Books & Reviews Archive

The novel recounts the fortunes of Madame Bovary, who, married to a provincial doctor, attempts to escape a prosaic and tedious existence by pursuing a series of affairs and leading an extravagant lifestyle—choices that ultimately lead her to financial ruin, emotional desolation, and, inevitably, suicide. It is a celebrated novel, widely considered the wellspring of nineteenth-century realism, which tackles the theme—subsequently taken up by numerous other authors—of the pettiness of bourgeois morality. At heart, Emma Bovary pursues a dream of happiness, striving not to be trapped within the mediocrity of everyday life. Surrounding her, by contrast, hypocrisy, the pursuit of money, social ambition, and the like prevail. In truth, Madame Bovary is herself a child of her time: there is no genuinely romantic sensibility within her, no sense of guilt, and she is willing to resort to any falsehood to achieve her ends—which are, in reality, modest, such as meeting her lovers, buying elegant dresses, and so forth. The third part of the book, unquestionably the finest, which portrays the events leading to Madame Bovary’s death, is conducted in an almost illustrative manner. The characters, in fact, emerge as cold and flat, devoid of even the slightest introspective probing into their motivations and feelings. Ultimately, this is a social novel that appears to have enjoyed a renown far exceeding its actual merits. It bears the heavy imprint of the nineteenth-century ethos and leaves little room, even in its style and narrative rhythm, for that lyricism so typical of our own day.

In Canto XVII of the *Paradiso*, in verses 43–45, Dante recounts that his ancestor Cacciaguida turns to music to explain his vision of the poet's impending exile: > thence (from the divine mind), even as to the ear comes / sweet harmony from an organ, so comes / to my sight the time being prepared for you . The sound of an instrument's strings, together with the sweetness of the voice, is a divine gift granted to humankind to soothe the wounds of both body and soul—and, for Dante, to endure the prophecy of his sorrowful wandering. Is this true, or is music merely a palliative? If we probe Alberto Riva's novel beneath the surface, we must conclude that while music induces a kind of wondrous bewilderment, it can do nothing to heal loneliness, depression, and madness. We are in the eighteenth century, between 1720 and 1758; Domenico Scarlatti, son of the more renowned Alessandro, arrives in Lisbon to become a musician in one of the wealthiest courts of Europe at that time. Domenico > is a man in his late thirties who looks a few years older, with a prominent knobby nose and eyes of a shifting hazel, distant, perhaps flawed by a slight squint: his skin is exceedingly pale and his clothes black, a resolute, mournful black. (...) For years, his father kept him bent, almost kneeling over the keyboard for hours on end every day, especially at night . Shy to the point of rudeness, he is certainly neither the classic cicisbeo nor a man of polished manners, as the elegant and vacuous society of the eighteenth century would demand. And perhaps precisely because of his sullen and independent nature, he is unwilling to endorse the sovereign's wish to stifle the musical inclinations of the Infanta, the plump and rather plain Maria Barbara. Instead, Domenico becomes her tutor, refining and exalting the girl's natural gifts; a bond is forged that will endure over time, even after Maria Barbara marries the heir to the Spanish throne and subsequently becomes queen. Any composer of the age, from Vivaldi to the singer Farinelli, would have seized upon such circumstances to secure fame and wealth. Not so Domenico Scarlatti; driven by a somber frenzy, he vanishes into taverns, where > he listens to imaginative arrangements transposed onto the strings, carried by female voices . In Inquisition-era Spain, he frequents the world of the gypsies, where he discovers that > within that Andalusian folk lay a buried civilization, and that civilization was music. That the guitarra is the unwritten book through which a history is handed down. But it is not just the guitarra: it is the hands, the voices, the fingers, even the feet. (...) They ask us why our singing is deep (explains the old gypsy). They ask us for the secret of cante.....And we answer: our singing is the search, our singing is the journey. (...) a mysterious drama, a drama without an ending . All his life Domenico pursues something indefinable, and finds it, perhaps, by wandering through the poorest, most disreputable quarters. > Anyone who had caught the maestro unawares on one of those nights would have seen him slightly slumped, an elbow on the table, one leg stretched out, a certain look in his eyes. (...) He looks at his hands: his relationship is with the instrument. (...) His relationship with the instrument is one of interrogation. Of progressive unveiling . Had it been up to Domenico, the musical exercises—the famous Scarlatti Sonatas—would have been lost: perhaps the musician deemed it futile to leave behind compositions incapable of soothing his *male oscuro*. It is to Maria Barbara's credit that we know them today. The novel's framework is something poised between historical reconstruction and an introspective inquiry into the two protagonists: Domenico Scarlatti and the Infanta Maria Barbara, as well as the idiosyncrasies of their relationship. Music, and the mysterious allure of the Sonnets, have prevailed over a narrative that might have placed the two protagonists on equal footing: Maria Barbara remains in the background, flattened by the duties and demands of her station; beyond the fascination of the musical exercises composed by the maestro, what truly bound Maria Barbara to a man so withdrawn and discourteous? The only significant element is Maria Barbara's stubbornness, her determination to preserve Scarlatti's work and bring him renown. Could a repressed love for the man have driven her? We shall never know, because the musical and biographical genesis of the Sonnets took precedence, consigning Maria Barbara once more to the oblivion from which the author had sought to rescue her. The prose is plain and flows placidly, neither attracting nor repelling. Only when the author depicts glimpses of Lisbon do impressions rich with vivid colors emerge. Here is Lisbon, perhaps frequented and beloved by the author: > something grim, that smell of dissatisfied souls, of unhappy men, (...) and then the city, opening onto an estuary that is already the sea, composed of shifting colors, of ascents and descents, of sudden azures, turquoises, ultramarine blues. > And the City understands/And kindles/ And the flame titillates and absorbs/ The magnificent remnants of the sun/And weaves a shroud of oblivion/ Divine for weary men . (Dino Campana, *Genova* in *Canti Orfici*).

The setting is a fishing village in late nineteenth-century Sicily. The Malavoglia are a family of fishermen, owners of a boat (the *Provvidenza*) and a home with a small plot of land (the house by the medlar tree). Life unfolds serenely and with dignity within a community that respects the Malavoglia because they are economically self-sufficient. In short order, a succession of misfortunes plunges the family into poverty and grief: the *Provvidenza* is shipwrecked, claiming the life of Bastianazzo, the son of Padron ’Ntoni, and a cargo of lupins is lost. The family is forced into debt to repair the boat and repay the loan contracted to purchase the lupins. Then one of the sons, Luca, dies as a soldier, and a second shipwreck forces the sale of the house by the medlar tree as well. ’Ntoni, Padron ’Ntoni’s other grandson, turns to smuggling; surprised by the police, he severely wounds an officer in the ensuing scuffle. To spare him a life sentence, the defense lawyer invokes the officer’s pursuit of one of the Malavoglia daughters, who, consumed by disgrace, flees the village. Following this series of catastrophes, the novel appears to conclude on a positive note: Alessi, Padron ’Ntoni’s other grandson, manages to repurchase the house by the medlar tree. In reality, this positive note bears witness to the cyclical nature of history, the perpetual struggle for survival composed of positive moments and negative ones—the latter far more frequent. Alongside the Malavoglia family, the book’s other primary subject is the community itself, embodied by a gallery of characters, their mutual entanglements, and their utilitarian logic, but also by a continuous intertwining of economic concerns with gossip, the hunt for husbands, moral hypocrisy, and, ultimately, indifference toward misfortune. No one aids the Malavoglia, save for fellow unfortunates, while the propertied families—or those who perceive themselves as such—abandon them, as misfortune is, at bottom, regarded as evidence of guilt. It is a complex work, layered with manifold themes. In the background lies an absolute fatalism, reflecting a destiny already sealed by social hierarchy and economic utilitarianism: > What ails you? he would ask him. Nothing ails me, only that I am a poor devil. And what can you do if you are a poor devil? We have to live as we were born . "When a man cannot catch good fortune, he is a fool, as everyone knows." It would be reductive, however, to limit the novel to a mere mirror held up to society, or to subsume it under a kind of philosophy of history. In truth, the vitality of the various characters, the narrative tempo, and above all the language—highly idiosyncratic in that it is non-dialectal yet profoundly representative of its milieu—are all elements that elevate the narrative into a realm that is non-realistic, imaginative, and expressive of universal sentiments. If one compares Verga’s work with those of Émile Zola, particularly *La Terre*, a profound difference clearly emerges. Verga’s novel seeks neither to sensationalize nor to incite revolt or desolation; instead, it operates on the terrain of "lightness," steeped in irony toward a society locked within its own rigid codes and incapable of comprehending the heroic spirit that animates the Malavoglia. The clash between individual (and familial) heroism and the narrow-minded conservatism of society constitutes an inherently Italian theme, and is thus emblematic of a culture and a country.

Benedetto Croce panned this novel, Fogazzaro’s first, observing that it lacked “the central intuition that dominates all others,” offering instead an irritating confusion. One is tempted to agree with him if one allows oneself to be led merely by the plot, with its innumerable secondary episodes. If, however, the book is read from the perspective of one of its protagonists, Corrado Silla, it becomes evident that one is faced with the narrative of a troubled spiritual journey, unfolding amid existential unrest and the quest for faith—the only thing capable of providing balance and serenity. Silla, behind whom the author conceals himself, is an > intellect lacking lucidity, mystical in its tendencies, powerful through certain fleeting intuitions rather than by any steady, inherent vigor.. he had vague, unpractical ideas, an ardent spiritualist.... he loved, even in slight matters, to lean upon some grand general principle . He has written a short story, ignored by both the public and the critics, which has nevertheless aroused considerable interest in Marina di Malombra, a young aristocrat, orphaned and penniless, taken in on that account by a wealthy uncle. The writer portrays her before the mirror: > from the ample dressing gown emerged, as from a white cloud, the slender, elegant neck, and between two torrents of dark-blonde hair, wherein shone two large, piercing eyes, fashioned for dominion and for voluptuousness... with a toss of her head she cast behind her shoulders the two torrents of hair and who knows how many turbid thoughts . Silla and Marina share many affinities, above all a restlessness that manifests in impulsive actions and in disordered, hallucinatory meditations; yet poor Corrado, weak and insecure, is overwhelmed by the woman, who banishes him, seeks him out, desperately summons him, professes her love, and ultimately kills him. Marina, on the other hand, is ruled by the phantoms of the past—specifically, by the mad determination to avenge the murder of an ancestress, the first wife of her uncle’s father. She sees in Corrado the reincarnation of the murderer and, despite loving him, must nevertheless punish him with death. The relationship between Silla and Marina has no rational, psychological foundation; it belongs entirely to the realm of the magical, the fantastic, and the dream. Silla’s fault lies in succumbing to the dark allure of a spiritualism unanchored to faith, to rationality, and to the order of the Catholic religion. Conversely, the other narrative thread, the pairing of Silla and Edith, develops around the search for faith. Edith is a German girl who has come to Italy to be reunited with her father, an aging exile who had found refuge with Marina’s uncle. > She was graceful in her black dress, exceedingly simple, short but not excessively so, with a small bunch of violets at her waist.... in her delicate, faintly rosy face, the mouth and eyes bore a more pronounced expression of firmness. It is strange how those eyes expressed an understanding of real life, tempered with goodness..... as though another spirit infused into hers, a melancholic spirit, were somewhat revived by her gaiety . Faith governs Edith’s personality and directs her feelings and conduct. “Edith’s elegant, dark figure, which he clothed in poetry,” captivates Silla, who yearns to find in her the balance he so desperately needs. > And he felt within himself a serene light, a warmth so distant, it seemed to him, from indifference as from passion, a rising of some indefinable faith . Yet the summons of Marina’s dark allure proves too potent for Silla, just as Edith is too confined within a religion of sacrifice and duty to fight with the necessary passion for the love she nonetheless harbors for Corrado. And “the demon of somber voluptuousness” leads Silla to his death. Edith is left with nothing but the memory of what her life might have been, a destiny she accepts with Christian resignation. Meager consolation and a thoroughly hypocritical justification for a bloodless love, incapable of fighting for the beloved! And what kind of religion is it that leads to timid passivity, to being mere spectators of one’s own life and that of others? Beyond the lack of cohesion underscored by Croce, the fundamental flaw of the book lies in the purely literary treatment of the characters, who rarely take on real life. Moreover, the entire novel is steeped in, and weighed down by, lengthy philosophical and religious digressions, as abstract as the depiction of its protagonists. The most compelling feature of the book is its landscapes. Nature is painted in bold strokes—at times somber and tempestuous, at others luminous and serene. Above all, nature possesses “a soul,” one that is indeed living and real: a soul that reflects and amplifies the characters’ emotions, thereby bestowing upon them at least a semblance of vitality. Like mankind, nature is fraught with contradictions, admirably synthesized in descriptions of the landscape such as this: > a lake modest in size and fame, passionate, changeable; now violet, now green, now leaden; at times, toward the plain, even azure . The contemplation of the landscape captures the eternal yearning of the human soul: > oh amorous fury of blossoms reaching toward the omnipotent sun, exultant grasses, drunken with wind, what solace to be you, to live your single-day life, to feel memory fall silent, and the heart, and that wearying tumult of thoughts relentlessly battling together, making and unmaking the future . Why avoid reading it? It is a tedious, prolix, inconclusive book.

