Books & Reviews Archive

The year is 1971, in China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Two youths are sent for re-education to a remote mountain village. One is the narrator, while the other is his friend Luo. Unquestionably, a critique of the Communist regime runs through the entire novel—a critique mounted with irony and lightness, yet no less incisive for it. Were it confined to recounting how two charming and unfortunate city boys survived in an environment so far removed from their social and cultural origins, the book would remain trapped within its historically dated dimension; in truth, the author engages with the universal theme of the book as self-discovery and an instrument of emancipation. The two friends cross paths with a young woman, the daughter of the local tailor. > When she bent over the sewing machine, the gleaming metal base reflected the neckline of her white blouse, her oval face, and the sparkle in her eyes, undoubtedly the finest in the district . Sophisticated and elegant, “in a place where nearly everyone went barefoot,” the Little Seamstress captivates the boys, lending meaning to their wretched existence. Another event intervenes to alter the destiny of the two friends, and of the Little Seamstress: the discovery of a trunk containing the great masterpieces of French literature, from Balzac to Flaubert. They come into possession of the books and devour them ravenously. > Leafing through them with my fingertips made me feel as if my fragile hands were touching human lives . It is a wondrous yet insidious sensation, for immersing oneself in human nature through the pen of the great nineteenth-century writers will overwhelm the young men and transform the Little Chinese Seamstress. “She will no longer be a simple mountain girl.” In Luo, now her lover, there arises something akin to a delusion of omnipotence: the ability to govern the cultural maturation of the Little Seamstress. Is that possible? > She wants to go to the city, (the father) said. She mentioned Balzac. (...) She said she learned one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond any price . Was it perhaps better to have left her in ignorance? For the most part, the novel follows a linear plot, rich in delightful, surprising, and joyful episodes. It is as if the two friends were revelling in it: they disguise themselves, for instance, as Mao to coax the lyrics of folk songs from a wild old mountaineer and hand them over to the owner of the books in exchange for several novels—a scheme crowned with success, yet ultimately doomed because the songs are brazenly erotic, and thus at odds with socialist morality. At a certain point, the narrative shifts tone, turning somber and oppressive. Two metaphors emerge—the precipice and the raven—omens of the disaster toward which the two friends are hurtling (in Chinese culture, oracles bear fundamental significance, revealing as they do “the Way of Heaven”). Later, the narrator steps back to make way for the accounts of other characters: the old mountaineer, Luo, and the Little Seamstress. It is a lyrical juncture, detached from the narrative approach maintained until then. It is as though the narrator has definitively accepted a subservient role; nevertheless, we perceive that he too is traversing his own path toward an understanding of femininity. And finally, we witness the resigned, desperate account of the Little Seamstress’s abortion, as she makes her choices unbeknownst to Luo, who impregnated her. It is as though a woman’s freedom always demands a painful act. The writing is elegant, adept at orchestrating diverse lexical and syntactic registers. Fluid, spirited, effervescent, the author manages never to dissipate the narrative drive despite engaging with numerous themes, many of which overlap and even clash. He can steer a steady course through to the end—surprising and unsettling—because the story revolves around the mysterious allure of the book. Why read it? It is a gem!

