were right to wonder whether she had ever truly existed». Next comes Anna, the daughter of wealthy landowners, who, as soon as she graduates, marries a peer from her own social class, shelving her studies, friendships, and freedom simply to live on her family estates. > I think, she continued earnestly, that it is a mistake to wish to leave oneʼs own social class and force oneʼs way into another . Vinca also leaves the boarding house—a Spanish woman who fled home to avoid living with her stepmother; she stays with compatriots awaiting news of her fiancé, who went off to fight for Franco in the civil war; her beloved, however, has married another woman there in Córdoba, and Vinca has no choice but to remain in Rome, living modestly by giving Spanish lessons. Then there is Silvia, plain but intelligent, who graduates with honors. > And now, Silvia? Now? Nothing had changed except that 'Dr.' she could place before her name. She would have to do everything on her own . Augusta and Valentina remain, destined for spinsterhood and for this reason bound by a peculiar friendship, shielded by the walls of the boarding house. And it is they, custodians of an utopia of female communion, who finally drive Emanuela out. > Her torso bent forward, her face next to hers, breathless, Augusta spoke to her in a muffled, murky voice: Thief! (...) Not even the other day, when you were in bed, did you speak. (...) Yourself, always before anything else. (...) You must leave now. (...) Tonight, before all of them, I wanted to tell you: Get out! But then I thought that it isnʼt your fault: there are beings who, like you, are born flawed, indifferent . We are in the presence of a great female novel, perhaps the first in Italian literature. The protagonists are women in all their complexity: their feelings, erotic reveries, and aspirations. Men are entirely absent, and when they do appear (one need only think of Xeniaʼs trajectory), they serve merely as instruments for achieving goals conceived by the protagonist in solitude, without the contribution of the opposite sex. The setting is the 1930s, and one can well imagine the revolutionary impact of such a narrative, even within an apparently traditional framework. The young womenʼs paths, once they leave the boarding house, diverge into different yet entirely plausible stories: in some way, they also reflect the diverse facets of the female psyche—a coexistence of ideas, emotions, and desires that the author likely felt within her own consciousness as a young woman with so many potential destinies still ahead of her. None of the protagonists will achieve complete fulfillment; all will, in one way or another, betray the fullness and multiplicity of female nature, resigning themselves to a single path—traditional, transgressive, or vacuous, yet always a single path, necessarily reductive of the complexity of the human soul. Yet how many of us, men or women, abandon the multifaceted richness of youth? Perhaps because, as Silvia remarks, «living events is much easier than imagining them». Regarding the narrative style, there is little to say: the writing is flawless, the diction elegant, the entire literary construction refined. It is a splendid contribution to the Italian language, a demonstration of how one can write in a manner both erudite and lucidly simple. Why read it? A great book of womenʼs literature.

The setting is Japan across a chronological span that stretches from the years immediately preceding the Second World War up to the outbreak of the conflict. Against a backdrop of unease and mounting economic hardship, a family drama unfolds: the story of four sisters. An ancient family, now in decline, has split into a main branch—which moves to Tokyo and retains the authority over fundamental family decisions—and a secondary branch, residing in Osaka and centered around the protagonist, one of the sisters: Sachiko. This woman assumes responsibility for her two younger sisters: one unable to find a husband due to her shyness and aloofness, and the other, more modern and emancipated, who works as an artist and weaves a web of romantic affairs, including with men of a lower social standing than the family. The novel is an assemblage of small episodes, featuring a narrative arc that appears fragmented, yet builds precisely upon the portrayal of the intimacy of a Japanese household, and the clash between the tradition of customs and values on the one hand and Western modernity on the other. The women wear kimonos, but also Western dress; they attend the theater to watch ancient Japanese performances, yet devour Western books and films. Even the most rebellious girl, one of the younger sisters, who dreams of going to France to study dressmaking, attends a traditional dance school and gains renown by crafting traditional Japanese dolls. The strictures of tradition fail to confine or ossify familial affections. Sachiko’s repeated matchmaking efforts on behalf of one of the younger sisters fall through because she cannot bring herself to thwart her sister’s will and temperament. The scandals provoked by the other sister ultimately meet with Sachiko’s forgiveness and benevolence. The love among the sisters and within the family proves stronger than any rule or imposition. One might assume the context is defined by the war, and that conflict must eventually burst into the novel (much like a sort of *War and Peace*). This is not the case: the war remains perpetually in the background, scarcely mentioned, and what matters above all are the private tribulations, the protagonists' search for serenity and balance. Only the letters from Western friends who have left Japan evoke the approaching military conflict, of which, however, there is not yet full awareness. Perhaps the author wishes to reassure the reader (it should be remembered that it was serialized during the war), or perhaps he offers a subtle critique of familism, of that excessive fixation on individual feelings and personal friendships, which delays an awakening to the reality of unfolding events. It would have been compelling had there been a sequel to the novel, to observe the characters’ conduct during the final phase of the conflict, beneath the bombings. The true fabric of the novel is woven from the customs and values of Japanese society, captured across myriad moments yet epitomized by nature—such as the family’s excursions to view the cherry blossoms. The peace, order, and serenity emanating from the natural world stand in stark contrast both to the complexity of the emotions and events, and to the creeping emergence of the war. The novel unfolds slowly, marked by a pronounced scarcity of plot-driven action, as everything hinges on minute particulars. Ultimately, it feels long-winded, though never dull, and at times repetitive.