The best introduction to this strange book is the figure of its author: Count Potocki, who lived between 1761 and 1815, when he died by suicide. A great traveler, ethnographer, archaeologist, geographer, and philologist, Potocki was the quintessential exponent of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: his curiosity and immense erudition were placed at the service of a rational approach to reality. A keen observer of religions and customs, Potocki was likewise drawn to esotericism, spiritualism, and the realm of the fantastic in general. The complex interplay between reason and mystery is the guiding thread of the manuscript, whose own history is no less obscure and unbelievable: written in French, it was lost, resurfaced in a translation from an alleged Polish version, and finally what may be the original French text was recovered. Constructed in the form of the *Decameron*, as a series of novellas divided into days, the novel recounts the adventures of Alfonso, who must cross the Sierra Morena to reach Madrid. In fact, the young protagonist—and narrator—makes very little headway, as he finds himself sucked into an infernal and mysterious loop between the gallows of two hanged men and an abandoned inn: in the morning he awakes among decomposing bodies, by day he travels toward the inn, and at night he is visited by two splendid women who claim to be his cousins. In this continuous shuttling back and forth, he encounters other characters who tell him their stories, fraught with apparitions, skeletons, and supernatural retributions. Despite situations that obsessively defy rational explanation, Alfonso continually attempts to find a rationale for them and refuses to accept the existence of mystery. > Perhaps at the inn I had been given a draught to put me to sleep, after which nothing could be easier than to transport me during my slumber beneath the fatal gallows. Pacheco (a madman or demoniac whom Alfonso encounters) might have lost an eye in an entirely different accident than through his amorous liaison with the two hanged men, and his frightful tale could well be a fable.... But slowly he is overcome by a sort of «annihilation of all my faculties».....( he begins to realize the existence of a powerful cabal) > which seems to have no other purpose than to conceal who knows what secret, or to bewitch me with sorceries that I sometimes partially manage to penetrate, but which then, through other circumstances, soon plunge me back into doubt. It is clear that I, too, am part of this invisible chain . Reason wavers before the inexplicable, and vast erudition can be, at best, «agreeable company,» yet it risks ending up like the hundred volumes of another character in the novel: gnawed and destroyed by rats. The narrative structure is founded upon the singular repetition of the same prophecy: an ever-identical situation, reproduced and multiplied through a series of fantastical combinations that seem to have a single aim: to assault the stability of rational interpretation. This repetitiveness, which might otherwise render the reading tedious, is sustained by an explosion of narrative invention and by a style that is pleasing, imaginative, and often ironic. Thirsting for experience and knowledge, Potocki meant to tell us, with this unfinished novel, that life is wondrous. Why read it? It is an enjoyable and fantastical book.

A ten-year-old girl, a poor relation, is taken in by her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, a wealthy landowner and an influential member of parliament and the community. From the very beginning, the rules must be made clear: > without depressing her spirits too far, to make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram ; and Fanny Price lives up to expectations: small for her age, without any particular beauty, exceedingly timid, bashful, and retiring, > the consciousness of being a poor relation grew hand in hand with the conviction that for a creature as insignificant as herself it was only right not to be happy . In a conversation with her cousin Edmund, with whom she strikes a chord from early adolescence, Fanny states: > I can never be important to anyone; what should prevent it? (asks her perplexed cousin), everything, my situation, my lack of judgment, my plainness . Yet it is precisely this loneliness, this feeling of being an outsider, of always having to be mindful of decorum and social norms, that helps forge a strong, independent personality, steeped in steadfast ethical values. None of this causes her to lose her "bearings" when the entire family allows itself to be swept away by the allure of the theater; taking advantage of the absence of Sir Thomas, away for an extended period on business in the West Indies, they decide to stage a then-famous play, *Loverʼs Vows* (*Lovers' Vows*). It is a period of "general madness," as Edmund will later call it, in which everyone steps outside the rigid social roles to which they must adhere, to assume the guise of the various characters in a play considered licentious at the time for its plot and dramatis personae. The only one who obstinately refuses to take part is Fanny; this allows her to observe the behavior of the others, and in particular that of Edward Crawford, a brilliant young man who shamelessly courts Fanny’s elder cousin, despite her already being engaged. Upon Sir Thomas's return, everything appears to return to normal, with Fanny more highly regarded by her uncle for the virtuous demeanor she maintained throughout the "general madness." We arrive at a turning point. Up to this moment, Fanny appears as a somewhat prudish girl, still waters, even slightly opportunistic and subservient; her true personality will emerge fully when she must confront a grave danger for someone so independent: a man seeks to decide her fate. Edward intends to "conquer" Fanny; accustomed to being pursued by women, he has found one who keeps him at a distance, and all of this intrigues him. It may be a whim, yet the man appears to have serious intentions: he is generous, affable, and through his connections he has arranged for Fanny’s brother to be made a naval lieutenant; he is an eligible match who would provide wealth and security to the impoverished girl. Yet she, now eighteen, cannot accept him. > She was feeling, thinking, trembling, about everything; agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely grateful, enormously angry. (...) No, no, no, she cried, hiding her face, all this makes no sense, (...) I will not, I cannot bear it. I must not listen to such things. No, no, do not think of me. But you are not thinking of me. I know well that all this is nothing . If she manages to withstand Edward's assault with ease, it is far more difficult to defy her uncle. Sir Thomas, bolstered by his authority, attempts to persuade Fanny; astounded and indeed angered by her lack of gratitude and respect, he runs up against the girl's categorical refusal. > With eyes intently fixed on one of the windows, she listened to her uncle in the greatest perturbation and dismay . And to her uncle’s bewildered question regarding the reasons for her refusal, Fanny's answer is simple yet revolutionary for the era: > I cannot love him, Sir, well enough to marry him. (...) Have you any reason, child, to think ill of Crawford’s character? (asks the uncle kindly). No, sir, (...) and she would have liked to add, but I have of his principles, and her heart failed her to tell the father of Crawford’s misconduct toward her cousin. Fanny’s troubles are not over. First she must face Edmund, and he too attempts to convince her; then she is sent for several months to stay with her parents—a ploy by Sir Thomas to show her the wretched social conditions in which she might live in the future, should her uncle's support be withdrawn; it would be wise of her to accept Edward's offer, a marriage to a wealthy young man. The matter resolves itself: the play was not merely an interlude of "general madness"—it unleashed the forces lurking beneath the rigid surface of bourgeois life. Sir Thomas’s family falls apart; specifically, the cousin abandons her husband and elopes with Edward. For Fanny, the story has a happy ending: she returns triumphantly to Mansfield and marries her cousin Edmund. Approaching the novel from Fanny’s point of view is perhaps an obvious and reductive perspective, given the numerous characters, the underlying social issues, and in particular the role of the theater within the narrative, its demonic and liberating function: a theme that has drawn the attention of most critics, to the extent of claiming that it would be impossible to read the book without being familiar with *Loverʼs Vows*. Beyond the historical context, the question remains remarkably relevant today: how profoundly can an eighteen-year-old’s experience be shaken? Fanny’s tribulations undoubtedly strengthened her, bestowing upon her the character that allowed her to govern her own destiny; but is all this just? Ought the girl not to have been protected, granted the opportunity to grow up peacefully? These are the questions that keep the novel relevant today. The novel is very long and does not always sustain its narrative pace; the prose is typical of Jane Austen, intricate and complex. To be appreciated, the book must be read with care and patience, seeking its value in the details, in the unexpected and ever-incisive insights into character psychology, in the spirit of independence that animates the entire work, and in the sharp, unerring judgments on humanity and society. Why read it? It is somewhat long, but well worth reading, with patience and care.

> They whisper among the neon lights/under the canopy. They want/me to strain my ears/and recognize them one by one/as the night trains arrive/at the station of memory. Who are you?/Where do you come from? I would like to ask,/but my shadow swerves/on the platform of so many sudden/departures, my heart shrivels,/air runs short...: Is my wife with you?/Let me hear her voice once more/I plead, flinging my arms open/in a dream now extinguished (Stefano Simoncelli, from *Terza copia del gelo*, 2014). The protagonist/narrator is a reporter, perpetually abroad; and so he was when his wife Chiara died suddenly. > I wasn't there. I was far away, on an assignment. Photographs of Chiara are everywhere, almost as though he wanted her still present, yet he never speaks of her, > the pain has self-fertilized, has expanded. Burdened by loss and guilt because he was absent at the moment of his wife's death, he lets himself go, neglects his work, abandons friendships, feels like > a usurer of feelings. It is into this state of existential crisis that Martino bursts: an eight-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome, one of the many forms of autism. His daughter Nina brings him to him, leaving the father to manage the child on his own. It is an unusual encounter: a man who let himself drift with the flow of existence, and a boy for whom it was enough to sit nearby, turn on a computer, without necessarily having to converse or get involved, > always without exchanging too many confidences, but also without distress. From this stems a slender story, in which an adult and a child help each other discover a bond that transcends the dimension of responsibility, solidarity, and sentiment. There is no striking, salvific ending, nothing that offers us a moral, a lesson: the story concludes with an embrace. > I would have liked to embrace him, raise my hand and then my arm, and finally gently take him by the shoulder and hold him tight. (...) "What are you thinking about?", he had asked me, just as my thought was about to be filed away in the drawer of resignation. "About the fact that I'd like to hug you." (...) He hadn't answered, keeping his lips pressed together for a while. Then he had leaned into me, burying his head under my armpit and starting to tap gently. And so the dead can return, > leaving behind only fragments that no longer have a place in memory. What gives us the strength to move forward is not remembrance, but caring for others: call it Love. The novel's title does not reflect the meaning of the story: rather than *maintenance of the senses*, it ought to be titled *discovery of the senses*—not those we habitually think of today: sex or romantic relationships (in truth, the protagonist stumbles into a few fleeting affairs); I refer to that physical bond that employs the entire spectrum of our senses without expecting anything in return, be it play or gratification. It is a pity that Faggiani addressed such an important topic, that of the discovery of the senses, by framing it within an escape from the city, in an exceptional setting such as the mountains. Which of us can afford to go and live in a chalet in the woods? And who can afford to live > as we wanted to live , free, watching > the Earth turn without hearing its noise?. It is not clear whether this is an autobiographical story; what is certain is that the context is too flimsy to give depth to the narrative, beyond some interesting, yet fragmentary and sporadic insights. The writing is the novel’s fundamental merit, even if the style is at times journalistic, with an overabundance of periods, gerunds, and verbless clauses. Take this example: > But he hadn't answered me (already Word's grammar checker would have marked as an error the "but > after the period), probably he was negotiating, reassuring, supporting someone. Someone else, instead of yours truly. Wasn't a comma sufficient before someone else"? And aren't three gerunds in a row too many? The narrative develops slowly, without twists; the characters remain suspended, without their inner turmoil ever truly being understood: so many feelings crowd in, yet always on the surface. Why not read it? Too fragile.

The setting is the Sicilian countryside of the second half of the nineteenth century. Rabbàto is a small town, long awaiting rain to put an end to the drought that is driving the entire community to destitution and hunger. The Marquis of Roccaverdina is a wealthy landowner who lives as though the world were immutable and acknowledged his boundless power over things and people. He had long taken a peasant woman, Agrippina Solmo, as his mistress. To keep up appearances, he decides to give her in marriage to his bailiff, on the condition that the marriage must remain unconsummated. Jealousy drives him to murder the bailiff and then to orchestrate the conviction of a poor peasant, who will perish in prison. He feels no true remorse for these outrages (the abandonment of his mistress, the murder of the bailiff, and the condemnation of an innocent man), since, after all, they are merely common folk and to the Marquis of Roccaverdina everything is permitted. Rather, he senses a creeping fear, “the usual apprehension of perils lurking in the shadows.” The abandoned mistress and the murdered bailiff “would suddenly appear and just as suddenly vanish,” and > he felt the strange sensation of walking upon unstable ground that might collapse beneath his feet at any moment . It is cowardice that acts as the catalyst driving the Marquis—previously so confident in himself and his social standing—to doubt, to reflect upon the very existence of God and the validity of religion, upon mankind, and upon himself. In vain, he seeks solace in feverish activity, throwing himself into politics, launching an enterprise to modernize wine production, and marrying a local noblewoman. Only the sight of the countryside, bathed in rain, affords him a measure of peace: > let us leave this subject, for now. Look. The countryside looks like a garden! An immense expanse of green, in a thousand shades of green, from tender to somber, almost black; a triumph, a frenzy of vegetation even in the most unyielding soils, which had never borne a single blade of grass! The suicide of a peasant, from whom he had extorted land through threats and abuse of power, unleashes the madness that leads the Marquis into dementia and, ultimately, to death. In his final illness, only his mistress remains at his bedside to attend to him, a testament to a love that transcends social hierarchy. Yet appearances prove stronger than affection: the poor woman cannot remain at the moment of the Marquis’s passing, and she > let herself be dragged away, offering no resistance, humble and resigned as she had always been, convinced herself that she could no longer remain there, because her destiny had willed it so! It is a complex novel: on the one hand, a rigid and immutable social order within which the characters move according to predetermined roles; on the other, the figure of the Marquis of Roccaverdina, who seeks to break these social moulds, both from an economic standpoint (new crops, modern processing methods, technical innovation, cooperative models among producers) and in the realm of personal affections and feelings. The Marquis has no love for his own social milieu; he feels far more at ease among the peasants, with the old servant woman who raised him, and with the mistress for whom he killed. His madness stems precisely from the contradiction between an unfettered, almost “superhuman” will, and the inability to shake off cultural and social conditioning, superstitions, and the dread of divine retribution. Why read it? It is an absorbing read and a strikingly modern novel. The figure of the Marquis of Roccaverdina is emblematic of an inner conflict typical of our own time.