The book is a collection of short stories set in a town in South-Western India, Kittur. The author traverses the various corners of the city, its people, and its social life, like a modern-day Guy de Maupassant. Yet in truth, as an editor remarks when rejecting the stories, > your characters want absolutely nothing. They simply walk through richly described situations and think deeply. They walk through cows, trees, roosters, and think, and then walk through roosters, trees, and cows, and think a bit more. That is all. The narrative, in fact, unfolds between the realistic, stark, and often repetitive depiction of modern Indian society, and the pessimistic chronicle of an unalterable social and existential condition. Despite India’s intense economic dynamism, there is no real shift in the social fabric, in caste relations, in the mechanisms of power—ever dominated by corruption and abuse—nor in the lives of the characters, who, whenever they aspire to or believe they have attained even a modicum of social mobility, are thrust back into the immutable roles of a stratified society. All the stories are remarkably fine, but the most emblematic of the entire collection is *“Market and Maiden”*. Keshaya is a boy from the countryside looking for work in the city: “he is small, thin, dark-skinned, with huge eyes that wander dreamily.” Full of energy yet at the same time “capable of staring at the ceiling for hours,” the boy does not quite know what he wants, but remains captivated by the life of the tram conductor, who works outside, clinging perilously to the vehicle. He manages to secure this job and is thrilled because he rides to work on a bicycle given to him by his employer. It belonged to a former tram conductor, who now begs in the street after being crippled in an accident. One day, Keshaya falls, strikes his head, is fired, and finds himself wandering through the market like a madman, like a wild man. And everyone pretends not to recognize him, yet “he was the king of tram number 5,” cries the lame man, the only one standing by him, bound by the solidarity shared among the poor and the wretched. “That is the way of the world,” remarks the protagonist of another story, “and so it’s a rotten world.” And what can the writer do? If he does not wish to go mad, like another character in the book, he must convince himself that > every true word, as soon as it has been written, is like the full moon, in a day it vanishes and passes entirely into darkness. And this is the way of all things . What is truly remarkable in these stories is Adiga’s writing. It succeeds in transfiguring social realism into the anticipation, or the possibility, of an escape—wholly contemplative and interior—from the deterministic and inexorable forces of economics and sociology. In *“The Bunder”*, Abasi is a small-business owner, beleaguered by the corruption of public officials, who endures a profound inner conflict between the necessity of providing security for his family and the harrowing awareness that the manufacturing processes in his factory will inexorably lead the female laborers to blindness. What is to be done? He climbs onto the roof of his factory: > from here a man can see the limits of Kittur... and see the Arabian Sea stretching out from Kittur. The setting sun is shining above it. A ship is slowly leaving the harbor, sailing where the blue waters of the sea change color and turn a deep dark. And it is about to meet a broad swath of the brilliant setting sun, an oasis of pure light Will Abisa throw himself from the roof, or will he submit to the inexorable laws of economics? We are left in a state of suspense, of waiting, which forms the resolution to most of the stories. Why read it? Splendid stories, marvelous prose, and human and social narratives of powerful resonance.

This book belongs to a literary genre whose pinnacle is *Gomorrah*, and which could offer an opportunity for revival to an otherwise bloodless Italian literature. It is a hybrid of novel and investigative journalism. Fabrizio Gatti is a journalist who conducts his investigations into immigration by masquerading as a migrant, thereby experiencing their living conditions firsthand. The novel arises organically, as the author personally lives through the events narrated and the encounters depicted. In the first part of the book, the author retraces the route between Dakar and the Libyan border, chronicling the inhumane conditions and, above all, the violence inherent to these journeys. In reality, people are at the mercy of criminal syndicates—colluding with local police forces—who seize every opportunity to extort these desperate souls. Transit relies on makeshift vehicles (dilapidated trucks, off-road vehicles) that routinely break down along the way, abandoning passengers to certain death in the desert. The lack of funds to continue the journey reduces migrants to a form of servitude in transit hubs, where they are forced to work merely to have something to eat. This is the finest section of the book, both for its descriptions of place (at times almost evoking travel literature) and, above all, for the bonds of friendship the author forms with some of his