Books & Reviews Archive

> One of my earliest boasts had been my name. I had soon learned (it was he, I think, who first informed me of it) that Arturo is a star: the swiftest and most radiant in the figure of Boötes, in the northern sky!. Thus begins Arturo Gerace’s long quest for Love: > an indecipherable dilemma, without the solace of hope, or of revenge ; a quest that, to unfold, required an enchanted place like Pr

> In 1989, my first novel had been published; (...) the book was met with utter indifference. What followed was a prolonged depression and the breakdown of my marriage, until, coming to the rescue of the failed writer, arrived the sensual Conchi and the miraculous story of Rafael Sánchez Mazas. The former was a fortune-teller, > who was crazy about dating a journalist (an intellectual, she calle

Salgari wrote over eighty novels, and not all of them possess the same literary quality. In this case, two hallmarks of the author’s pen are absent: the pulse of adventure and the exotic, yet often captivating, depiction of the setting. The opening is promising. In the mid-nineteenth century, the slave trade is replaced by the recruitment of Chinese laborers, who supply South America with cheap

During a long train journey, the passengers begin a discussion on the institution of marriage. Can there be spiritual affinity in married life, or is it nothing more than > a horrifying hell, on account of which one ends up an alcoholic, shoots oneself, or commits murder ? The conversation is abruptly interrupted when a traveler declares that he is “the one who, fancy that, killed his wife.”

This novel belongs to the Western cycle. Influenced by the figure of Buffalo Bill, Salgari developed a series of stories set against the historical backdrop of the mythical conquest of the West, amidst heroic figures, savage Indians (Apaches and Navajos), and American villains. A young woman (the Sovereign of the Golden Field), whose father has been abducted by bandits demanding a hefty ransom,

The book is a collection of short stories written between 1943 and 1947, expressing the author’s effort to reckon with reality, with the lush, carnal, amoral, and shrewd humanity of that “Babel of history” that is Naples: hence, in all likelihood, the title *Spaccanapoli*, the thoroughfare around which the city’s life has always gravitated. Let it be said at once that this reckoning with reality w

La vita è > una specie d'inganno, cui ci si addestra, questo mentire a se stessi su se stessi , sfuggendo (...) «la sconosciuta e torbida paura della rivelazione». Come in *Open City* di Teju Cole (vedi la recensione in questo sito), nel quale il protagonista dimenticò persino di aver violentato una ragazza perché «per me sono sempre l'eroe» (ma «il piacere della negazione non è stato possibile

Life is > a kind of deception, one trains oneself for, this lying to oneself about oneself , fleeing (...) “the unknown, murky fear of revelation.” As in Teju Cole's *Open City* (see the review on this site), where the protagonist even forgot having raped a girl because “for myself, I am always the hero” (yet “the pleasure of denial was not available to her”), this novel also investigates > t

Asako works for a company specializing in wedding ceremonies. Her father's illness forces her to leave a well-paying job to devote herself to the family kimono shop. > She had been intimately familiar with kimonos since childhood, but nowadays almost no one wears them, except for the most important ceremonies. An anachronistic folklore, destined in any case for decline, a luxury permitted only t

> In the late afternoon of a summer day in 1946, at the helm of a large sailboat, I arrived at the port of Oggebbio on Lake Maggiore . In a few words, the author captures the atmosphere of the entire novel: the immediate post-war period with its yearning to reclaim one's prime years, lost to the war or in prison camps; the freedom of sailing without ever returning home, like modern-day Odysseuses

The star of Araucania is the young Mariquita, “of marvelous beauty,” who, between the two cousins, Piotre and Alonzo, chose the latter—more gentle and elegant than his coarse, brusque counterpart. Fate dictates that Alonzo is shipwrecked in the wild lands of Tierra del Fuego, and only Piotre’s ship can brave the sea during the terrible winter of the Strait of Magellan. In a dramatic encounter, t