Anna Maria Ortese returns to Naples, a city from which she has been absent for many years. Officially, she was commissioned to interview young Neapolitan writers, some already renowned, others destined to become so: Prisco, Rea, Incoronato, and La Capria. A long chapter recounts, precisely, her visits to these authors, and we come to understand how the city’s immediate postwar cultural and political awakening had by then dissolved, leaving behind disillusionment, resignation, and pessimism, and driving an exodus toward Rome and Milan. When she meets Prunas, the guiding spirit of the review *Sud*—by then defunct, yet around which so many intellectuals had once gathered full of ardor and hope—Ortese perceives > an infinite grief and curiosity: you must have pity, those extinguished eyes seemed to say, you must avoid looking. Is it true that we are dead?, he asked, is it true that we have been absorbed by the city, and are now at peace? (...) The city had destroyed him. And why should it not have destroyed him? All had fallen here, those who had wished to think or to act; all tongues had grown confused and had gone to swell the sorrowful human vegetation. This nature (Naples and its people) could not tolerate reason, and against man it mobilized its armies of clouds, of enchantments, so that he might be dazed and submerged. The journalistic inquiry is merely an expedient: the author wishes to lose herself, to become disoriented, to seek out a “vision of the intolerable,” possible only in a city, like Naples, in which everything is > conceived, imagined, dreamed, and even artistically realized, but not real: a disquieting representation . The book opens with several sketches of Neapolitan life, the most accomplished of which is undoubtedly the first, *Un paio di occhiali*. In a putrid, foul-smelling district, the sun touches only the highest balconies, while the rest is nothing but shadow and filth; yet the people joyfully greet the sunny day, as though > that air, that celebration, and all that azure suspended over the paupers’ quarter were also theirs. A poor girl, nearly blind, anxiously awaits the eyeglasses that her family has purchased for her with their meager savings. Yet can someone who has never seen what reality is truly like bear the sight of it? Is it not better to see everything blurred? > Eugenia, still holding the eyeglasses with her hands, walked as far as the doorway. (...) Suddenly the balconies began to multiply (...) the vegetable carts were tumbling down upon her; the voices filling the air, the shouts, the whipcracks, struck her head as though she were diseased. (...) So many holes, so many ants ; a sense of bewilderment seized her, reality was too intense to bear. Following these sketches—brief, elegant, and evocative—comes the account of a visit to a massive tenement building, which houses families who can no longer afford a decent apartment. The author is guided through the long corridors, from the first floor, composed of dark, foul-smelling dens, up to the third floor, where the dwellings are cleaner and brighter. The trajectory of those who enter the building is always the same: at first they reside on the highest floor, only to descend, inexorably, lower and lower. > The children, once neat and cheerful, in that darkness became covered in insects and their faces grew ever more somber and pale, the young women took up with married men, the men fell ill. No one ever climbed back up from down below. (...) There was something calling from down below, and whoever began to descend was lost, but only realized it at the end . The vast tenement is a metaphor for the anthropological, social, and existential condition of Naples, where the plebeians and the bourgeoisie coexist, mutually indifferent, like > shadow, weakness, neurasthenia, resigned fear, and impudent gaiety . In the preface to the 1994 edition, Ortese admits that > the writing of the *Mare* has something exalted, febrile about it; it tends toward a high pitch, borders on the hallucinatory: and almost everywhere on the page it exhibits, despite its rigor, a certain excess: in it, all the signs of an authentic neurosis are manifest . This judgment is the perfect diagnosis of the book: the individual pages, sentences, and words are often magnificent, rich, and capable of fully rendering situations and emotions; yet the whole remains disordered, confused, and unresolved, such that any conclusions must be drawn from the author’s own words. It is an outcry, a desperate indignation against a reality that is, for Ortese, “incomprehensible and hallucinatory”: the demise of the dream of Naples’ rebirth, and therefore a defeat. Why read it? It is exceptionally well written, and above all, the visit to the vast tenement possesses an astonishing vividness: a true masterpiece.

The novel is set in Sicily in the first half of the nineteenth century: an ancestral, arid land, > a sun-scorched expanse, hills upon hills, tumbling over one another, bare, parched, stony, scattered with rare and stunted olive trees, with dusty prickly pears . Ever since his youth, Mastro Don Gesualdo has toiled relentlessly to amass wealth and > defend his property against everyone, to pursue his own interest, with not a single person in the town who was not his enemy, or a dangerous and dreaded ally . Moreover, as a commoner outside the circle of local landowners, he must therefore > always conceal the fever of profit, the blow of bad news, the surge of joy; and always keep a closed face, a watchful eye, a grave mouth! He has the opportunity to escape the marginalization to which his peasant origins condemn him: he can marry Bianca, a member of the ancient yet decadent aristocratic Trao lineage. At a reception hosted by an exponent of the local nobility, Don Gesualdo ( > freshly shaven, dressed in fine cloth, with a brand-new hat between hands eaten away by lime ) makes his entrance among the town's notables, only to realize that marriage will not allow him to lower his guard. And it is precisely to take revenge for the icy, contemptuous reception of his marriage by his wife’s relatives that Mastro Don Gesualdo flouts all local traditions by taking on the lease of the communal lands entirely alone, and at an exorbitant rent. The description of the auction is one of the finest passages in the novel, depicting the landowners as they attempt to repel Don Gesualdo’s assault, then seek to invalidate the auction, and finally try to broker a deal—exerting pressure on Bianca as well, and thus appealing to the very kinship ties they had previously repudiated. Yet our protagonist presses onward along his path, steadfast in his position > with his foolish little smirk, the only one who did not lose his head in that bedlam . Don Gesualdo’s victory—first and foremost a social one—concludes the first part of the novel, undoubtedly the most accomplished, owing to the detachment with which Verga narrates, through brisk and rapid dialogue, the dynamics of money and relationships within the local petty aristocracy. The characters seem like puppets trapped within their social roles: there is no psychological introspection; instead, the cold facts speak for themselves. Subsequently, an ideological and stylistic shift takes place: the novel descends into a sugary sentimentalism, taking on the characteristics of a serialized feuilleton. Bianca proves to be an obedient yet distant wife, who shows neither affection nor intimacy toward Don Gesualdo, thereby reaffirming the disparity of their social origins. Their only daughter, Isabella—perhaps the product of an earlier liaison of Bianca's—grows up spoiled and contemptuous toward her father, whom she too regards as a coarse peasant, failing to grasp his sacrifices and toil. Don Gesualdo, now aged and ill, sees the estate he accumulated with such hardship squandered by his daughter and son-in-law, and dies amidst indifference and solitude. And yet, even on his deathbed, he commends to his daughter > his property, to protect it, to defend it.... He explained what his estates had cost him... he reviewed them all lovingly.... he described them minutely, clod by clod, his voice trembling, his hands trembling, the blood still flushing his face, tears welling in his eyes . Only out of a pang of conscience does he implore his daughter to give something (“you will consider it a gratuity”) to the illegitimate children he had by a servant woman—the only person who ever truly loved him. Numerous critics consider the novel to be the > demystification of the social climber.... implicitly aimed at striking at the core values of bourgeois society itself (Romano Luperini 1968) and the chronicling > of the rifts induced in the fabric of an archaic economy and a peasant society by a capitalist-bourgeois economy and society, governed by a brutal, exclusive economic code, by the alienating logic of wealth and possession (Vitilio Masiello 1972). This interpretive approach is superficial and reductive when set against the complexity of Verga’s pessimism. While it is true that the author has his character state that “everyone in the world pursues their own interest, and goes their own way,” it is equally true that the accumulation of property is perceived by Don Gesualdo as a calling—one about which he can only lament, but from which he cannot escape. Likewise, the other characters are all trapped in a social destiny that forces them to live in existential—and at times physical—misery. One need only consider the figure of Bianca herself—among several others in the novel—who is forced to marry a man she does not love and spends her entire life frail and ill. And so, perhaps, the true interpretive key to the novel lies in the impact wrought upon the human personality by an immobile, static social structure that permits neither ascent nor escape. One of the earliest commentators on the novel observed that Verga never reveals > his characters through the internal workings of their soul: he makes them act, he does not show them in the act of thinking (Guido Mazzoni 1890). This authorial approach lapses into superficiality and obscurity in the second half of the novel, where the narrative pace becomes relaxed, fluid, yet conventional. In the first part, up to the magnificent auction scene for the lease of the communal lands, the predominance of dialogue over narration and the reliance on brief character sketches are remarkably original literary devices designed to distance the author and capture the protagonists, highlighting their total surrender to their social roles and effacing the inner stirrings of thought: they are not conscious subjects, but societal marionettes. Why read it? It can at times make for demanding reading, but the novel’s first part is well worth the effort.

The novel is set in Vietnam and recounts the dramatic ordeal of a company of the American military, forced first to garrison an outpost in the middle of the jungle, then to abandon it when deemed useless by military command, and finally to retake it in a bloody battle. Matterhorn is a mountain, a circumscribed territory, a microcosm that allows the author (a highly decorated former Marine) to narrate the absurdity of war and the perverse mechanisms that sustain it. And he does so from the perspective of the soldiers, all very young. In war, a soldier is nothing but > the ash of a cruel game... nothing more than a collection of empty events that will end up as a faded photograph above his parents' mantelpiece. They too will die, and relatives who do not know whose photograph it was will throw it away . In war > the people one loves will die to give meaning and life to what was always thought to be senseless words, a language of death . The novel is structured in three parts, which can also be interpreted as a kind of military life path of a young man, still a student: from his initiation as an officer to his forging in the epic struggle against the enemy, down to existential despair and the loss of the only bond that holds value in war: friendship. Mellas is a nineteen-year-old officer who, as dictated by an absurd military tradition, is sent to the front despite his inexperience. Mellas must make decisive choices for his own survival and that of the soldiers entrusted to him. They move through a hostile environment, amid fog, jungle, aggressive insects, and ferocious beasts. The enemy is invisible, and one often fires without knowing whether anyone is truly there or if a target has been hit. Yet the young officer is never alone, for the commanders—comfortably safe, drinking and smoking—hound him over the radio, demanding his position, the enemy body count (often fabricated to pacify them), and the reasons why he does not act with greater resolve. > Already weary from lack of sleep, Mellas was now fighting the physical exhaustion of hacking a path through almost impenetrable brush, climbing muddy slopes to gain a ridgeline, to search for a path, a trail. He was drenched in both sweat and rain. Strain, Weight, Flies, Cuts. Vegetation. He no longer cared where they were or why.... (still) three hundred and ninety-nine days and then stand up and walk away . Yet Mellas, too, is seized by ambition, by the desire to advance his career. He volunteers to go on patrol with a few soldiers. Deep within the dense tropical forest, they finally encounter a Viet Cong fighter, who is mortally wounded. He is a young man, just like him and his comrades. Terrified, he begs for help, but Mellas knows that the only real mercy would be to kill him rather than leave him as prey for the tigers. He cannot bring himself to do it and returns to the outpost in tears. He cannot accept that this is what war is, and > in doing so he opened himself up to the pain of seeing thrown away the bonds tying those slain enemies to those who loved them: mothers, sisters, friends, and wives. Command has decided that the company must abandon the outpost and reach another location as quickly as possible, still deep in the jungle. And the Marines are forced into an exhausting march, dragging behind them the wounded and even the corpses of fallen soldiers—one mauled by a tiger, another killed by a strain of malaria found only in that specific region of Vietnam. Because they failed to reach this new outpost—every bit as useless as the last—within the allotted time, the company is designated as an emergency reserve for the front’s most precarious sectors. Mellas wants to protest such an unjust decision, but his friend Hawke reminds him that one must play politics—not for one's own sake, since they are merely reserve officers after all, but because command, out of spite, might withhold the helicopters needed to resupply companies at the front and evacuate the wounded and the dead. The helicopter is a weapon of blackmail! In the novel's second part, Mellas's company is sent to retake Matterhorn, now occupied by the enemy. Military command does not know how many Vietnamese there are, but it does not matter. A heroic feat must be performed to cast the regiment’s senior officers in a favorable light and advance their careers. The company finds itself embroiled in a horrific battle. It is an epic narrative, a kind of *Iliad*, complete with its heroes and martial episodes. What drives the American soldiers is certainly no ideal (why are we here? the soldiers ask themselves; does Vietnam have gold, oil, or some other raw material?). What moves them to extraordinary acts of valor is brotherhood and rage: saving their comrades, recovering the wounded or at least the dead; fighting with the conviction that their true enemies are the very men who led them into this butchery. And then there is the taste of killing for killing's sake. Tension and fear forge a bond between enemies, who are as if bound together in a web of violence and death. In the third part of the story, Mellas is wounded in combat and consequently sent to convalesce. Yet upon his return, he discovers that during the lull, the company has been gripped by the racial strife between whites and blacks that plagues American society—a conflict that had temporarily vanished during combat operations. The solidarity and friendship forged in combat merely suspend social and racial rivalries. War is not a moment of genuine change; it only habituates one to violence. Indeed, his friend Hawke is killed in an attack orchestrated by a faction affiliated with the Black brothers. Nothing truly changes; they are merely shadows, > moving through this landscape of mountains and valleys, changing the character of things as shadows move but leaving nothing changed when they leave. Only the shadows themselves can change . War triggers an individual transformation, not a collective one. It is undeniably a war book, one in which the epic element prevails. Yet it would be reductive to view this novel merely as an account of the Vietnam conflict, a sort of prose poem, a modern *Iliad*. It is not merely that. It is an indictment of war. Narrating it from such a circumscribed space—Matterhorn and its surrounding territory—already allows the reader to enter the mundane yet tragic reality of individual men's experience, shedding the overarching, particularizing frame of the Vietnam conflict. It speaks of war—of any war. Then there is the figure of Mellas, undoubtedly autobiographical. The young man refuses to accept the inexorable laws of military life and war. Yet he rejects them not out of nostalgia for civilian life, which for him, as for the others, is already considered forfeit. He refuses to accept the futility of the decisions, the gratuitous suffering inflicted upon the soldiers, and the killing of enemies—unknown to him, yet fellow human beings with lives back home, young men who also had a future. It is the chronicle of the tragedy of all wars. The book is very long, meticulously detailed, and at times slips into reportage. By the end, one grows somewhat weary of so much slaughter. Yet this is perhaps the author's very intent: to sicken us with war. Why read it? It is a magnificent war book.