companions. Here, the author's driving impulse behind these experiences becomes strikingly clear—a quest for adventure coupled with an investigation into the roots of one of the great agonies of our era: > and tonight, as I update my journal, tucked inside my sleeping bag with the mini flashlight wedged between my neck and shoulder, I feel that I am at the mercy of this immense river of arms. I realize there are no safe havens. It is no longer I who am making this journey. It is the journey, in its boundless cruelty, that is shaping me . In the second part of the book, the author reproduces an email correspondence with two friends, met during the earlier leg of the journey, who became stranded in Libya. It is the novel's weakest section, yet it still offers an insight into Libya and the plight of migrants within this country—which is not merely a transit point, as commonly assumed in Italy, but frequently an end destination for labor. Under Italian pressure, Libya carries out a veritable persecution of migrants, who are often rounded up in camps at the edge of the desert and subsequently abandoned to certain death. There are then two sections of the book that do not allow us to detach ourselves from the issue by dismissing it as someone else's affair. First, Fabrizio Gatti manages to pass himself off as a Kurd and gets himself "imprisoned" in the Lampedusa reception center. What emerges is a shameful picture of the material living conditions and the conduct of the Italian police, in flagrant violation of the principles enshrined in our constitution. Next, the journalist recounts his undercover investigation into the living and working conditions among tomato pickers in Apulia. The essence of its impact on the reader is encapsulated in a reflection by the author: > would you have let them be killed? The answer is a watershed. There is no middle ground. There is no room for compromise between a world of civil struggles and its surrogates of violence . Finally, in the closing section, the author retraces the journey "in reverse" from Libya to Dakar, partly to document the expulsion of migrants from Libya and partly in search of his lost friends. It is a muddled section, one where the limitations of Fabrizio Gatti’s prose become starkly evident—too journalistic to sustain a book of such length and complexity. The question one must ask is why such a "forceful" book met with such modest resonance. A primary explanation certainly lies in the shortcomings of style and narrative pacing: the former too fragmented to be fluid, the latter frequently repetitive and verbose. A second reason is to be found in the general Italian apathy toward the plight of migrants. We are confronted with pervasive indifference toward the "modern slave trade." Alas, dear Fabrizio Gatti, there is indeed a compromise between a world of civil struggles and its surrogates of violence: burying one's head in the sand and retreating into the seclusion of one's apartment building.

Il romanzo si avvia in un'atmosfera kafkiana: l'ingegner Robert Fahmel, esperto di calcoli strutturali, si lamenta con la segreteria per aver disubbidito a un suo preciso ordine: non dire mai dove si trova, se non alla madre e al padre, ai figli, e a un certo Schrella, che scopriremo poi essere suo cognato e amico di liceo, quando entrambi non aderirono alla gioventù nazista. Siamo nel 1958, nella Germania dell'immediato dopoguerra, quando > everything seemed submerged in the past, yet present. In the regular, even liturgical routine of his life, the distinguished engineer Fahmel goes every day, from nine-thirty to eleven, to play billiards in a grand hotel, doing so solely in the presence of an errand boy, to whom he recounts his high-school years when his classmates had partaken of "the sacrament of the buffalo" (a clear reference to Nazism, which is never explicitly named) and beat the "lambs of God," those who refused to adhere to Nazi ideology. > He struck a ball with a stroke now gentle, now hard, seemingly without reason or purpose; (...) five times, six times, as the struck ball hit the cushion or the other balls. (...) The carousel of lines was always anchored to the corners, obedient to the laws of geometry and physics. Is the daily, solitary game of billiards the pastime of a man enamored of the laws of statics, or does it conceal some mystery that engineer Robert Fahmel carries within himself? For a while, the question finds no answer in a novel characterized by a continuous shifting of narrators, from the third person to the first, and by ever-new windows opening onto the past and the present, as the laws of remembrance dictate. For pages on end, we follow the account of Robert’s father; of when, in 1909, he arrived in the city from the countryside to take part in an important competition: the construction of the Abbey of St. Anthony. The description of the hours spent in a café preparing the project drawings, eating cheese with ginger, is a light and amusing interlude in a grim, hopeless novel. Robert’s father, on the other hand, harbors great expectations, confirmed when he is awarded the construction of the Abbey, which will open up for him a future of success