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,

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 innamor

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 Isr

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

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 feel

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

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 Art

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 an

> 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 psycholog

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

> 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

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 maste

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 e

> 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, construc

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 me

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

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 deviatio

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 p

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 ci

> 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 attach

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 shipwr

> 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

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 un

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