The novel, written in Italian, is set in a country never named, yet readily identifiable as Iran, before and after the Khomeinist revolution. There is perhaps a protagonist, Reza, but he is a figure merely "brushed upon," about whom we know little because his character and fate are determined by the circumstances and personalities of the other characters. Or perhaps he has no need to express himself because "he > is steadfast, with just the right dose of opportunism and selfishness to survive, while those around him are too fragile to endure in a harsh and cruel world. The novel is structured into five chapters, corresponding to the characters who shape Reza's fate. In the first chapter, Akbar takes advantage of the people's credulity to replace his stillborn son with an infant, Khodadad, abandoned on his doorstep. To do so, however, he must cry miracle, thereby offending faith and sealing the fate of Khodadad, who from that moment on will be marked as one favored by God, as one capable of raising the dead. Akbar then commits another sin: he makes love to his sister-in-law, who will later give birth to Reza. The entire narrative thus originates from a dual deception, and it is as though a curse hangs over all subsequent events. In the second chapter, Khodadad, no longer able to bear the role of the miraculously saved > , flees together with Reza to seek a new life in the big city. To convince his friend to follow him, Khodadad leads him to the cemetery, where there is an empty grave, already dug so as not to be caught unprepared by God's inevitable summons. Going to the city, the boy says, is the only way we have to save ourselves from that end there." Yet the practical and prosaic Reza rightly replies to him, "if it's not there, it will be elsewhere > . Life in the city proves far more difficult than they had anticipated, though it must be said that Reza adapts much better than Khodadad. During an altercation with their master, who refuses to pay them, Khodadad is mortally wounded while Reza kills the man. The two boys flee, deciding to part ways. And so Khodadad fades away alone, with the sole consolation of the angel of death, Ezrail, who swayed him, singing in his ear, in a whisper, the lullaby of oblivion, the only one he knew > . In the third chapter, the novel recounts the sad tale of Donya, which, it must be said, hews a bit too closely to the plots of many a nineteenth-century tearjerker. After a wretched adolescence brought on by a cruel stepmother, the girl falls in love with the classic gentleman > of good family and is forced to marry a man she does not love—namely Reza, who has in the meantime become a skilled and prosperous mechanic. Between the two there is neither love nor, even less, passion; yet while Donya suffers deeply from an incomplete, comfortable marital life, brightened by a daughter but emotionally barren, Reza seems content enough, accepting—perhaps with excessive submissiveness—his wife's coldness. Donya's only moment of relative happiness consists of visiting the cemetery of a nearby shrine, where the woman imagines praying over her dead mother's grave: she sits on the ground, and with a small stone knocks three times to draw her mother's attention and let her know she is there to pray for her soul > . Donya's life might have drawn to a prosaic close in a resigned yet peaceful marriage (Reza is, after all, a decent man), were it not shattered, driving her to suicide, by the tragic end of Mahtab, her beloved daughter. The fourth chapter is without question the most dramatic, in many respects harrowing. The girl is arrested by the Khomeinist police, tortured, and strangled. Her only fault is being engaged to a lawyer who defends his clients—often impoverished prostitutes—with excessive fervor. And at the moment of death, Mahtab takes refuge in wonderful childhood memories, imagining she hears her father's words. The darkness and the crack-free silence cradled her. A warm, gentle voice soothed her eardrums with words that reached her liquid, light > . In the final chapter we discover that Reza has had a long relationship with a prostitute, Laleh. It is in fact she who financed Reza's business, enabling him to become a wealthy mechanic. On the verge of death, she longs for Reza to come and say goodbye to her—she who had always helped him. Yet he does not come. If she recovers, he will come and take her away, so he told her. So much pain? He doesn't come. Yet she does not resign herself. The night still seems very long. Sleep does not cradle her. Will the end ever arrive? > For many commentators, the meaning of this book lies in the quotation of verses by a great Iranian poet, which read we played amidst this for a while, then we ended up, one after the other, in the basket of oblivion > . We are not the ones who forge our destiny, which is, in any case, a trifling thing before God. Without doubt, the novel is steeped in a profound religiosity, a sort of existential resignation that finds peace only in the notion that all of life is God's will. Yet one also senses, throughout the book, an abiding desire to escape from the prose of existence: an escape that ultimately can be achieved only through death. To be resurrected lighter and with wings, she tells herself. She must become lighter, with wings, and fly far away. Far away from there. Up high. But then? How to find one's bearings? Which compass to look to? Which qibla to trust? And what if she gets lost all over again? The book's principal virtue is its prose: simple, elegant, delicate. The numerous dialogues do not thin out the narrative; on the contrary, they allow for a deeper exploration of the characters. The complexity of Iranian society emerges vividly, caught between a deep-seated religiosity and modern aspirations. Lingering too extensively on detail, drawing out the various characters' stories, causes the tension to slacken and works against a sharp focus on the fundamental themes, which are neither easily discerned nor fully developed. Why read it? Splendid prose, an intriguing and at times gripping narrative.

It is singular to open the review of a Hungarian novel by invoking Hideo Fukukawa's *Tokyo Soundtrack* (see the review on this site). It is precisely the geographical and cultural distance that makes the comparison compelling. While the Japanese narrative chronicles the environmental and social unraveling of Tokyo, here the same theme unfolds in a Magyar provincial town swept up in a slow, inexplicable disorder, as if > that lethal, utterly down-to-earth reality seemed irreversibly destined to evaporate. Numerous were the unmistakable signs: the garbage piling up in the streets without anyone collecting it, the increasingly frequent power outages, centuries-old trees collapsing, public transit in chaos, few and frightened people about, even hordes of cats, > enormous beasts, gone feral, (...) returned to the primal instinct of predators, witnesses and emperors of an announced twilight—yet apparently postponed indefinitely— , akin to the dogs and crows of *Tokyo Soundtrack*, and to the wild boars, coypus, wolves, and other wild animals that now roam our streets, alongside the triumphant rat population. > A quagmire over the swamp (...) was the ideal foundation for the situation, [with] the feeling that houses, trees, streetlamps, and advertising pillars were sinking into it. It is a prophecy, if we think of our world seeming to slide into an insidious future, with us living in "a hopeless waiting." It is no easy task to identify the narrative threads of a tale steeped in magical realism, deliberately confusing and fragmented (and how could it be otherwise, when what happens is no longer rational?), marked by extensive, even philosophical digressions, by an ironic and paradoxical tone reminiscent of Kafka. I shall attempt to do so by starting with the protagonists, who, as the great German scholar Erich Auerbach remarked of Dante's characters, are a "figural representation": human beings, with their personal destiny, and allegories of timeless ideas of decline and disorder. Let us take the first character, Mrs. Pflaum; we meet her in a hilarious scene: traveling on an overcrowded train, beside dirty and uncouth people, she herself so neat and orderly. Equally amusing is the description of the small house amid > the immaculate objects of the apartment, and everything seemed to her perfectly in order, (...) it was utterly clear that all those who, like her, lived in their quiet little nest , would avoid the terrible things happening outside. How many Mrs. Pflaums do we know who are certain that tending to plants, polishing furniture, and small daily routines protect them from devastating misfortunes! Then there is Valuska, > this exceptional artist of ecstatic life , convinced that he has found harmony in the perfection of the constellations; he gazes up at the sky so as not to see what happens on earth. He does not notice—or is quite content with the fact—that his drinking companions mock him when he reconstructs the Moon's rotation around the Earth with living bodies. How many of us seek refuge in abstract ideals to avoid grappling with reality? There is also the musician Etszter: he resigned as Director of the Conservatory upon realizing that piano tuning flattened sounds into an abstract and unnatural harmony, and now lives shut away in his apartment, playing an out-of-tune piano, pontificating on the irrationality of the real with his only pupil: the kind, simple-minded Valuska. How often are we forced to listen to authoritative philosophers on the crisis of the West, or rather on the Apocalypse awaiting the earth, because our European "City of Light" cannot defend the values of the Enlightenment and Christianity! And finally, there is Mrs. Etszter, with her enormous, sensual body, > feeling herself mistress of the future, she looked upon the town with the eyes of a bold heiress, convinced that she stood on the threshold of a radically new era, fraught with promise, which would sweep everything away. But just as occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century, when many signs portended the end of a world seemingly joyful and secure, yet it took the eruption of the First World War to overwhelm that golden age, so too the arrival of a circus displaying the mummified carcass of an enormous whale shatters the fragile, declining equilibrium; and nothing is ever the same again. To halt the looting and brutalities, directed perhaps by a mysterious figure known as the Prince (the devil, the personification of Evil?), one can no longer beat around the bush, take shelter in modest domestic peace, daydream about distant worlds, or philosophize about whether "the real is rational"; what is needed is the firm, energetic hand of one who knows how to command. The town readily yields power to Mrs. Etszter, the personification of authoritarian rule. We might sorrowfully stop here: it seems undeniable that only dictatorship can grant us that craved tranquility, our cherished little domestic habits. Yet, perhaps, > the workmen of destruction (commanded by the Prince?) are still at work. As in Thomas Mann's *Buddenbrooks* (see the review on this site), the final chapter is devoted to the body's dissolution in death: a detailed and precise description reminding us how man, in his long evolution, has seen > billions of restless things, poised for continuous change; he had seen how they engaged in stern dialogue with one another, without head or tail, each on its own; billions of relations, billions of stories, billions, yet reduced to a single one that contained all the others: the struggle between that which resists and that which attempts to overcome resistance. In a recent interview (*La Stampa*, October 25, 2025) Orhan Pamuk states that > too much ethics kills literature. (...) Literature is not meant to make moral judgments. It is an art of connections, of understanding. It allows us to enter the minds of people we do not like . And I would add: it answers humanity's need to listen to and tell stories, to become passionately invested in characters, to love and despise them; literature teaches us the complexity of the human being. All of this is missing in Krasznahorkai. To be sure, the characters are described as human beings, with their weaknesses and characteristic traits; but there is no psychological depth—they are treated ironically, without empathy, the prerequisite for understanding. This holds particularly true for Valuska, who is ultimately the protagonist. His description always remains on the surface, never going beyond a paradoxical depiction of him: > the postal greatcoat, along with the leather shoulder bag, cap, a pair of boots. But who is this young man, already destined for the asylum like the village idiot? What are his feelings? Why his trusting bond with the Conservatory Director? Everything remains unresolved. The novel's paramount merit is its writing: long periods, dense with parenthetical clauses, unfolding without interruption—a flow of words and sentences that grips the reader. It is an exhausting read; one must read many pages at a stretch to enter the narrative style, allowing oneself to be guided by the author through the narrative's numerous threads; yet after fifty pages or so, one must pause, catch one's breath, and summon the strength and willpower to continue. In the end, fatigue prevails, and, it must be admitted, one cannot wait to reach the end. Why read it? The writing is intoxicating, at times thoroughly amusing.

Albino is a young peasant who lives above a lake with his mother, an alcoholic, taciturn, and emotionally detached woman. From the sparse details of his past life, we learn that he spent his childhood in France, lost his father as soon as the family returned to Italy, served as a soldier in World War II, and was held in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he likely contracted tuberculosis. Within Albino dwell a nostalgia for a happier time, a need for points of reference (his mother, religion), and an unshakable conviction that he is being persecuted (by officers, by doctors, and later by factory foremen), coupled with a confused anarchism rooted in the peasant world in which he was raised. The lake stands as an allegorical representation of a solitary disquiet. > Blue mists hung over the lake, neither high nor low; only over the lake, like smoke. The sky was clear, and already high up, beneath the veils of day, was a small moon: > see, Albino, I thought, if only all your troubles were like those mists that the moon will surely have consumed by midnight. (...) I touched my shoulders as I had as a boy during my illness, tasting the flavour of myself, a thread of my youth. It is 1946 when Albino presents himself at the Personnel Office of a large factory to be hired as a milling machine operator. From this point two narrative strands branch out, developing in an intertwined fashion: one sociological, the other existential. Volponi, with his experience as an industrial manager, portrays the alienating factory environment with great precision: before their workstations > everyone had a taut muscle, or clenched lips, or squinted eyes, or furrowed brows. It means everyone had a thought pounding inside their head, ricocheting throughout the factory and still pounding. (...) The work itself offered no relief; it required no accompanying thought, it went on by itself pulling our hands along, because inside the factory nothing else was possible. Unlike what emerges from Ermanno Rea’s novel ( *La dimissione* > see the review on this site), there is no discernible sense of belonging to the product, to the machines, or to the organization of labour: the factory is a hostile body; Albino stands apart, feeling no solidarity with the others, nor does he accept the corporate hierarchy, which even suggests he act as an informant. A trade unionist friend tells him, > but you always keep to yourself. Was I under attack, then, because I was alone? , Albino wonders. Despite his illness and his accusations against the factory doctors, Albino is protected by Management (who knows why?), who assign him a quiet job as a gate guard. It is right from the factory gate that Albino witnesses one of the first post-war strikes and rushes to warn the canteen staff to refrain from work, in order to support the workers' struggle (today, it is difficult for us to grasp the importance of the canteen). This act of insubordination is unacceptable to Management, and they fire him. Were this the whole story, the novel would merely be a fresco of 1950s industrial Italy. But Volponi seeks to convey an existential malaise that transcends the historical context and the theme of alienation—a topic pervasive in the Marxist commentary of the 1960s. The author imagines Albino writing a kind of confession, through which he seems intent on definitively coming to terms with his state of abandonment. > As always, I watched the lake gradually swell beneath my eyes on the climb toward home. In the clarity of the afternoon, the lake had no subtleties of tone, no arms reaching out toward the countryside and the trees; locked within its shores. And its colour neither shone nor spread outward. (...) At that point I realized that no one could come to my aid: not the factory, not my comrades, not the doctors, scoundrels or not, nor much less my mother: > I am a drop/the first or the last of a downpour/fallen from the gutter/when in the air/no rain was expected,/not even that drop./my drop is lost, /no one enjoyed it. In his fine preface, Giuseppe Lupo regards the novel as an elegy for the factory, for a world set to the rhythm of machines that has savagely displaced the cycle of seasons and agricultural labours that once defined rural life. Of this transition, Giuseppe Lupo seems to suggest, Albino is both victim and bard; hence the solemn, dreamlike rhythm of the novel. It is remarkable that an industrial executive at Olivetti, such as Paolo Volponi, should have written a work at once so realistic and existential, with tones that seem to verge on psychoanalysis. If we consider that *Memoriale* is Volponi’s debut work, we must forgive its narrative confusion, needless repetitions, or digressions; and we must do so because Albino's malaise seems to mirror Volponi’s own, caught between managerial rationality and poetic tension. Written in the form of a confession, the first-person narrator is Albino himself. The extensive reading in the sanatorium and the leisure time spent in the library must have taught the poor peasant a great deal, given how well the novel is written: fluid, if at times convoluted, phrasing, tight dialogue, and descriptions of the rural landscape steeped in symbolism (echoes of Pascoli resonate throughout), contrasted with an oneiric realism when depicting the factory. What the novel lacks is plot: it stretches out needlessly over many pages, losing concision and growing prolix. Why read it? The marriage between industrial rationality and the magic of the peasant world is compelling.