and renown as a great architect, and allow him an advantageous marriage, with the promise of a large family of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. But at the very moment he was submitting the drawings, Robert’s father sensed an omen of the future: > squinting my eyes, the entire massive construction seemed to stand before me, already real, as if I were looking at it from a window: the monks bent over their work, the pilgrims quenching their thirst, and the female workers already singing below, anxiously awaiting the end of the workday, their voices bright and somber, reaching me up here like a death knell. Then I closed my eyes and already felt that chill that only fifty years later, as a grown man in the midst of swarming life, I was to feel again. Illness, Nazism, and the Second World War will take away many of his children and his young daughter-in-law, culminating in his wife’s descent into madness; the Abbey itself will also be destroyed, demolished by the Germans themselves to leave scorched earth for the Allies. From the past we return to the present, in 1958, with a seemingly marginal scene. Joseph, Robert's son, is with his fiancée, but he is taciturn, withdrawn into himself, unwilling to speak and reluctant to attend a family lunch. An architect himself, Joseph is working on the construction of the new Abbey and has discovered some numbers written by his father in several spots among the ruins of the old building: they are the markings indicating where to place the dynamite to demolish the Abbey. It was Robert, then, an officer in the combat engineers, who destroyed that masterpiece, which had meant so much in his grandfather's life. The balls, > red on green, white on green, the monotonous music of the balls, like the rhythm of a Gregorian chant, (...) almost tokens of a severe poetry , are the metaphor for the quest for an order that might heal, through its daily liturgy, the incurable wounds of a Germany in which the guilt of a people is intertwined with that of individuals, and torn family destinies are bound up with a nation's delusion of power. "Why why why"—this questioning refrain recurs often in the novel. How is it possible that an intelligent and cultured people spawned so much death? And is reconciliation with the past even possible? Through a family history pivoting on the meticulous rationality of engineering—in construction as in demolition—Böll succeeds in conveying the pain and confusion, the disorientation and despair of a people. In *And Never Said a Word* (1952), Böll depicted the condition of a people reduced to starvation amid the rubble of post-war Germany; later, in 1963, in *The Clown*, Böll would delineate the moral ravages of the economic miracle (see the reviews on this site); in this novel, the writer seems to want to distance himself from the Nazi madness, yet without succeeding: the past resurfaces incessantly, and the characters are like extras, groping between madness and indifference—perhaps the only way to process their grief. Whatever the outcome, Böll reckons with history without taking refuge behind an easy self-absolution. Have we Italians done the same? Did the likes of Moravia, Calvino, and the other post-war writers write of our own guilt, or did they retreat into familism, abstraction, or victimhood, as in Elsa Morante's *History* (see the review of this novel on this site)? We must not expect a linear plot; to appreciate the novel, one must let oneself be captivated by the writing, by the allure of a prose that at times recalls Thomas Mann (see the review of *Buddenbrooks* on this site) and at others the musicality of László Krasznahorkai (see the review of *The Melancholy of Resistance* on this site). It is a pity that, in the end, the novel loses itself in a delirious drift toward nothingness. Why read it? An anguished masterpiece upon which we Italians ought to reflect.

The book’s subtitle is “the epic story of Kit Carson and the conquest of the West.” Indeed, the book spans a very long period, from 1809, the year of Kit Carson’s birth, to his death in 1868. Even though the great scout lies at the heart of the book, in reality it features all the protagonists of those years who contributed to an exceedingly complex and multifaceted history, shaped by competing ambitions: the imperial dream of the United States aimed at conquering the entire continent from East to West at the expense of a weaker nation, Mexico; economic expansion toward territories whose wealth was often overstated; the American Civil War and the role played by Indigenous nations; the clash of cultures (North Americans, Mexicans, and Indians); and, finally, the heavy imprint of a Methodist vision intent on imposing its own rules without acknowledging particularities and cultural distinctions. At the core of the book, therefore, lies the American dream: the conviction of being inherently in the right, and consequently the inability to understand the indigenous peoples. The latter, accustomed to a nomadic society rooted in raiding, fail to realize that they are up against a new adversary—one quite different from the Spanish and the Mexicans, equipped with technological