Books & Reviews Archive

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

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 th

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 c

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

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 y

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 i

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 malais

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 subject

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 w

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

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

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 witnes

*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 pos

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, assiste

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

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,

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 spr

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 initi

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

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

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 hallma

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 militar

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

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*.