Books & Reviews Archive

We find ourselves in Germany in the years immediately following the Second World War. The wounds of war are still palpable, physical and psychological: destruction, destitution, memories of the conflict’s horrors, and no hope for the future. Fred, a telephone operator at the city’s archbishopric, has abandoned the family home where his wife, Kate, and their children live, after catching himself

*The Shadow of the Sun* is a collection of notes from journeys across Africa spanning thirty years: from the independence of the continent to its more recent upheavals, such as the Rwandan genocide. The book encompasses both the nature of an essay and that of a memoir of lived experience, profoundly engaging for the author. A penniless reporter for an equally cash-strapped Warsaw daily, Kapuścińsk

We are in Maine in 1934: in the wake of the Great Depression, a family has had to leave the city and relocate to the foot of a mountain, on the edge of the forest, adapting to life in an environment entirely foreign to their urban past. The mother confesses to her daughter Ellie, still an adolescent: > she looked at her ruined hands. I feel like a stranger in this new skin. I left behind too muc

Nicolai Lilin comes from Transnistria (a no man’s land between Moldova and Ukraine) and writes in Italian. He belongs to that cohort of immigrant authors who are making a significant contribution to the renewal of our literature, so often bloodless. And indeed, the novel overflows with energy, with a vitality and brutality barely kept in check by the canons and formative paths generated within t

Eugenio is a well-known Italian set and costume designer living in Los Angeles. A phone call from Italy takes him back to the origins of his career and to the figure of Olga. Many years earlier, when he was still in Italy, Eugenio had had an affair with a friend of his wife, namely Olga: > petite, pretty, dark-haired, with fringe and kiss curls à la Louise Brooks (...) she had an elusive, ambi

Upon picking up this novel by Grazia Deledda, one's mind immediately turns to *Canne al Vento* (see the review on this site), hoping to rediscover the same magical atmosphere of the Sardinian author’s masterpiece. The environmental and social context is the same; here too, pain is treated as destiny, life as a journey toward death, yet that living, magical, and indecipherable nature—the hallmark o

Emma is a young woman, determined, independent, but inclined “to think a little too well of herself.” She lives in a small English country town with her father: a frail widower, fearful of novelties and above all of being abandoned by his adored daughter. Then again, why marry? > If I were to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing! But I have never been in love; it is not in my wa

We are in the East, in the magical empire of Akbar the Great. > If the war-torn world was a hard truth, then Sikri (the capital of the empire) was a splendid lie . It is a magical world where the mystery of the great sovereign "enchants all the earth, and the future, and all of eternity." Into this wondrous land arrives a traveler hailing from the West, who calls himself Mogor dellʼAmore. He

Like much of McEwan’s fiction, we are confronted at the outset with an extraordinary event (in this case, the death of a person falling from a hot-air balloon) that brings profound upheaval to a life that seemed quiet and settled: the couple’s relationship enters a crisis, an undercurrent of paranoia and instability emerges within the protagonist, and his professional choices are called into quest

The poem recounts the journey of Aeneas toward Italy and the war he was forced to wage > so that he might found his city and bring the Penates into Latium, giving rise to the Latin race, the Alban fathers, and the lofty walls of Rome (Book One). The poem is divided into two parts. The first, which chronicles his wanderings until his arrival on the shores of Latium, adopts the structure of th

> When numbers and figures are no longer the key to every creature, when those who sing or kiss know more than the learned, when the world returns to free life, and returns into the world, when light and shadow unite once more in authentic clarity, and the eternal tales of the world are known in fables and poems, then before a single secret word, absurd existence will vanish . These verses expre

Massimo, an elderly retired mathematics professor, lives in solitude on an island in the Gulf of Naples: he lost his wife Maddalena a few years ago; his daughter Cristina married a wealthy northern entrepreneur and only returns in the summer for a brief stay, accompanied by her eight-year-old son, Checco. In dreams, Massimo imagines telling his wife about the fruit trees and > that sea bass and

> The Kopanice region lies on the border between Moravia (the south-eastern area of today’s Czech Republic) and Slovakia, comprising various villages scattered across the slopes of the White Carpathians. Si tratta di una regione che ha pienamente conservato le sue tradizioni folcloristiche, anche perpetuate in una forma arcaica, soprattutto perché è un luogo quasi isolato dal mondo circostante .

Chelli is a “minor” nineteenth-century author, forgotten and relegated to the margins of Italian literature. Only Benedetto Croce remembered him in his *Letteratura della Nuova Italia*, misspelling his surname to boot (calling him Ghelli) and citing him as a chronicler of the bourgeoisie of Rome as capital. Chelli, however, is a fine writer, both for his narrative technique and his original hand

Don Rigoberto is the director of a major insurance company, has just retired, and is about to embark on his long-awaited trip to Europe. He is a cultured man, a lover of literature: he chose a managerial career "out of cowardice," deciding to > not be a creator, only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. (...) How sad to be forced to deal with lawyers and judges, (...) instead of immersi

I will begin writing from here >the quotation begins now it is no longer here, but there is a word in **bold**

> I publish this old story today because I hopelessly love its free language, its fable without a moral, its *porteña* melancholy (typical of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires) and also because the nightmare in which it was born is still awake and roams the streets . With this note Cortázar introduces a story written in 1950, during the years of the first Peronism, between 1945 and 1955. It was a

> Fieramosca's father, grown old in the wars that tore Italy asunder during the fifteenth century, could give Ettore nothing but a sword; and as a youth, the latter believed the profession of arms to be the only one worthy of him, nor could he for many years conceive thoughts above the times in which he lived, wherein the force of arms was employed solely to augment reputation and wealth. Ma wisd