superiority and, above all, an obstinacy driven to see matters through to the bitter end. It is the Navajos who pay the heaviest price, despite having been one of the strongest and wealthiest Indian nations. They are destroyed: first by starvation, then by the long march toward a settlement intended to serve as an experiment in civilization, which proves instead to be an inhospitable wasteland where disease, poor harvests, and contaminated water deal a mortal blow to the Navajos. It is a chronicle of clashes and battles, of plunder and cruelty, laying bare a violent society on both sides. A curious code of conduct effectively binds Americans and Indians alike: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In this context, Kit Carson—already a legend in his own lifetime—stands as an emblematic figure: a consummate scout gifted with both diplomatic and martial prowess, a commander, yet ultimately an executor who, against his own inclinations, is compelled by obedience and gratitude toward others to wage wars and endure conditions he does not himself condone. Deep down, he is frail, a weakness evident in his physique and his voice to such a degree that visitors who had read accounts of his life and exploits failed to recognize him when meeting him in person. He is a hero who becomes one in spite of himself, almost an artfully crafted figure within the American collective imagination. This persona served to open the conquest of the West to the American people and to rationalize the slaughter of the Indians. Like all heroes, he is also an antihero. The book is a compelling work. It appears historically well-documented, and while not a novel in the strict sense, the narrative possesses all its hallmarks. The overlapping of episodes, which develop in parallel before converging into a central storyline, likewise generates an atmosphere of suspense typical of a detective story or contemporary fiction. The approach is cinematic. Its most compelling aspect is the extensive reliance on the very diaries of those who took part in the events. For instance, a woman who followed the wagon train toward the conquest of Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, writes with scandalized outrage about a ball held in honor of the conquerors, where Mexican women appeared in low-cut, provocative gowns.

Those who listen to music often fail to realize just how much the quality of sound depends on the tuning of the instrument. Between musician and tuner there exists an intricate bond, rendered by the author through the imagery of magpies. In an ancient Chinese legend, magpies form a bridge across the Milky Way between the stars Vega and Altair on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month: celestial lovers, sorrowful in their separation, who on that day can finally unite in the fulfillment of a great love. Sound—an inexplicable and captivating creation of both nature and man—lies at the heart of this novel. Tomura is a high school student living in an isolated mountain town; for him, it was enough to > scrape through school somehow until graduation, find any kind of job, and keep on living . It would have been sufficient for him merely to contemplate, year after year, the miracle of spring in the mountains, when “the bare trees all bud at once.” (...) > The entire mountain seemed to radiate light, from the vast expanse of branches softly suffused with a reddish glow. Overwhelmed by the sight of those illusory flames burning across the mountains, I stood spellbound, unable to do a thing. And I was happy for it . His life changes when a piano tuner arrives to service the school’s modest piano. Watching the man work, Tomura chooses this vocation. He enrolls in a vocational school and is subsequently hired by a musical instrument firm. At first an apprentice accompanying more experienced colleagues on client visits, he is gradually—and not without setbacks—permitted to work on his own. > I have no talent (Tomura told himself). (...) I couldn't hide behind the word talent: I mustn't use it as an excuse to give up. Experience, practice, effort, wisdom, presence of mind, perseverance, and then passion: if talent wasn't enough, I would replace it with these. (...) Clinging to something, and using it like a cane to lean on and pull oneself up. Once again, the turning point erupts from the outside. He attends a piano performance by the very young Kazune and is entranced, captivated by the music and by the girl's playing. > Kazune's piano was a spring connected to the world, one that never ran dry; indeed, it would have continued to pour forth ceaselessly, even if there were no one to listen . And an episode from his childhood comes back to him. As a boy, he was walking in the woods when he saw lights that > crowded upon the slender branches of an elm and shone dazzlingly. I don't know what phenomenon it was. But it was beautiful. Almost terrifying. Listening to Kazune's music, Tomura is certain that somewhere in the mountains, in a place unknown to him, a tree was glowing. Love, unreserved and unconditional—a feeling that expects nothing in return—compels Tomura to overcome his self-doubt and become a concert tuner, in