In the preamble, the author himself divides the tale into two parts. In the first, entitled "Underground", > the character presents himself, his views, and seems to wish to elucidate the reasons why he appeared, and was bound to appear, in our midst, that is, how in the era of positivism and dominant reason, it was necessary to acknowledge a primordial force within man—one rising from the underground, driving one to be wicked, to debase oneself in abjection, making one cry out with self-satisfaction: > I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. It is thus a philosophical manifesto, a nihilistic culmination concerning human nature. In the second part, "Apropos of the Wet Snow" (a title one might expect from a Japanese novel), the protagonist narrates an episode from his life meant to explain the ideas and impressions voiced in the first part. It is as if the protagonist, forty years old at the moment he expounds his theories, returns in memory to when he was twenty and to an encounter that altered his life. If we liberate ourselves from the framework cunningly proposed by the author, we realize that Woman lies at the heart of the tale. A clear hint is already present in the verses quoted by Dostoevsky at the opening of the second part: "when, out of the darkness of error, /(...) you told me the story of what had been before me/and suddenly, covering your face with your hands,/overcome with grief and shame,/indignant and appalled,/ you wept..." (Nikolay Nekrasov, 1846). Here it is a young prostitute, Liza, whom the protagonist meets in a brothel and urges to turn her life around, offering his help. He had been captivated by her > fresh, young, rather pale face, with straight, dark eyebrows and a serious, somewhat astonished look. In making her this reckless promise of redemption, our protagonist is not moved by genuine empathy. > A sordid thought was born in my mind and crept through my whole body like an unpleasant sensation, akin to descending into a damp and musty cellar. (...) Now, however, the absurd idea—loathsome as a spider—of depravity became clear to me, which, without love, in a brutal and vulgar way, begins precisely with that: the crowning of true love. There is, as it were, a faint boundary between subjugation, the pleasure of humiliating, and sincere, pure affection for a Woman; between love as lust and Love without ifs or buts. And when Liza arrives at the protagonist's home, he pursues a cruel game of insults and spite, almost as if it were the poor girl's fault for having caught him in a shabby dressing gown— > filthy, wretched, disgusting, (...) a scoundrel, a rogue, a loafer, no longer the hero of their encounter at the brothel. And then *a strange thing happened*. Humiliated, insulted, in the face of abasement, Liza > had understood, above all, what a woman always senses before anything else, if she is truly in love: namely, that I was unhappy. (...) I had not even imagined that she had not come to hear pitiful words, but to love me, because for a woman all resurrection, all salvation from whatever ruin, and all rebirth lie in love alone, which cannot manifest itself except in love. Unfortunately, > we are stillborn, and for a long time now we have not been fathered by living fathers, and we like it more and more. We do not know how to recognize and accept Love. The tale is an existential, introspective, and philosophical analysis of an antihero, or rather of a split within the Self, between our self-representation in fantasy and literature and concrete life, in which we are no longer great men, but petty and wicked beings. I do not know whether D'Annunzio ever read *Notes from Underground*, but without doubt the novella's protagonist seems to foreshadow the characters of our writer's novels and plays: supermen in art and abject in life. It is not the protagonist-narrator who remains etched in our imagination; on the contrary, we ultimately grow weary of the redundant flood of words behind which he takes refuge. It is Liza who gradually emerges—from a wretched prostitute into a woman wounded in her betrayed love, in her proud refusal of a payment brutally thrust upon her. She is a dynamic, non-stereotypical figure, the only one to evolve within a static narrative where situations and characters seem pinned down in their functions, beginning with the protagonist. It is no accident that *Notes from Underground* did not achieve critical or popular success, precisely because it lacks plot and the development of human figures in their psychological and spiritual dimensions. Why read it? It is of great interest for understanding Dostoevsky's "philosophy".

> When I was four years old, in my father's house, life tasted of true happiness, and before my siblings and me lay the opening of a fairy-tale existence . Memories, nostalgia, and a sense of one's own rank are the distinctive traits of this autobiographical novel, set in Ethiopia and Italy between 1925 and 1946. The author is the daughter of Dejazmach Nasibu Zamanuel, a prominent figure of the feudal aristocracy, a hero of the resistance against Italy, who was poisoned to death by mustard gas—a weapon the Italian army deployed extensively during the 1935 invasion. Martha was driven to write the novel “by a sense of duty”: to shed light on the events that devastated her family and to convey the > astonishing atmosphere that emanates from my country, evoking its colors, flavors, and customs, as well as the vitality of a refined, generous people who deeply respect the dictates of the Christian values upon which they founded their very existence (book presentation, Rome, July 17, 2006). The book is divided into two parts. The first recounts the author's childhood through her mother's stories and the wonder-struck eyes of a little girl. What emerges is a dazzling, sumptuous, magical world, remote from our time and from the reality of Ethiopia itself. These are vignettes of life centered around the figure of the father. At a grand social gathering of the feudal aristocracy, in the presence of the Emperor, Dejazmach Nasibu appears > draped in a diaphanous shamma with broad red silk borders, his broad shoulders cloaked in a blue velvet cape embellished with gold trim, (...) in the saddle of his magnificent white horse harnessed with rich trappings gleaming with gold ornaments. (...) In the cloud of dust kicked up by the tumultuous gallop, a young woman riding sidesaddle drew alongside him . She is Martha’s future mother, the daughter of a Russian prince, and love seems to blossom from the splendor of these two nobles and Ethiopian high society. It is pointless to ask inopportune questions, such as inquiring into what brutal exploitation lay behind such magnificence; we too, like Martha, are captivated by “very distant memories,” when one feels sheltered by parental love, games can go on indefinitely, and > no one would ever have foreseen that anything could disturb the course of our lives . On October 3, 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia with a well-armed army of 350,000 men, supported by aviation. After a glorious yet futile resistance, ground down by the spraying of nerve gas, Ethiopia surrendered. The magic dissolves. > Memory, as if erased, fails to bring forth even the faintest recollection of those moments. Of what followed, nothing remained with me but a feeling of numbness . Augusto Graziani, appointed Viceroy of Ethiopia, consents to spare the hated family of Dejazmach Nasibu, but exiles them to Italy. We arrive at the second part of the book. The narrative sheds its fairy-tale qualities to become the painful chronicle of a wandering exile: after a stay in Naples, they are sent to Tripoli, then to an oasis in the Libyan desert, where Graziani perhaps hopes they will perish from hunger and disease. Brought back to Tripoli, they are sent to Rhodes, subsequently to Val di Fassa, and then to Florence, where they live until the city’s liberation amidst hardships, aerial bombings, and strict police surveillance. One might expect hatred toward the Italians; not in the least: not only the Italian populace, but the fascists themselves—the *federali* and government officials—seem to display a singular tolerance toward Nasibu’s family: in short, «*italiani brava gente*!». We cannot discern whether it is the adolescent Martha’s optimistic gaze that views events in a positive light, or if this benevolent attitude was genuine, perhaps owed to the family's princely status. It matters little: what is missing is Martha's inner lived experience, as she enters adolescence during exile; there are delightful episodes (such as the evacuation to San Giustino and her camaraderie with the children of the small village) and vivid, painterly depictions of nature through which we understand how the young Martha was captivated by Italy’s beauty. Our country must have left an indelible mark on the young princess’s maturation, given that, once back in Ethiopia, she would leave again for a new exile—because her deeply loved native land, in the end, felt too confining. On the other hand, “life is a story”: we remember only that which contributes to the depiction of ourselves. Let us detach ourselves for a moment from Ethiopia and from the crimes of Italian colonialism, rightly recalled by Angelo Dal Boca in his passionate preface to the book: let us dwell instead on the theme of remembrance. In a regrettably forgotten novel (*Il Giorno del Giudizio* > , reviewed on this site), Salvatore Satta, as death approaches, retraces the Nuoro of his youth through a gallery of portraits, and distant faces reappear (...) and perhaps as I think of their lives, because I write their lives, they feel me to be a ridiculous god who has summoned them on the day of judgment, to free them forever from their memory > . Martha's memoir is entirely different: even amid so many calamities, both of her country and her family, the characters and events resurface as if bathed in a bright, clear sky, beneath a canopy of stars, in vivid shades of bright azure. "How beautiful this world is, Mama, (...) It looks like paradise to me!," the child Martha exclaims at the sight of Naples from the sea. It is truly regrettable that the narrative failed to preserve in its second part the vividness and magic of the first. The drop in tension, the inability—or unwillingness—to evolve the narrative into a *Bildungsroman* and, why not, a work of social and political reflection, are all factors that compromise the overall quality of the story, ultimately rendering it verbose, banal, and tedious. Why read it? The first part is a splendid fresco of Ethiopian society, a magnificent cavalcade of memories.

> We know next to nothing about her, and that's that. The fact is she was good at her job and liked being in charge, and that’s where everyone’s troubles began. Masters like having good workers, but they don't like being bossed around. If they had listened to her, they’d be richer still, but we always remain poor and slighted, even in death . This is how Don Paolino, former chauffeur to the Alfallipe family, sums up the fate of Maria Rosalia Inzerillo, known as the Mennulara, who died at the age of fifty-five. The novel opens with the woman’s death and slowly unravels the mystery of this «criata» (servant): born into utter poverty, she was forced from childhood to work harvesting almonds (hence her nickname); taken into service in the Alfallipe household, she became the shrewd administrator of an ailing estate; and ultimately took the helm of the family, ensuring its financial survival. This is how Orazio Alfallipe describes her, recalling the day he fell hopelessly in love with her. > I saw her, slender and petite. (...) She wore a pale slip, wet from splashes of water. I trained the binoculars on her, spellbound by the rhythmic sway of her body, her small, pointed breasts, and her youthful, harmonious arms. She was beautiful. (...) She watched me circumspectly, yet without fear. What is that?, she said, pointing to the binoculars. (...) Teach me how to look, she said. (...) A sense of wonder welled up in my chest, overwhelming me... The Mennulara’s death upends the small town of Roccacolomba, in a timeless Sicily: people pass judgment, often harshly critical, on the woman’s life, gossiping about the funeral and especially about the Alfallipes' conduct. The latter are convinced that the Mennulara harbored substantial hidden funds; they expect a rich inheritance, but find no such testamentary provisions. Growing increasingly exasperated, they fail to comply with the woman's directives regarding the obituary and the funeral. Yet even from the grave, she continues to direct the family, forcing them to do her bidding; in particular, she leaves precise instructions to retrieve ancient Greek ceramics and have them appraised by an expert. Because these artifacts had been purchased from grave robbers—and thus could not be legitimately traded—the Mennulara had commissioned copies, and it was these that were submitted for appraisal, securing a certificate of forgery that would allow the pieces to be taken abroad and sold. Blinded by greed and foolishness, the Alfallipes cannot conceive of so clever an expedient; their disdain for the Mennulara, a mere «criata», leads them to suspect some obscure deception. Yet hadn't she served them all her life, salvaging their estate? She was a servant, nonetheless. Upon reading the appraisal, they believe they have been duped; overwhelmed by rage and hatred for the woman, in a fury they shatter both the counterfeit copies and the authentic originals. Before the astonished and amused town, they divest themselves of their long-awaited inheritance and squander the last vestiges of their respectability. In devastating the ceramics, they also obliterate the «mute witness» to the relationship between Orazio and the Mennulara, and to their shared passion for art and history. Must the feelings of a «criata» be respected in a timeless Sicily? Certainly not. The question is whether the Mennulara is a positive figure, an engine of social change, or if her story is, once again, the testimony of a defeat, the acceptance of an inevitable and immutable destiny. Indeed, the Mennulara believed she could elevate herself («she had estranged herself from people of her own station») without altering social hierarchies; she renounced everything, endured a clandestine affair with her master, bore the contempt of the Alfallipes—for whom she was the cornerstone—and, in the end, failed to preserve her spiritual legacy, the collection of ceramics, the testament to an existence. The Mennulara is a defeated figure. But so too are the numerous characters of Roccacolomba: they gossip, at times they seem to rebel, at others they voice wise and benevolent reflections, yet they invariably yield to power and social immobility. This is the profound meaning of the novel, as well as of the figure of the Mennulara: there is no civic future for Sicily. The novel is nearly flawless up to page 152, up to the scene of the ceramics' destruction. Then, for reasons unknown, the author felt compelled to lay bare the Mennulara’s life, resorting to lengthy explanations rather than relying on the plot and the interplay of characters. It was needless, detrimental to the overall pacing of the narrative. It was a pity, as it drained the tension from the story. Why read it? It is enjoyable, engaging, «a majestic entertainment» (Aldo Busi)