The novel, made famous by a film, is a war diary. Set during the First World War, it recounts the story of a group of German twenty-year-olds: “the iron youth,” as their schoolmasters called them. Everything is confused; memories of their previous lives are > mute visions, (...) an immense, disconsolate melancholy. (..) As long as we were in the barracks they awakened in us a wild and rebellious longing. (...) But here in the trenches that world is lost. The memory rises no more; we are dead, and it appears far away on the horizon like a ghost, like an enigmatic reflection that torments us and that we fear and that we love without hope. (...) And even if it were restored to us, this landscape of our youth, we would no longer really know what to do with it . What Paul, the first-person narrator, recounts is a descent into hell; and he does so without rhetoric, victimhood, or self-indulgence. > Our thoughts are like soft clay molded by the shifting fortunes of the days; they are good when we are at peace, dead when we find ourselves under fire. Churned-up ground, within us and without us . The book retraces the various facets of military life amid the great slaughter that was the First World War: the agony of a comrade-in-arms ( > This is Franz Kemmerich, nineteen and a half years old; he does not want to die, Do not let him die! ), whose fine boots are appropriated while he is on his deathbed; the harsh and oppressive discipline of the barracks, the infantryman's petty revenges against the obtuse and malicious non-commissioned officer; the vital importance of rations, the scrounging and stealing to supplement meager food; visits to young prostitutes while dreaming that they are the girls from the propaganda posters; the atmosphere of the field hospital, where limbs are amputated amid the wretches' shrieks, and men can hardly wait for a dying comrade to vacate a bed; leave back home, made grating by having to endure the warmongering speeches of the “bourgeoisie”; friendship, a bond strong enough to make the harshness of a soldier’s life bearable, yet so fragile because companions die so easily; and, finally, the trenches. Anyone expecting an epic tone, a sort of *Iliad*, will be disappointed. The fighting is, in truth, pure butchery: bodies riddled with bullets and pulverized by shells, the death rattles of the wounded with disemboweled bellies, blood and corpses everywhere, even the screams of dying horses; all that matters to the infantryman is survival. > We have become dangerous beasts, we no longer fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. (...) We rave with rage, we are no longer bound helplessly to the scaffold, we can destroy, kill in our turn, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to avenge ourselves . The book is an indictment of war, not only because it is absurd and cruel, but because it transforms men, stripping them of their humanity: > this life has reduced us to barely thinking animals, (...) it has kneaded us with insensibility, to make us withstand the horror that would crush us; (...) it has given us the indifference of savages so that we may endure, despite everything, every moment of reality. (...) Thus we lead a closed, hard existence, entirely on the surface . There is no plot in the strict sense; the characters act like people living “empirically,” day by day, devoid of apparent feelings, which would in any case be useless to show. The narrative is sustained by an essential, stripped-down prose made of short, almost frantic sentences capable of driving the story forward at a relentless pace. At times, moments of calm supervene, such as life in the barracks or leave at home (and here the author's stylistic weakness emerges); yet this is momentary: the images of the great slaughter return, evocative of that cruel death which is war; despair overwhelms us, and we realize that life is a wretched semblance. There are only stumps of life: > red poppies on the meadows around our billets, glossy insects on blades of grass, warm evenings in the cool, half-dark rooms, black and mysterious trees in the twilight, stars and the flowing of waters, dreams and long sleep . Why read it? It reminds us of what war truly is.