service of Kazune, the piano, and music itself. It is undeniably a *Bildungsroman*. Tomura learns a trade while simultaneously coming of age. Aided by a workplace environment that is benevolent, perhaps beyond plausibility, the young man comes to understand that his humble, rustic mountain origins are not an impediment; rather, they grant him a stubborn tenacity that will prove to be his strength. Up to this point, it might seem a conventional narrative, woven from protracted dialogues with colleagues who dispense “nuggets of wisdom,” and weighted down by technical minutiae regarding the art of tuning—intriguing yet redundant curiosities. What endows the novel with an original and compelling dimension is that sense of the magical arising from the juxtaposition of the piano's sound with the lights and murmurs of the forest: a Shinto-inflected touch quintessential to Japanese culture, possessing nothing of the Romantic nor of the trivially pantheistic. While the piano is an invention of nineteenth-century Europe, its sweet melody and luminous atmosphere evoke sensations of the forest that our own positivistic and idealistic culture has forsaken for centuries. Beneath its ostensibly realistic veneer, the tale beckons us to achieve harmony with the Universe, guided by music. The narrative style is spare, almost minimalist: short sentences, sparing with adjectives—fitting, after all, for a narrator in his early twenties who was never particularly gifted in school. The recurring allusion to Hara Tamiki, where the poet of the Holocaust defines the complex ambiguity of style, signals that the prose’s simplicity is a deliberate aesthetic choice by the author, and an entirely successful one. Paraphrasing Tamiki, we might say: > a style that may seem gentle, up to a point, but is instead fraught with severity and depth; a style as beautiful as a dream, yet as certain as reality . Why read it? Luminous, quiet, replete with love and nostalgia.

Henry Molise is the son of a tyrannical, drunken father. Summoned by his siblings because their parents appear poised for divorce after yet another of the father’s abusive outbursts, Henry finds himself roped into helping his father build a small stone shed at an out-of-town motel. During the journey in the company of his father’s old friends and by working alongside him, Henry rediscovers, with horror, his own familial matrix and his affection for his father. The shed, scarcely finished, is destroyed by a windstorm, starkly demonstrating that the aging father, once a renowned and skilled craftsman, is no longer physically and intellectually capable of carrying out a job, however simple. At this point, the story hurtles to its crisis: the father falls ill, is hospitalized, and subsequently flees the hospital to die at the home of an old friend who owns a vineyard and produces excellent wine. The overarching threads of the book are fundamentally two: the familial context, from which Henry sought to escape, only to rediscover through this homecoming that he belongs to it indelibly. This familial context is composed not only of the characters (the mother, the siblings, the father’s friends and the barroom regulars, the neighbors who endure the father’s excesses), but also includes objects (above all, wine and food) and the memories of a childhood deeply shaped by Italian roots. *The Brotherhood of the Grape* is the setting of a series of primordial relations that forge profound bonds among men. Emblematic in this regard is the figure of Angelo Musso, a sublime winemaker deprived of speech, who represents a “Greek god” to the members of the brotherhood, and who, when Henry comes to retrieve his father to return him to the hospital, proclaims with wise fatalism: “it’s better to die drinking than to die of thirst” and “it’s better to die among friends than among doctors.” Evident here is a nostalgia for an ancient time in which the rhythm of life and the bonds between men were determined by an authentic wisdom; the relationship with the father, who shaped the lives of all his children without ever succeeding in fulfilling his desire to pass on his craft as an artisan. This is not merely a question of traditional bonds, forged of conflict and affection toward the paternal figure; the core of the narrative lies primarily in the trade of stone quarrying and masonry, handed down to the father by his parents. The children reject this trade, which has weighed heavily upon their lives. The father’s failure in his final endeavor exposes all his fragility and weakness, thereby reopening the relationship with his son, who rediscovers an affection and a bond with his parent, but also with his craft, which had been lost over time due to the presumed omnipotence of the paternal figure. The style recalls that of the great American writers, such as Faulkner and Chandler, yet it is grounded in the deliberate use of words, in their careful juxtaposition so as to articulate a poetic and musical rhythm. The meaning of the narrative emerges not so much from the plot, nor from character study and the description of settings, but above all from the sensations that arise from the sequence of words and sounds.