Books & Reviews Archive

>. 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 Ba

*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, s

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 capaci

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 parall

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 smal

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

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

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

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

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, vigor

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 detec

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, (.

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 bec

> 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, fling

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 sentim

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 v

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 experien

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

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

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 histor

> 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 o

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

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 clerk

An unsuccessful, penniless lawyer takes part, almost as an onlooker and without realizing it, in a series of events—both romantic and professional—that deeply embroil him. He continues his relationship with his ex-wife; becomes the object of love for a brilliant and beautiful female lawyer; learns, without reacting, that his son falls into «bad company» and is inclined toward homosexuality; becom