With this novel as well, Faletti confirms his standing as a fine author of American-style thrillers. An excellent style and a brisk narrative pace that nonetheless leaves room for evocations of the mysteries surrounding life and human relationships. The only flaw lies in the fact that the protagonist sees the scenes through the eyes of one of the murder victims—eyes that were transplanted into her. It is an implausible conceit that introduces a jarring note, one that is, moreover, superfluous to the unfolding of the plot.

> I have a daughter, fair and coquettish,/an unwed maiden, fresh as a rose;/ever close, since she was a tot,/I’ve held her fast by my skirt. . Thus Nunziata would sing of her little girl, Miluzza, while picking lice from her head. And Miluzza was truly beautiful, and all the men in town > studied the slender ankles of a racehorse, the breasts budding like a posy of flowers, the dark charm of her fourteen-year-old head . What they wanted, Miluzza knew “by prenatal memory,” and also because she had been born and raised in a destitute family of the *bassi*: a crippled, impotent, and cuckolded father; a mother notorious for giving herself to every passing soldier, doing so with joy and passion like Fabrizio De André's *Bocca di Rosa*. Daughter of the neighborhood whore, Miluzza becomes acquainted with sex while still a child: whether with her playmate or the old shopkeeper, or instead the parish priest and the austere schoolmaster. It is not true carnal intercourse, but lascivious explorations of her young vagina; on the other hand, “one doesn’t walk around with such bare legs and without knickers.” It is possible that Miluzza would have met the same fate as her mother Nunziata, a whore tolerated by the small provincial town, had not the death of her parents (and the consequent collapse of the modest tailor's shop on which they lived) and her employment as a factory hand in a local cardboard manufacturer radically altered Miluzza's life. The factory owner becomes infatuated with the girl and shamelessly makes her his mistress. Hoping to conceal the affair and to dazzle Miluzza, he whisks her away to Naples, lodging her in grand hotels and taking her to the finest restaurants. Yet it is precisely the elegant life in the big city that leads Miluzza to realize her condition as a kept woman, as “Sisina, elegant Sisina, (...) and for a lira she does the zuchetuzù,” as an insolent vaudeville performer recites. Listening to him amid the general laughter, > Miluzza gave a cold laugh. (... The Neapolitan world, so unbuttoned, was the opposite of her mood . For her, sex is a natural, melancholy, understated, and delicate affair to be consummated in a discreet setting, among the neighborhood folk, without offending anyone. Indeed, Miluzza risks being engulfed by scandal, forced to shutter herself at home amid general reprobation, or compelled to leave the small town where she has always lived. To save her comes the war, and, like the angel of the Resurrection, a deserting soldier arrives. The happy ending clashes with the overall tone of the tale—precious and effervescent, yet ever steeped in a disconsolate pessimism. The life of the poor is and always will be thus: carving out spaces for survival and simple diversion amidst daily misery and toil. But is such a life truly so sorrowful, or does one instead forge ahead, serene and confident, as part of an exuberant and festive humanity? It is no coincidence that it takes the big city to lay bare the squalor, which previously went unnoticed within one’s own milieu. The writing is the story’s primary merit. Rea forges a new idiom, a blend of Italian and Neapolitan; in doing so, he lends brio and evocative power to the entire narrative, demonstrating as well how one can employ the “language of the speakers” without turning it into a coquettish gimmick or, worse still, a protected species. Why read it? Spirited and captivating.

