Books & Reviews Archive

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

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

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

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

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

Chernyshevsky was a nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary, a forerunner of the major ideologies and political currents that led to the October Revolution of 1917. An economist, philosopher, and writer, he was imprisoned at the age of thirty-four in 1862 and remained incarcerated until 1888. Written during his early years of imprisonment by a young idealist, the novel bears an overwhelming mor

In *Age of Iron* (among the reviews), the mother abandoned by her daughter and condemned to solitude cries out in despair, “let me go to myself, (...) it is a hard task, but I am learning.” In *Disgrace* (also among the reviews), the protagonist, a pompous intellectual, moves toward death: > lying on a plastic chair amid the stench of chicken feathers and rotting apples, he feels his interest in

The novel is set in England between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the triumphant era of the bourgeoisie, which would come to a tragic end with the First World War. Technological and artistic innovation—including in the decorative arts and crafts—individual freedom and equality, the role of women and feminism, socialist and anarchist ideas: these are the defining hallma

The book traces the history of China from 1909 to 1978: from feudal and imperial China to the end of the Cultural Revolution, through the Japanese invasion and the struggle for independence, the civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang, Mao's victory and the birth of the People's Republic, the long years of perpetual revolution waged by the Red Guards, and the ensuing social upheavals.

> I went on living and writing. Without enthusiasm, living and writing. (...) With supreme indifference, I watched my young female colleagues, laden with charm and sacred zeal, pass me by without even elbowing me. I myself stepped aside to make way for them . This opening of the novel leads the naive reader to believe they are facing the story of a girl, with “a face like so many others,” sea

A poor book, certainly not on the level of his previous ones. A group of friends live in the provinces, revolving around a young boy who inhabits a bleak and squalid environment. The characters and their stories are pushed to the point of absurdity. The boy's father is a Nazi fanatic, obsessed with brute strength yet fundamentally good-natured and deeply devoted to his son; another friend is an

The plot of the novel is well known. Edmond Dantès is wrongfully imprisoned. He manages to escape, becomes immensely wealthy, and consequently devotes his life to vengeance through a series of deceptions and acts of cruelty. The novel appears to have been inspired by a true story. It unfolds across three distinct levels: adventure, sustained only at times by a gripping pace, as in the first pa

The book is set within the affluent Roman bourgeoisie (*pariolina*) of the 1970s and 1980s. A Jewish family, the Sonninos, leads an extraordinarily luxurious and lavish life, even as they weather periods of great prosperity, bankruptcy, and eventual financial recovery. The patriarch, grandfather Bepy, lives in absolute dissoluteness, shaping—for better or worse—the fate of his entire family, his

The novel is set in England, where a secret agent must negotiate the purchase of coal for his country at war. The book is dull, perhaps because it is not so different from Greene’s other adventure novels, and in any case it lacks the irony and narrative pace of *Our Man in Havana*.

The book recounts the story of Inspector Rogas, who is called upon to investigate the murders of a series of magistrates. The inspector identifies a lead (a wrongly convicted man exacting revenge), but is diverted by his superiors toward a politically motivated track. Pursuing this line, he discovers a plot to assassinate an opposition politician in order to thwart a potential alliance between r

The book belongs to the Bermuda cycle. The context is the American War of Independence (thus the mid-eighteenth century) and the protagonist is Sir William, an English nobleman of French descent who has become a privateer to fight his half-brother, the cruel Marquis Halifax, who seeks to take his beloved from him. Unhappy love and the grand poetry of the sea seem to be the novel’s points of refe

Eric Packer is a brilliant young financier who loses and makes millions of dollars in a matter of seconds, speculating on currencies and the stock market. The novel chronicles a single day in which Eric travels across the city in his limousine, alternating between fleeting sexual encounters, hurried breakfasts, traffic jams caused by violent protests and the funeral of a music idol, a doctor's ex

The quince is > the only fruit that with time can make its fragrance grow stronger rather than languish. It is ugly, full of bumps, but with time it grows rounder, softer, more beautiful and feminine . The tale is the chronicle of a tenacious love, for a land and for a woman. The land is Bosnia, “the land of long loves and long grudges.” The woman is Masa, “a Tatar face, eyes like black gra