Books & Reviews Archive

Arkady Dolgoruky, the first-person narrator, is the natural son of Versilov, > a cold and proud man, haughty and negligent toward me, who..., having fathered me and abandoned me among strangers, not only did not know me at all, but never even repented of it . Arkady suffers deeply from his father’s indifference, not least because the latter has taken his mother with him and reduced the young m

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 chronicles the Resistance in the Valli di Comacchio, between the mainland and the wetlands. Unlike the great works on the war of liberation (1943–1945), typically set in the mountains, *LʼAgnese va a morire* tells of the lowland partisan war, where > the Germans did not know that among those men and women, wandering through the snow, many, almost all of them, were partisans. Couriers

The novel relates two parallel storylines originating in Kitty’s refusal to marry Levin, favoring the handsome and dashing officer Vronsky. From this act of vanity and levity, immediately undone by Vronsky falling in love with Anna Karenina, Levin’s trajectory begins: his love for the countryside, his rapprochement with Kitty culminating in marriage and the discovery of faith; while Anna’s sorrow

The novel is set in Friuli in 1944 and deals with an event that actually occurred. In that year, the Germans relocated an army of Cossacks to Friuli, who had sided with Hitler under the illusion that they could defeat the Bolsheviks, their historic enemies. They were a people who had wandered across Europe with women and children in search of a land, spurred by the promise of a victorious return

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

> Cipollino was the son of Cipollone and had seven brothers. (...) Decent folk, it must be said right away, though rather unlucky. What do you expect, when you are born an onion, tears come with the territory . Thus begins the book. In a few simple words, the author introduces the protagonist—Cipollino himself—the world of the novel, where the characters are fruit and vegetables, and the gent

The novel, published under the pseudonym Guido Landucci, is an adaptation of one of the earliest Western-genre tales, written in 1837: *Nick of the Woods: A Tale of Kentucky* by Robert Montgomery Bird. Perhaps for this reason, the novel exhibits several unique traits compared to Salgari’s typical approach. The author’s traditional formula is as follows: a hero, often defrauded of his wealth and so