The novel is part of a trilogy, a vast fresco of Nigeria’s recent history; the review of the first book, *Things Fall Apart*, can be read on this site. *No Longer at Ease* takes its title from a line in Eliot’s poem (“The Journey of the Magi”), which reads: > we returned to our places, these kingdoms/ but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation/ with an alien people clutching their gods/ I should be glad of another death . Just as the three Magi, having returned to their palaces, are no longer as they once were and can no longer adapt to the old ways, so Obi, the grandson of Okonkwo, the protagonist of *Things Fall Apart*, can no longer understand Nigeria—seemingly Westernized, yet still anchored to ancient ancestral morality. At the expense of the Umuofia Progressive Union, an association bringing together the notables of the native village of Obi and his family, the young man was sent to study in England; he earned a degree in English literature, and upon his return he was hired in an office of the nascent Ministry of Education (we are in the 1950s, shortly before independence). He must repay the eight hundred pounds received from the association; Obi asks for an extension and an additional allowance, intoxicated by the intense life of Lagos, teeming with people, a melting pot of ethnicities and tongues, straining toward the future. The young man himself firmly believes in the new Nigeria destined to emerge from colonialism. He indignantly rejects every offer of money to favor a candidate in examinations and civil service competitions. The city is full of temptations; Obi also has a taste for luxury (he hires a car to drive around), and takes no account of taxes and the advances he has received. These are all venial sins that would be forgiven him, were it not that Obi falls in love with Clara, a young woman belonging to the "osu > , regarded by the Igbo as akin to lepers. With great naivety, the young man informs his father of his intention to marry Clara. His father laughed. And it was the kind of laughter that was sometimes heard from someone masked as an ancestral spirit. (...) We are Christians, but that is no reason to marry an "osu > . (...) Our fathers in their darkness and ignorance called an innocent man osu > , a thing given to the gods, and from then on he became an outcast, and his children, and his children's children forever . Obi is angry, but he is also convinced that he can persuade his father—at heart a good and submissive man, a sincere and devout Christian. In a second conversation, after a long silence, the father recounts to his son the story of Ikemefuna. > He began slowly and quietly, so quietly that it was difficult to hear the words. It seemed as if he were not really speaking to Obi. His face was turned sideways so that Obi saw him in dim profile . Ikemefuna was killed by Okonkwo to uphold ancestral rules; Obi's father abandoned his family and became a Christian; Okonkwo hanged himself out of shame. What did the father mean by recounting this tragedy to his son? Whoever abandons their "chi > , god, role, and destiny, brings terrible consequences upon themselves and their family. This message is not explicit, but that is how Obi interprets it. As often happens in Achebe's novels, the characters are granted freedom of choice and are therefore responsible for their own actions; indeed, the story could also have been an invitation to the son to forge his own path with courage, just as the father had done by becoming a Christian. Obi returns to Lagos, convinced that he cannot marry Clara; but the young woman is pregnant, and so the pregnancy must be terminated. Obi accompanies her to an obliging doctor and returns to the car. When he sees them come out to go to the clinic, where the abortion will be performed, he would like to get out of the car and shout: Stop! Come on, let's get married now, but he could not and did not do it. The doctor's car slid away. (...) Clara looked in Obi's direction and immediately looked away > . The boy is a coward: in anger he tears up the manifesto of the new Nigeria, but it is he who failed to fight to the very end for his country's future. And since, as Stevenson says, evil possesses its own fascination and begets further evil, Obi begins to take bribes shamelessly, captivated by the pile of cash. As the elders of Umuofia said, "you see this thing called blood. There is nothing like blood. That is why when you plant a yam it produces another yam, and if you plant an orange tree it produces oranges. (...) But I have not yet seen a banana tree produce a yam." A curse hangs over Obi: "it is a strange and surprising thing, but I can tell you that I have seen it before. His father did it." Charmed by the elegiac tone of *Things Fall Apart* > , by the power of its plot and its characters, one is left somewhat disappointed by this novel. Obi is a small man; he has none of the tragic stature of Okonkwo; the urban setting evokes no mysteries like the pre-colonial village of Umuofia. The style, based on tight, concise dialogue, plunges us into a bourgeois comedy", into an ostensibly flat and banal story. The characters are merely sketched, not fleshed out, in particular the figure of Clara: a subtle irony creeps in alongside an overriding sense of resignation. Everything seems already written: Obi’s story as well as the future of Nigeria. Were the elders of Umuofia right: can a banana tree not produce a yam? Why read it? I do not know why, but reading the novel brought Italy to mind.