On May 28, 1974, in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, a bomb killed eight people and wounded one hundred and two. > Eye to eye, she waves to him. Just then, the bomb explodes. A roar. Then smoke (light grey, white, pale blue, pages upon pages of witness testimonies, poignant, grueling...)... Livia must have felt practically nothing. The image she took with her is the smiling blue eyes of her

In an unspecified year (though let us assume it is 1908), a Martian presents himself to the revolutionary and scientist Aleksandr Bogdanov, inviting him to come to Mars to study its society and disseminate superior Martian values on Earth. The Red Planet possesses a flawless organization that makes it possible, for instance, to assign to each individual the work most useful to the community while

This is a highly complex book, in certain respects difficult to interpret, with pronounced philosophical undertones. The protagonist, an advertising executive, decides to abandon his job and the city to change his life, returning to the countryside where he owns a house. At the moment of making this decision, his attending physician introduces him to a young girl—entirely normal and very bright—

The novel chronicles the obscure career of a professor of English literature. William is the only son of a modest farming family. At the cost of great sacrifices, his parents sent him to study agriculture, in the hope that he would one day return with what he had learned to improve the management of the land. At university, the young Stoner falls in love with literature, and with books. Above

> There is no word, in any human language, capable of consoling the guinea pigs who do not know the reason for their death (a Hiroshima survivor). Elsa Morante places this quotation as an epigraph to the novel, indicating that her aim is to recount the victims during a dramatic and painful period of our recent history: the years between 1941 and 1947. It would nonetheless be mistaken to think on

The novel is set in Shanghai between 1911, the fall of the Chinese empire, and the late 1930s, just prior to the Japanese occupation. Traditional China is unraveling; the centuries-old certainties underpinning the families at the apex of the social hierarchy—the imperial bureaucracy and the vast landed estates—are collapsing. It is a prolonged transitional period, in many respects akin to the on

Elena continues the story of her friendship with Lila. The first book, *My Brilliant Friend*, had ended with Lila’s marriage to Stefano, the wealthy grocer. > I wanted to sink back into the neighborhood, to be as I had been. I wanted to throw away studying, the notebooks crammed with exercises. (...) What I could become outside Lila’s shadow counted for nothing. What was I compared to her in

The story of the friendship between Elena and Lila continues, its conclusion offering us the meaning of this long narrative: in vain do we attempt to bring clarity to the disorderly flow of events and feelings. In the previous book, we left Elena fleeing with Nino, abandoning a prosaic bourgeois life. For many pages—too many, even—Elena remains at the center: a separated mother and, above all, a

> To become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me (...). I wanted to become, even though I hadn't known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a true passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something, that was the point, only because I feared that Lila would become who knows who and I would be left behind. My becoming was a becomin

It is a book for young readers written in the early twentieth century. It recounts the Trojan War, blending episodes from the *Iliad* with others drawn from Greek tragedies. Though aimed at young readers, it is written in a clear language, yet remains rich in terms of both syntax and constraints. The intent is also moralistic, conveying a society grounded in simple, common-sense values: friends

Questo romanzo fa parte di una trilogia, che include *Mesopotamia* e *The Orphanage* (*Il Convitto*), quest'ultimo recensito in questo sito. L'ambiente è sempre il Donbas, una terra dove > tutto scompare -- le città, la popolazione, le infrastrutture. (...) Si stendeva e si levava un vuoto leggero e profondo, dipanandosi direttamente sotto i nostri piedi verso oriente e verso meridione. E' una t

The premise of the book is very interesting. Vera, an apparently happy wife, abandons husband, family, and job. She begins walking down a provincial road: > she started by walking, then picked up speed, her strides growing longer, quicker, tighter. One after the other . > The road is a wide road cutting across a ruined countryside. A precise, geometric destruction . > Beneath her eyes,

With exceptional timing, in 1897 Salgari published a novel "of adventure and love" that recounts the Philippine Revolution between 1896 and 1898: a conflict between the Philippine independence movement and Spain, which would ultimately lead the latter to lose its colony. As had already occurred with Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898, recounted by Salgari in another novel (see the review