Elisa wanders through the rooms, in silence and solitude, and when she unexpectedly catches sight of her own reflection, she seems to see > a shape moving in these funereal, solitary waters, (...) like a jellyfish , not a saint: “rather a witch.” It is precisely to explain the sorcery that led her to shut herself up in a few rooms that Elisa offers us the tale of her family: and it is “an appearance of shadows,” a “fantastic malady” that speaks of love and death, as in fairy-tale books: “with thee, Fiction, I gird myself, fatuous raiment.” The novel can be divided into two parts. In the first, Elisa has not witnessed the events and characters she narrates: everything is filtered through the reminiscences of those who were still living when she was a child, or through clues, papers, and places. On the other hand, > the past and the future are two fields of mist and vertigo, which the living cannot explore except through fantasy and memory. (...) What is the use of plumbing this palace of death? The mere attempt to plumb it produces anguish and nausea, as when one looks out over a precipice . We will never know whether what she tells us is true, not least because it reads like the narration of a grand deception, of lies meant to cloak the beloved in “fire and splendor.” Thus the maternal grandfather is a scoundrel and a sluggard, yet he captivates his daughter Anna with wondrous tales of travel, jewels, honors, and glory; and Anna forgets that she lives in poverty, venting her rage on her mother Cesira, a petty and desperate woman. The paternal grandparents are hardworking peasants and could have been an anchor of solid substance: their son Francesco, however, was born of the mother’s fleeting affair with a rogue, himself a fabulist and a peddler of "smoke > . One should not be surprised if Francesco, upon going to study in the city, introduces himself as a baron, and one with revolutionary ideas to boot. And what of Edoardo, the wealthy cousin of the destitute Anna: charming, with feminine features, vacuously intelligent, enamored of himself, ready to love, beguile, and betray anyone, purely for the ambiguous pleasure of amusing himself. Anna and Francesco are too naive not to fall into his tempting coils: Anna falls in love with her cousin, dreaming of a bond that can never materialize due to the difference in social standing and, above all, Edoardo’s character, far too superficial for an enduring and responsible relationship; Francesco believes he has found a true friend in Edoardo, unaware that he is being led by the hand from a genuine love (that of the prostitute Rosaria) toward a yearned-for and idealized one, his passion for Anna. And so Anna and Francesco find themselves married, as if under a spell: Anna loves Edoardo and binds herself to Francesco out of despair, while the latter has deceived the woman, masquerading as a wealthy landowner and a young man on the rise. At this point Elisa steps onto the stage, no longer merely the narrator. Henceforth ended is my privilege of attending, a solitary spectator, a comedy of spirits. (...) A lucid insomnia takes hold of me, and in this taciturn and deserted room, henceforth I can interrogate nothing other than my true memory. I can recount nothing, that is, except the things I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and of which my father and mother, in their differing insanities, made me their confidante and witness > . To be protagonists is an act of maturity, and at the same time of sorrow, because one cannot defend oneself with imaginary remembrance. Memories, like animals that have lain in hibernation, stir at my call, and approach me with velvety, funereal steps > . The experience of the adolescent Elisa is truly extraordinary; she is not merely a party to a toxic and perverse relationship, the cause of her parents’ psychophysical decline; the girl is swallowed into a kind of triangulation with Francesco and Anna on one side, and on the other the ghost of Edoardo, dead of consumption. To humor Concetta, Edoardo’s now-deranged mother, but in reality to gratify herself, Anna invents an epistolary exchange of letters from her cousin. What virtue did this counterfeit correspondence possess? > Dwelling within it, full of feast and fire, was a Thought: (...) it possessed inspired movements, chivalric demeanor, and a coquetry cast, like a bold and light armor, over its bitter voluptuousness. Moreover, its shadowy beauty flaunted adolescent fatuity like an oriflamme, that dear, venial fatuity > . But who was truly the author of this correspondence? The Cousin in his ethereal form as a ghost, or Satan, as might appear from the infernal postmarks > of the letters, or Anna herself, as any doctor would have said, hybrid fruit of a poor, morbid mind”. Were this so, “the counterfeit Epistolary turns within me into a mirror, in which Anna’s beloved face appears to me so disfigured and contorted that memory, will, and fantasy urge me to choose a lie in place of this diagnosis. (...) Of Anna, of this twofold idol of mine, of my sleeping, precious Phoenix, it makes an object of wretchedness and pity. And finally, over the fantastic Epistolary, over our renowned correspondence, it sheds the dismal pallor of insanity, and the shapeless tedium of death > . And then the fantastic Epistolary, just like the novel as a whole, comes to be a stanza of love”, a desperate way by which “the spirit that presides over childish things” seeks to overcome death, “at least in play. The novel has a nineteenth-century architecture: a complex plot, meticulous description of settings, in-depth character analysis, richly vaporous prose of refined elegance. One must not, however, be deceived; if love and death are tightly interwoven—because as soon as one loves, one already knows the beloved will perish—only dreaming, fantasizing, lying to others and to oneself allow us to survive, to keep suffering at bay. The sorcery lies in this: Elisa prefers to shut herself in the solitary rooms, pursuing her own shadows, rather than reckon with reality and retrace the demented aspirations of those who came before her. Does the novel not speak, perhaps, of Elisa’s consciousness? Might it not be the fruit of her diseased mind? Only Alvaro the Cat, Elisa’s faithful companion, knows. When every light is quenched, kindle your pupils in the dark, o torch of my half-sleep, and the solemn truce cracks, a thousand ephemeral torches blaze, childish tigers chase one another in sweet deliria". In reading *Menzogna e Sortilegio*, the mind turns to Thomas Mann. We are in Southern Italy; the colors and characters are those of our South; and yet there is the same demolition of the traditional novel, and one breathes the very same air of decay, of slow decline toward death. Its excessive length is regrettable: we are before a work of great originality, which deserves to be rediscovered and read anew. Why read it? Splendid writing, and long live the imagination!

The inside back cover likens the book to Umberto Eco’s *The Name of the Rose* and Ken Follett’s *The Pillars of the Earth*. Nothing of the kind: if one insists on finding a literary reference, one might point instead to *The Da Vinci Code*. The setting is the Middle Ages. A merchant arrives at a monastery in the Polesine region. He is in search of a mysterious book, but also of a young novice who was raised among the monks. From here begins a sort of treasure hunt across Europe’s major monasteries (Santiago de Compostela, predictably, could not be omitted) to recover fragments of the mysterious text and piece together, through various clues, a puzzle of meanings and magical formulas. Throughout this quest, the merchant and his companions (the young novice and a valiant French knight) are pursued by the knights of the Sainte-Vehme, a mysterious and powerful chivalric order. What follows is a succession of ambushes, surprises, and dramatic turns. Naturally, the story has a happy ending, yet it leaves the reader disappointed, unable to understand what was so significant about the long-sought book in the first place: could it be just another sham? The novel is clearly a thriller, yet it lacks all the ingredients that could grant it depth and distinctive character. The medieval setting is pointless. Beyond the sequence of monasteries, there is no thorough or evocative world-building rooted in a genuine grasp of the customs and culture of the period. The characters are flat, and even the figure of the merchant, who might have possessed some allure, comes across as cold, incomprehensible, and superficial. The book is packed with plot twists, yet they are never preceded by an atmosphere of suspense; as a result, they remain entirely predictable, both in their unfolding and in their outcomes. It feels almost as if the author focused exclusively on the plot, only to become entangled in a tangle of episodes and circumstances. Why not read it? Unless one is thoroughly exhausted and in need of something requiring minimal concentration, it simply is not worth the time.

The novel centers on a series of castrations and subsequent murders, which turn out to be the work of a cult. It is an unsuccessful effort, undoubtedly falling short of the author’s other books. The narrative is tedious, flat, and at times contrived (consider the stay in Russia): it lacks the original hallmark of Bartlett’s books, which lies in the depiction of the author’s character, her worldview, and her approach to life.

Monica lives in New York and wants to be a writer; instead, she works in a clothing store. After a series of romantic misadventures, she meets an English publisher (a veritable “Prince Charming”), who not only falls in love with her but enables her to publish a book. This is a novel riddled with clichés (Monica lives with a ditzy Puerto Rican woman who gets pregnant, and a gay man), sappy sentimentality, and banalities. The story could just as easily be set in Rome as in New York, and utterly lacks any depth in its exploration of emotions and events. Yet do such books really find success?

Michel Strogoff > was tall, vigorous, broad-shouldered, deep-chested... he could endure to the utmost cold, hunger, thirst, and fatigue : an iron body and a heart of gold. In this manner, Verne introduces the protagonist right from the outset. The setting is Tsarist Russia, likely in the second half of the nineteenth century. An army of Tartars is overrunning Eastern Siberia and threatens to seize its capital, where the Grand Duke, brother to the Emperor, resides. At the head of this horde of "barbarians" stands a traitor, bent on presenting himself to the Grand Duke, winning his trust, and ultimately capturing him. Michel Strogoff is entrusted with the mission of warning the Grand Duke in time, journeying across a Siberia torn by war. It is an epic endeavor, an extraordinary mission. This adventurous undertaking can be divided into three parts. In the first, which is rather dull and predictable, Strogoff travels incognito as a merchant, crossing European Russia, the Urals, and then the first Siberian steppes. Right from the start of the journey, he encounters a young woman, Nadia, who must make the same trek to join her father. Strogoff decides to accompany the young woman, believing that doing so will make it easier to avert suspicion regarding his true mission. Here emerges a defining trait of the protagonist—dissimulation—which contrasts sharply with the loyalty and sincerity of the other characters who stand by him, particularly Nadia. A dramatic scene brings about a turning point that injects pace and intrigue into the narrative: Strogoff and the young woman are captured by the Tartars; the protagonist is forced to watch his mother about to be beaten to death, reveals himself as the Tsar's courier, and is subsequently blinded. From that moment on, Strogoff becomes dependent on Nadia, who serves as his guide. This section of the novel is the most compelling, as the protagonist's vulnerability makes him human, less of a superhero; moreover, amidst the ever-adventurous and dramatic developments, other characters appear, generous and eager to lend assistance. Finally, the third part is dominated by grand set pieces, where natural perils intertwine with the drama of battle. Strogoff and Nadia, along with other refugees, journey down an ice-choked river aboard a raft. By a stroke of fortune, they manage to reach the capital, besieged by the Tartars, where the traitor has already infiltrated—only to be slain by Strogoff. The story would be flawless were it not revealed at the end that Strogoff was never blind at all, but had feigned blindness so as to be left free to move, given that the Tartars would have deemed him harmless. Yet how could he lie even to his friends, and above all to Nadia, who had helped him asking nothing in return, out of pure love? In the preface, the commentator views this novel as an "obstacle course" in which "a hero above suspicion" overcomes every trial simply to achieve his goal. It is from this that a sense of coldness, contrivance, and determinism arises, where feelings have no place, relegated to the background in deference to duty and the assertion of one's own strength and will. It is the other characters who offer flashes of human richness, from which the author seems to swiftly retreat, taking refuge in stereotypes. The harsh, grim Siberian wilderness forms the backdrop of the novel—in a sense the true adversary of the superhero, Michel Strogoff. It is a pity that here, too, imagination is lacking; it is mere geography, without the description of Siberia ever sparking the reader's imagination. Why read it? The story is gripping, particularly in its second part. Certain scenes are mesmerizing, such as the Tartar feast with its exotic dances, the epic descent down the frozen river, and the final battle.

