Books & Reviews Archive

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 ex

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 symbolo

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

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

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

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 ha

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

*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 ga

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

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

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 quest

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

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 s

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

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. T

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,

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 deta

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 wi

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 Ameri

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

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 ra

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 tireles

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

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 th