Books & Reviews Archive

This short novel recalls a novella by Giuseppe Verga: *La Varanisa* (see the review of *Le novelle* on this site). The Sicilian writer admirably synthesizes the peasant condition by describing the feet of a wretched girl: > those feet accustomed to walking in the snow and on rocks scorched by the sun, to tearing themselves on thorns, or hardening on stones, could have been beautiful . In the sa

It would be wrong to think that this novel is about Afghanistan, which nonetheless constitutes its frame of reference. The theme of the book is cowardice. Amir lives in a fine house in Afghanistan with his father, an important and courageous man, and two servants, Ali and his son Hassan. The latter is Amir’s childhood friend, whom Amir treats with arrogance, albeit tempered by brotherly affecti

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 protagonist returns to Trieste to await custody of her son. In an exhausting wait, mingled with encounters and tragic events (the murder of a young woman), the protagonist experiences the sensation of losing herself. > Suddenly, as if that silence had reached its critical point, the air seemed to congeal, shattering into petals that slipped, swaying, along the pale wall. A rapid decomposit

The book brings together football-themed short stories by various noir writers, some well-known—such as Aykol, Giménez-Bartlett, Malvaldi, and Manzini—others less familiar: Gian Mauro Costa, Francesco Recami, and Gaetano Savatteri. The plots, characters, and writing styles vary, yet a common thread emerges: football, even at the amateur level or played in the minor leagues, is invariably a sordid

A teacher at the end of his career, married without children, with a wife who is an accountant by trade, decides to recount two pivotal events from his adolescence. Had he been—who knows?—an astronaut, a Silicon Valley adventurer, or simply a sensitive, and therefore fragile, person, he might have given us a tale less prosaic and intellectualized, yet rich in emotion and feeling; instead, the spr

> But look here, my good sir, the two of us cannot go on like this. (...) I haven’t quite grasped what you need, but (...) if I say they did something, they did it, and that is that; you have to believe me, otherwise we might as well drop it. I’m not inventing anything. At most, my memory might fail me . Imagining a dialogue with an interlocutor, Pennacchi adopts a colloquial tone to narrate the

The case of Grazia Deledda was a singular one: the only Italian Nobel laureate honored as a prose writer (Montale and Quasimodo were poets; Pirandello and Dario Fo essentially dramatists), Deledda’s oeuvre unsettled our literary establishment, which puzzled for a long time over the reasons behind the prize. As had already happened with Matilde Serao, critics sought to pigeonhole Deledda within li

> 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

If the Strega Prize has rewarded the best book of the year, one must conclude that Italian literature is in a truly dire state. The book offers two interesting premises. First, the theme of grief, with the difficulty of feeling sorrow over the death of a loved one. The protagonist has indeed lost his wife, yet he exists in a state of suspended animation (hence the title *Quiet Chaos*), being ne

We stand before one of Salgari’s most astonishing novels. The events of *Capitan Tempesta* are set in 1571 during the Turkish conquest of the island of Cyprus, which until then had been in Venetian hands. But who is Capitan Tempesta? > He was a remarkably handsome youth, indeed too handsome to be a warrior, somewhat tall, slender, elegantly proportioned, with two pitch-black eyes like glowing

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

> I wish it were she who wrote about me. To gather thoughts about those years centuries away. To justify my cowardice, my need for certainty... I am a seeker of gold nuggets, I collect precious fragments, intersections of my life with hers, thoughts of her, sudden emotions that interrupted years of my heart's silence, years of absence. I stretch time so as not to reach the epilogue with which

The novel revolves around a question to which the reader cannot find an exhaustive answer: who is the "Cardillo Addolorato", and what role does this omnipresent and obscure figure play among so many characters? And what is the meaning of the verses that recur throughout the tale, up to its seemingly tragic conclusion: «e vola vola vola lu Cardillo! e vola vola vola... oh! oh!»? To answer, one mus

This is a short story in which two parallel narratives unfold. In the first, an aspiring screenwriter, forced to sell insurance for a living, desperately pursues a script reader to whom he has submitted his work. In the second, a poet, now famous and wealthy, is forced to endure futile meetings with publishing house staff and submit to demands for revisions to his poems. Regardless of the initi

Let us imagine a young woman, somewhere between her thirties and forties. She was never a brilliant student, she works a monotonous office job, she has had a few romantic relationships that nevertheless came to nothing. She is alone. > All alone I took the bus, all alone I walked the streets, all alone I did my shopping, all alone I went for a drink (...). A cheerful life. Sad. Pleasant. S

> I know a city / that every day fills with sun / and everything is enraptured in that moment (Giuseppe Ungaretti, *Silenzio*, from *L'allegria*). The city is Alexandria, Egypt: > here is the sky, free of black clouds; here are the little white clouds scattered in the air like children skipping with joy across the immensity of space. Thank you, God! Here you are, you who never abandon your son

Amedeo Consonni, the novel's protagonist, has been retired for many years and lives in Milan in a *casa di ringhiera*, built at the beginning of the twentieth century around a rectangular courtyard and now housing twenty flats. It is a «curious microcosm» bearing traces of industrial architecture, today severely deteriorated: crumbling stucco, dilapidated plaster, window frames—traditionally woode

> He sets off between walls, prey to the light..../perhaps it was you, now it is an apparition/or perhaps it is all that knows no peace/ (...) It is a figure, it has no rest.../it is ours, I thought it a chimera (from "S'avvia tra i muri" in the collection *Avvento notturno* by Mario Luzi). These lines come to mind when reading this novel, which speaks of timeless presences, shadows and light dw

The Resistance is most often narrated from the perspective of those who took part in the partisan struggle. Pavese’s novella speaks of those who waited, even while caught up in it. > In essence I was asking for lethargy, an anesthetic, the certainty of being well hidden. I was not asking for world peace, I was asking for my own . Thus reasons Corrado, protagonist and first-person narrator, a

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

A successful author decides to abandon her genre to venture into other narrative territory. As often happens, this attempt turns out to be a resounding failure. Critics, however, have judged it very favorably: in the magazine *Internazionale*, the novel was awarded top marks, five stars. Did I fail to understand the book’s merits, or are publishing houses’ profit expectations dictating critical

The underlying theme is mendacity; the author develops this subject within the context of the family—the very social sphere that, more than any other, ought to foster mutual trust. For years, the members of this family have acted in apparent harmony; when, however, it is revealed that Big Daddy, the family patriarch and “authoritarian master-father,” is suffering from cancer, the impending death