*Microcosmi* is an assemblage of > fragments that little by little coalesce into an orderly novel, whose structure and meaning reveal themselves (to him) at the end, as happens in life . And life is an assemblage of places, > places and things, scarcely separable from beloved persons and from the image of the world that envelops them . The first fragment is the Caffè San Marco in Trieste, setting the keynote for the narrative: a journey where one never moves. > Sitting at the café, one is on a journey; as on a train.... one cannot leave a vain personal imprint on anything, one is nobody. In that familiar anonymity, one can disguise oneself, shed the self like a peel . And what could be more motionless and yet vital than lagoons and great forests? The narrative proceeds with an evocative, memory-laden description of the sea at Grado and the forests of Monte Nevoso. Here, the forest is not a natural or fantastical place, but rather > at once the exaltation and erasure of borders, a plurality of different and conflicting worlds, held within the great unity that embraces and dissolves them . the following chapter, devoted to the Turin hills, creates a placid and gentle atmosphere (perhaps serene and happy years for the author), leading us to think that > even disappearing could be a celebration, like losing oneself among the hills that in the evening resemble a sea, great and calm waves of a long, powerful breath . And one feels the urge to «go up to one's room and let the world manage on its own». The subsequent chapters (The Absyrtides, which concerns the Croatian islands, in particular Lussino and Cherso) and Antholz (a valley in the Tyrol) lead to places (never explicitly stated) where the author spent his vacations. They are the book's less fortunate pages, overburdened with historical citations and settings difficult for the reader to identify. With the chapter dedicated to the «Public Garden» (a true literary gem), Magris abruptly brings us back to his own childhood, evoking it through a child who carries a dying goldfish to the park's small pond in an attempt to keep it alive. The Garden is a place of recreation, but also of prohibitions. Venturing into the garden is, for the child, like plunging into deep water, finding himself «beyond all those doors that usually bar entry to its secret heart». The Public Garden mirrors the complexity and variety of the human psyche. The self, like the Garden, is a dark forest, an assemblage of open clearings, ancient centuries-old trees, and recesses: > the forest is all around, but one is not inside the forest; invisible thresholds bar the way... one is outside, excluded from the woods, which perhaps begin a meter further on, but the door to enter and reach that gnawing and murmuring cannot be found . The child's return home introduces the final chapter, with the mysterious title «The Vault», which finally speaks explicitly of an episode from the author's life, bringing forth the figure of the mother with poignant tenderness. As in a dream, the child remembers an air raid and the flight into a shelter inside a church. The child is frightened, yet he is together with the others («throughout the church, people greeted one another, shook hands, some embraced») and so > he was not surprised to see her beside him... go to sleep, she told him, I'll wake you when the time comes . He is afraid, but he hears voices that reassure him. They are > two voices, almost identical to his own, the children who had filled the house, the days, life itself, telling him not to be afraid . The cycle of life comes to a close, from childhood to old age, among loved ones. *Microcosmi* possesses several virtues: the author's literary device of chronicling the places and people of his life without ever resorting to the first-person “I,” a felicitous choice in an era as narcissistic as our own; the exceptionally elegant prose, which frequently rises to the level of poetry; the depth and acuity of many reflections, tossed off with seeming nonchalance—veritable aphorisms. It is difficult to discern an overarching meaning across these narrative fragments. One might, perhaps, offer a psychoanalytic reading: revisiting the most significant places of his life allows the author to return to his childhood, to his mother, and to forge a link among the disparate moments of existence. Then there recurs the metaphor of the door—that is, the difficulty of entering, but entering where? Perhaps one's own consciousness. The book's virtues are also its flaws: there is no plot, the references and digressions are often tedious, and the narrative style easily slips into erudite mannerism, losing its candor. One senses the learned Germanist, somewhat snobbish and unwelcoming. Why read it? Reading the entire book is a heavy task. It is worth lingering only over the chapters devoted to the Caffè San Marco, the Turin hills, and the public garden—the latter being a genuine masterpiece.

The book recounts the story of Callie Stephanides, born with female characteristics that evolve into distinctly masculine traits with the onset of adolescence. Sexual ambiguity, stemming from a genetic trait, determines the life of the protagonist, who is unable to accept himself—a male with underdeveloped sexual organs—until the very end of the novel, which chronicles several generations of his family. The novel can be divided into three parts: the saga of the grandparents, who fled to America from a Greece besieged by the Turks; the parents' story, followed by Callie’s childhood as a girl and young woman; and finally, the discovery of this sexual ambiguity—in truth, long suspected by the protagonist—leading to the decision to live as a male and the flight from the parental home. The best part of the novel is undoubtedly the first, as the narrative subsequently loses its evocative power and momentum, becoming increasingly tedious and predictable. The novel revolves around two fundamental themes: the ambiguity of individual identity, for we can embody multiple individuals and cultures all at once; and genetic inheritance, in the sense that we are what the evolution—biological included—of our family has somehow determined. Environment, life’s vicissitudes, and the people one encounters are all crucial factors, but what leaves the deepest mark is our history, for which we bear neither responsibility nor blame. In a historical period where every affliction is traced back to behavior, the book offers instead a return to a comprehensive view of the individual’s inherent traits. From this perspective, the novel proves superficial when called upon to describe the protagonist’s turning point, wherein he decides to reject the doctor’s attempt to force his nature toward the feminine and instead embrace a new life as a male. What impels him in this direction? How can he so effortlessly abandon a world of feelings and behaviors that had governed his childhood? Is cutting one’s hair enough? The novel fails to address any of this, and the family saga seems to prevail as the underlying narrative focus, overshadowing the protagonist’s experiences and inner life. Perhaps this is why the pursuit of a cultural identity (the Greek heritage blending with the American) appears far more pronounced than the sexual and individual one, which ultimately feels like little more than an expedient device to render the novel more alluring.

Can "a person's life be the mirror of a country"? To this question Rushdie responds not with a historical-biographical novel (the classic story of a family intertwined with that of a nation), but with a fantastical, imaginative, and astonishing tale. The protagonist is born in Bombay at midnight on August 15, 1947, the day of India's independence, but also of Pakistan's separation: the so-called "partition." And through this coincidence he has been mysteriously "tied to history" both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively. Duality is the guiding thread of the narrative, of the protagonist's life as well as of the vast Indian subcontinent, characterized precisely by interdependence and diversity at once. The author imagines that the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, narrates his family's story and his own up to 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Saleem's grandparents are Muslims originating from Kashmir, the "mother" of Indian Islam. His grandfather, a Westernized doctor, had been called to treat his future wife, permitted to examine only parts of her body, which remained covered out of modesty. He had therefore fallen in love "in pieces." It is a primary metaphor that recurs frequently throughout the narrative: that of fragmentation. Just as the > ghost of that perforated sheet condemned me to see my own life, its meanings and its structures, in fragments as well , the detachment of Pakistan weighed like a curse upon the new nation, leading to an endless conflict with India. Saleem's grandparents have a daughter who, after her marriage, moved with her husband to Bombay in India, where Saleem was born. At the moment of birth, the midwife swaps the couple's real child with Saleem, who thus usurps his place as a well-to-do child, while the other is destined for poverty. Does independence, then, bear the mark of betrayal? On the day of Saleem's birth, a thousand children were born in India. All possess extraordinary powers, and Saleem has the incredible faculty of communicating telepathically with them all: that is, he manages to forge in his mind an interdependence among distant children with entirely different languages and customs. The mystery of this great country is metaphorically fulfilled—constituted, at the moment of independence, by over five hundred states and a religion, Hinduism, made up of thousands of local deities. How can a country so vast and so fragmented hold together? In 1966 Nehru died, ushering in the era of Indira Gandhi, who introduced authoritarian rule culminating in the phase of the so-called Emergency, when she instituted an outright dictatorship. Saleem's family moves to Pakistan, where they hope to be safer from discrimination and violence against Muslims. Here, strangely, Saleem loses his telepathic powers (has Indira destroyed the unity of the country?). He enlists in the Pakistani army and goes to fight in Bangladesh against the Indian army. Having deserted the army, by then in total disarray, and after hiding in the jungle (a metaphor for the abyss into which India had fallen?), he flees to India, where he marries, lives in a village of acrobats and musicians, and takes up political activity, notably alongside a snake charmer. He seems, perhaps, to have found his path, when Indira Gandhi's crackdown erupts and Saleem discovers that he is one of the few surviving children born on August 15, 1947, > because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to have no private life of their own and to be sucked into the cauldron of the multitudes, and to be unable to live and die in peace . Alongside the bond between personal life and national history, the novel also confronts more intimate themes: Saleem's ugliness (afflicted by an enormous nose), his incestuous love for his half-sister, and the nostalgia for childhood, which, nevertheless, "disappears, or rather, is killed." And the pride of childhood is precisely one of the most intriguing and universal themes of the book: the ability to hide and to travel in one's mind, through one's own imagination, creates a unity that does not exist in reality: > Wonderful irony; the Widow (Indira Gandhi), by bringing us here to separate us, has in fact brought us together! Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our captivity; let the Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility! Children: we have won ! As happens all too often with Rushdie, the pursuit of baroque, wondrous prose overpowers the narrative, which seems to become—especially in the final part of the book—merely an occasion for "special effects." Already lengthy in its own right, difficult to follow—owing also to its references to Indian history—as one advances through the reading, one becomes completely lost in a deluge of words, neologisms, and complex, rhetorical syntactic structures. One must allow oneself to be carried away by the prose, yet at times it is a struggle to read on. Why read it? The core premise is truly remarkable, just as it remains a remarkably timely book for us Italians: the duality between interdependence and diversity, between unity and fragmentation, constitutes a defining trait of every Italian. Having managed to depict this in imaginative terms represents the fundamental merit of the book. As Paolo Bertinetti wrote in the daily newspaper *La Stampa* on August 12, 2017, the novel's greatest merit, > besides a very fine sense of humour and a pyrotechnic gift for linguistic invention, lies in dismantling the criteria of verisimilitude by placing reality and dream, realistic narrative and mythic invention on the same plane .

The impetus to read this short novel arises from the desire to understand why we read books, and consequently why we are so enthralled by the bookstore—that singular shop where paper volumes, large and small, yet always charming and inviting, rest upon the shelves. Who among us book lovers would not want to work in a bookstore! In this case, we are speaking of a secondhand bookshop, some volumes valuable, others commercial, in a Tokyo neighborhood where one sees nothing but bookstores on either side of the street. “A playground for book lovers,” murmurs Takako, the protagonist and narrator, after emerging from the subway station. She left a secure job after a disastrous love affair and has spent months shut away at home, sleeping all day. An uncle phoned her—an eccentric character who inherited her great-grandfather’s bookstore—proposing that she lend a hand running the shop, while also offering her a small lodging, crammed with books, dusty, with an overpowering smell of mold: a perfect den for a depressed soul like Takako. There is the risk that daily life will not truly change; after a few hours in the bookstore, she can slip back under the covers to sleep. But there are the books. > Those old books concealed stories unimaginable to me. And I do not refer only to what they recounted. In each one I found traces of the past . In particular, the young woman was struck by a sentence by Kajii Motojiro (a Japanese writer who lived in the first half of the twentieth century): > what does it mean to look? It means transferring onto an object part of our soul, if not its entirety . It is an evident Shinto approach, typical of Japanese culture, which reveals our relationship with the book: in reading, one feels an affinity with the writer and at the same time understands oneself better, in a mysterious involvement nourished by the words as well as by the scent and touch of ink and paper. The book is like a tree, like flowers and their insects, like animals, a landscape, a work of art: it is something that speaks through physical signs. Soon, however, Takako perceives the limits of the book. > In the bookstore I had found warmth and serenity, but I could not settle for that, or I would never have grown. I would have remained fragile. I had to leave, to take back the reins of my existence . We are at page 59; up to this point, the story is intriguing: from here on, it slips into a banal, saccharine tale of a girl in search of herself. To be sure, it would have been an exaggeration to expect a book on literature like Azar Nafisi's (*Reading Lolita in Tehran*, see the review on this site); we would have settled for Sosuke Natsukawa's *The Cat Who Saved Books* (see the review on this site), a verbose and at times banal tale, yet captivating in its hazy, mysterious atmosphere. Treating our indecipherable bond with books and the bookstore as the author has done stirs in us both disappointment and indignation. Why not read it? It is superficial.

The novel is set in a small Istrian village, spanning a period from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. The narrative charts the momentous events of the century just past: the final years of the Austrian Empire, the First World War, annexation to Italy, the partisan war, and ultimately integration into Yugoslavia following the 1947 peace treaty. These historical events had a profound impact on a border community composed of Croats and Italians: the former in the majority and generally poor peasants, the latter a minority of wealthy landowners. Yet it is not the social theme that interests the author, even though it naturally surfaces throughout the narrative, especially in the frequent blending of Croatian and Italian—one of the book's most compelling features. The theme of the story is entirely internal and can be distilled into a single subject: religion and its function for the individual and for a small community. Tomizza envisions an elderly sacristan recounting his life, and that of his fellow villagers, through the succession of parish priests over the years. > How many priests had I not had to deal with: priests with mothers, with sisters, with housekeepers, and priests on their own. During sleepless hours they revolved before my eyes like a carousel reflecting myself and at the same time the political circumstances of their era. I pondered in the dark that each could have appeared better to me, and each worse, depending on the times, but also by virtue of my own changing way of being and assessing them. (...) Why did I stay? It is hard to answer today, for it is hard to be believed. I felt I was serving the church, and through it the community, not the priests, who were all destined to pass away. I had wedded myself to that service, to that duty, even before Palmira, and everything else came second, Palmira included. Yet I was resolved to forge another path for our son, and this commitment partly redeemed me, even in her eyes . This quotation encapsulates the long journey of the protagonist-narrator, which leads him to drift away from religion as he witnesses the decline of the parish he serves throughout his life. > The church is a building like any other; it will end, as is predictable, without making much of an impression: atop the hills one can still see the walls of small churches from centuries past, engulfed by briars. Yet back then there was a recovery, and people returned to the fields as well. Will it happen again? I doubt it. Born to a sacristan, he becomes one while still young. The priests who follow one another are profoundly different: some ignorant and coarse, others overbearing and arrogant, still others frail individuals, quick to sin with wine and women. Only one, a young Croatian priest, seemed to embody what is expected of a man of the cloth. Yet later, when he sees him again as a bishop, he realizes that he too has become false and hypocritical. > From him I would have expected to hear, or at least read upon his face, the disillusionment, the wounds that could not fail to have been inflicted. (...) In earlier times, would he not have been prouder, if not more compassionate? . And so, left without a parish priest to serve, the old sacristan has no choice but to become the chronicler of his people. In the book's final, deeply evocative pages, the protagonist recounts the lives of some of his fellow villagers, such as *gnagna* Zvana Zuncolin, a "stooped, dark little woman," or Michelin, once "a handsome, dark man with gypsy eyes," who spent a lifetime as a drunkard to forget the woman he loved: he remains famous for the phrase, "there are no spare parts for man." The narrative style is not always effortless, yet the reading moves briskly because one remains captivated by the story of a community—first isolated and hidden, then increasingly caught up in momentous events. In Tomizza's narrative, never folkloric or nostalgic, religion intertwines with ancestral pagan customs and new, ostensibly secular and anticlerical mores. And the church is always there, "somehow simply present," with its registers of births and deaths, written partly in Croatian and partly in Italian, in hands both clear and obscure: a presence from which the protagonist wishes to escape, yet cannot, because > it adhered perfectly to that which I had always learned to know and, for convenience, am accustomed to calling ordinary (life), yet it did not completely coincide with it, while still enchanting me, while still helping me discover hidden or unnoticed facets of real life . Yet by thus contenting itself with "its own full power," religion does not resolve the mystery of death, leaving the individual alone and questioning at life's most solemn moment. > Does the void of the heavens descend upon the earth, or does the better life open wide above us? This I did not know, that the world dies with every death of a man . Why read it? Allow yourself to be enchanted by the story of an ordinary life in a small Istrian village, between Croatia and Italy.