Igino Ugo Tarchetti lived between 1839 and 1869. He is, therefore, a Risorgimento writer who was sidelined because he advanced a fierce critique of war and a clear recognition of the value of desertion and conscientious objection. The novel, partly autobiographical, relates the trials of Vincenzo D.: > one of those minds that cannot choose between prosperity and conscience, and are ever wretched creatures . The narrative is structured into three parts. The first part concerns the protagonist's childhood and adolescence. Abandoned, he grows up in an orphanage, where he meets Margherita, the great love of his life. It is a bombastic and rhetorical section, dominated by a romantic and spiritualistic view of life and the world. It is an unmitigated exaltation of love and nature, taken as an idyllic realm. A typical dialogue runs as follows: Margherita asks: > Where are we going? To love each other. And what are those fireflies doing? They love each other. And all those stars? They love each other. God, how beautiful the night is! It is love that adorns it . By page 71, the temptation to abandon the book is strong. The second part recounts the military life of Vincenzo D. Just as the two lovers resolve to marry, Vincenzo is called to arms. In pages of great efficacy, the narrative chronicles the individual and social transformation of a person forced to endure military discipline. Anyone who has completed military service cannot fail to recognize themselves in the author's words: > the drills, the march, the measured and mechanical motion, the deafening cadence of the drum, the novelty of the uniform, the harshness of command, and the discipline daze his mind, divert it from serious and sustained reflection, create new needs, new ideas, new semblances. The good have become bad, the bad worse, the worse wicked . Vincenzo's military life takes a turn when he is summoned to fight in the Crimean War. The very casus belli invoked by the author is of such futility that it constitutes in itself a critique of the absurdity of armed conflict: a Russian prince refuses to pay a visit to the Turkish minister and strolls through the streets of Constantinople with "whip in hand." This section of the book features the description of the Battle of the Chernaya: it feels like watching a modern special-effects film and, at once, a battle from the *Iliad*. Mangled bodies, severed heads, blood, and devastation are depicted with such chromatic force that one visualizes them as if in a painting. The narrative reaches its peak impact when nature itself (here no longer benign, but man's adversary) takes part in the battle: > the sea casts back upon the shore the masts, the rigging, the corpses. A gigantic wave, which seems to reabsorb into itself all the other waves of the ocean, draws near slow and majestic to the shore. A long line of shipwrecked men appears atop it, thrashing their chests and arms: they feel the ground beneath their feet, but the wave pressing behind them surges forward, breaks over them, sweeps them away, and drags them back onto the high surface of the sea . Yet Vincenzo manages to survive, having not yet killed anyone, buried as he was beneath a heap of corpses. Upon regaining consciousness, he faces an enemy soldier and, much like in Fabrizio De André's *Canzone di Piero*, he is forced to kill him, only to rush to beg his forgiveness and realize that the slain soldier > was handsome, with a beauty at once virile and gentle; he had blond, ringleted hair, a broad and serene brow . On the verge of death, the soldier asks Vincenzo, "Why did you kill me?" At that point, the protagonist resolves to desert and claim his freedom: > I had thrown down the gauntlet to humanity; I had nothing with me but my conscience: how was I to sustain that struggle? The third part is the descent into madness, rooted in the homicide. By now, the narrative devolves into philosophy and a collection of aphorisms, in some instances nonsensical. A trenchant declaration against war and, above all, against military life clearly emerges, while a pantheistic worldview now prevails. The whole degenerates into a confused political manifesto. The author relies on a narrative framing device (Vincenzo D. recounts to the writer, who in turn recounts to a friend), which, rather than enlivening the reading, contributes to weighing it down, as the tale unfolds entirely in the first person in the form of a narration: a narration that often serves as an occasion for tedious philosophical digressions that drag down the narrative pace. The bombastic, emphatic style, heavily laden with adjectives, frequently makes for a turgid read. Why not read it? It is sufficient to visit a public library and confine oneself to the pages depicting military life and the great Battle of the Chernaya (forty pages in all).

The plot of the novel is surreal. Paul, a small-time crook, falls in love with an unusual girl, Jeanne, who introduces him to the high-stakes world of armed robbery, only to betray him with another man. Following the betrayal, Paul begins living in a hallucinatory state, constantly dreaming of a little man with a mustache. During a bank heist, he believes he sees this figure in one of the clerks and, to free himself from the nightmare, kills him. A police pursuit ensues, during which Paul begins a "descent" into the underworld: both physically and spiritually. Paul loses control of his life and lapses into a paranoid state. In this condition, he murders a woman who had taken him into her home and shielded him from the police. The book chronicles the decline of an individual and his transition from a precarious equilibrium to a neurotic and self-destructive condition. In this sense, it stands as the representation of a broader situation, one that could happen to anyone; yet the author develops it in a paradoxical and inexplicable manner, leaving the reader bewildered and disappointed by the superficiality of the narrative.