> A certain Miguilim lived with his mother, his father, and his siblings, very far from here, (...) in the Mutùm. In the middle of the Campo Gerais, but in a hollow within forest country, black earth, at the foot of the mountains. Miguilim was eight years old . With this fairy-tale incipit, Guimarães Rosa narrates an extended peasant family through the eyes of a child. > Miguilim had no desire to grow up, to become a grown-up; grown-ups' talk was always the same dry things, with that need to be violent, frightened things . In a family plunged into poverty (the father > shouted that he was poor, on the verge of becoming destitute, of having to beg for alms ), Miguilim lives at the heart of a complex social nucleus made of people and animals: the violent father, the uncle carrying on an affair with the mother, the eccentric grandmother possessing a severe and atavistic wisdom, the witch-servant, "so pitch-black, as Death must be," the cowherds and the village folk, the farmyard animals, and so much more; yet none is like his brother Dito—self-assured, protective, capable of standing up to their father. > All at once, it burst. (...) And then came the thunder! It thundered tremendously, again and again; everyone covered their ears, closed their eyes. Then Dito held Miguilim close. Dito wasn't trembling, only he was more serious. (...) Dito was clever and peaceful. (...) Dito never truly quarreled with anyone, (...) Miguilim always wanted not to quarrel, yet ended up quarreling with everyone. How wonderful to be like Dito: suited to all people's hours... . Miguilim is fragile, unsuited to peasant labor, afraid to venture alone into the forest to bring lunch to his father working in the fields; nothing comes of the cowherd's reassuring words when Miguilim asks if he is deformed, nor of the hugs and kisses of the witch-servant, nor even of the purring rubs of the cat Sossoe, > eyes of a green so much less empty --- it was a light inside another inside another, inside another, without end . It is as though Miguilim lived in a world of his own: magical, incomprehensible, wondrous, and terrifying. It is no wonder that Dito's death shatters the boy; he nearly loses his mind, can no longer hide behind his brother's reassuring certainty, and must himself go to work in the fields, grueling hoeing beneath the sun. As in an exquisite fairy tale, a knight on horseback arrives to save him; he addresses little Miguilim directly and hands him a pair of spectacles. > And Miguilim looked at everyone, with such intensity. (...) He looked at the dark forests on the mountain crest, here the house, the hedge of wild beans and sao-caetano; the sky, the cattle pen, the yard, the round eyes and the high windowpanes of the morning. (...) The Mutùm was beautiful. Now he knew it. If in Anna Maria Ortese's *Il mare non bagna Napoli* (see the review on this site), eyeglasses unleash an unbearable reality upon an impoverished girl from the slums, here, instead, the lenses possess a salvific power, as though only the true knowledge of reality could make it bearable. A fairy-tale ending brings little Miguilim's childhood to a splendid close, foreshadowing the great social narrative of João Guimarães Rosa's masterpiece (see the review of *Grande Sertao* on this site). The extended peasant family characterized the social fabric of our country until the 1950s. And yet there are no great novels chronicling the sharecropping and tenant-farming world. *Pinocchio* is the son of an artisan, the Malavoglias in *I Malavoglia* are fishermen, Giannino in *Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca* is the quintessential bourgeois lad, the stories in *Cuore* are too edifying to mirror a social reality; perhaps only the splendid chapter "The Four Seasons" in *Il mulino del Po* investigates the dynamics typical of the peasant world (for *Pinocchio*, *I Malavoglia*, *Il mulino del Po*, and *Il giornalino*, see the reviews on this site). Here, however, Guimarães Rosa retraces a child's early years within the intricate web of relationships of an impoverished reality, entirely geared toward survival, yet one in which emotions churn and dreams remain possible. The relationship between Miguilim and Dito denotes an informal hierarchy in which the more fragile child seeks the support of the stronger personality, forging a privileged and steadfast bond that offers security—one that only the fairy-tale conclusion can replace. In his intense preface, Antonio Tabucchi defines the novella > an operetta with a Mozartian timbre, performed on the magic flute of an uncommon narrator . It is a particularly apt definition: it is the fluctuating cadence between hyperrealistic moments and fantastic ones, of "non-story," that imparts the sense of ambiguous allure that characterizes the narrative. Behind the easy screen of the fairy tale (but is it truly one?), the story > stirs unease and always retains an unattributable valence, on the margins of (or beyond) speculative formulation. Something reminiscent of the savage mind, bound to the mystery of Being . (Tabucchi's Preface). Why read it? Magnificent!

The novel is set in 1960s Milan. A police inspector is called to investigate the disappearance of a young woman, strikingly beautiful yet mentally impaired. He discovers her body, burned at the side of the road, and uncovers a prostitution ring. Through a series of inquiries into the criminal underworld and brothels, he identifies the killers, but arrives too late: they have already been murdered by the girl’s father. The latter, a decent man, is driven to commit a crime by the sluggishness and incompetence of the police in solving the case. It is a heavy, thoroughly bitter noir: a violent, unscrupulous city and a negligent police force. The story is well constructed, with an engaging narrative pace, even if the plot twists feel somewhat predictable. The author’s interest seems to lie more in the depiction of the milieu than in the construction of the plot.

Time fills up "with interminable, communicating galleries," a labyrinth that is by no means guaranteed to lead anywhere. At the heart of the book lies an existential premise: life is a succession of unpredictable crossroads, able to find solidity and certainty only in the pursuit of one's roots, one's land, and one's ancestors. Gioia is a young woman from Matera who has fled in search of a freedom that neither her mother, nor her grandmother, nor she herself would ever have been able even to imagine. She traverses > a brief season of freedom and belonging, lost in the crowd, in the Italian piazzas, Rome, Bologna, Florence Ponte Vecchio, sleeps with a Swiss boy with skin as smooth as a girl's.... shouts the slogans P38 a hole blooms in your mouth, is moved by the sight of red flags, uses their poles as clubs, pulls the red kerchief down over her face, thinks she has the future in her hands . Inadvertently entangled in terrorism, she flees to Paris, where she works as an actress, takes a job in an erotic call center, and loses herself among many men, more often than not allowing herself to be used. Ma quando > she had become a young woman as perfect as inorganic matter, removed from the unpredictability of time she wonders > what is the point?, to whom would she answer? Now that she could be anyone, she was no longer anyone . Then she feels the urge to retrace backward, > moment by moment, everything that had led there. And so, without realizing it, you lose yourself in history . Gioia traces the history of her ancestors back to Grottole, a small town in Basilicata. The starting point is 1861, the year of Italian Unification, and from there she sets out to narrate the fortunes of her family—in particular, of the women who were decisive through their strength and character. The result is at once a social and familial narrative: a fresco of an impoverished and neglected Italy, stagnant for a century before rapidly transforming during the economic boom years after 1960: the dissolution of family ties, of a communal life that represented both the cage and the strength of peasant society. Emblematic, in this respect, is the bleak everyday existence of Gioia’s parents, Rocco and Alba, who watch the same television program in separate rooms, when such incommunicability is contrasted with the lives of their grandparents and great-grandparents, who worked, ate, quarreled, and lived entirely together. That world, once so steadfast and serene, is no more. Gioia, departing anew, sees from the train that > the rolling countryside that had cradled her nostalgia, nostalgia for a cherished sorrow, for tears, for unfulfilled curiosities, for imprisonment, had now lost its virginity. She, who had kicked against it, now mourned its loss and silently held a tearless funeral for it . The book can be divided into two parts. The first, set in Grottole, is a reconstruction—almost a historical investigation—of a social and familial structure. The narrative pace suffers precisely from this descriptive approach, which only in flashes elevates itself toward the transfiguration of history and the deepening of the characters. The second part, describing Gioia’s life through the 1960s and 1970s, displays a modern style, at times disjointed yet effective in conveying the sense of the character’s "derailment." Particularly compelling are the pages in which the author pursues a sort of parallel history: the Gioia who could have been a respectable girl, university-educated, well-married, and with children, versus the real Gioia who has lost herself in the search for her own identity. The compulsion, perhaps, to say too much in too few pages leads to a cluttered narrative, a kind of haphazard jumble of actions and situations. The reader is left disoriented, unable to fully grasp Gioia’s story. Why read it? It is an enjoyable read, compelling in its historical reconstruction, and provides an effective contrast between modernity and tradition.

*The Thousand and One Nights* is an Arabic manuscript likely dating back to the Abbasid Caliphate, between 750 and 900 AD: the setting is the fabulous empire of Baghdad, stretching from North Africa across the Arabian Peninsula to Central Asia and India. Its discovery is credited to Antoine Galland in the early eighteenth century, and from that moment the text spread throughout the West, sparking wonder and scandal: Orientalism was born. Owing to the many versions of the work, it should be clarified that this review refers to the text established from the original manuscripts by René R. Khawan. Let us begin with *The Weaver of Nights*. The king has been betrayed by his wife: a Moor “lifted her legs in the air, slipped between her thighs, and penetrated her.” From that moment on, the sovereign resolves to take a maiden as his bride each night and execute her at dawn. The vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, who “had read books and writings of every kind,” asks her father to arrange her marriage to the king, saying: > either I shall rise in the esteem of my fellows by freeing them from the peril that threatens them, or I shall die or perish with no hope of deliverance, sharing the fate of those who have died and perished before me . Her father attempts to dissuade her with tales urging a prudent, unassuming life, but the daughter, obstinate and self-assured, replies that she could offer him other stories leading to entirely different conclusions. And herein lies the crux of *The Thousand and One Nights*: the word. Through literary invention, fabulation, and poetry, one can confront the direst straits, vanquish evil spirits, and even bend the will of God to one’s favor. According to the widely accepted interpretation—though not strictly corroborated by the work’s architecture—each night Shahrazad tells a story to the king: enthralled, the sovereign spares the maiden's life out of the desire to hear another tale, ultimately making her his lifelong bride. A miracle of the word! The work follows a recursive pattern: a frame narrative within which other stories unfold, all designed to persuade and astonish the listener. The prose narrative is interspersed with verses in a style characteristic of Abbasid civilization. One does well to surrender to its spell; nevertheless, certain common threads can be traced. In the celebrated *The Fisherman and the Jinni*, the central motif is cunning. A fisherman frees a demon imprisoned for centuries inside a jar at the bottom of the sea. Once liberated, the Jinni seeks to kill the poor man. The fisherman preys upon the demon's vanity, challenging him to demonstrate how he could possibly fit into such a small vessel; it is a ruse to seal the Jinni away once more. To the creature's pleas and promises, the fisherman replies with tales displaying the wisdom of poetry: > they might have remained just and pure,/but they abused their power/ and the world in turn oppressed them/(...) behold them restored to their squalor... One would gladly sink into the allure of the tales of the *Fisherman and the Jinni* (echoing the line “if you return, we shall return”), yet we must hasten to illuminate another magnificent tale: *The Porter and the Ladies*. Here the theme is clemency, itself the fruit of love. A porter finds himself in the house of three ladies of consummate beauty, which prompts the poet to say: > inviolate...when I beseech her to grant me/the embrace. Beauty advises her/to show herself generous,/ but Coquetry forbids her to yield . Three one-eyed mendicants arrive, and presently even the sultan and his vizier. A banquet ensues in which the guests are bound by an oath: > whatever you see us do, whatever you observe around us...do not seek to understand the reason . Yet the strangeness of what they witness is too great for the guests to refrain from questioning. Ten Moors appear, poised to behead the reckless intruders who failed to honor their pledge. To appease the wrath of the three ladies, the mendicants recount their life stories and plead for mercy: it will be granted to all the guests, so profound is the wonder inspired by the tales and the pleasure derived from them by the three magnificent maidens! How can one punish when love is being sung? > The woman took the weapon and advanced until she stood before me. (...) I looked at her for a long time. (...) Her cheeks then expressed the feelings that occupied her soul, and the verses of the poet came to my mind: if my mouth is silent, my glances speak/and they will tell you what I cannot say,/for love makes manifest/the feelings hidden within me.(...)/the one is a writer of genius, though his rhetoric is beholden only to the play of eyelids;/the other is no less fine a man of letters/though he expresses himself solely through the eye . We grasp from these lines how the bewitching word is also the fruit of oral and gestural performance, all within delightful company amidst pleasing music, sweet perfume, and the bliss of embrace, consummate > only if supplied with these four elements/youthful age, wine,/a beloved body, gold coins... One may investigate the myriad underlying themes of the work, from the philosophical to the depiction of a society centered on beauty, art, wealth, the supernatural, and magic, set against a prevailing backdrop of sovereign violence and tyranny. Let us not ask too many questions; let us lose ourselves in the tales, in their astonishing plots, in their incredible deeds and figures, the harvest of an exuberant and irrepressible imagination; let us indulge in the pleasure of the many verses, as seductive and mysterious as the following: > the oath that binds me, I have sworn/by the intoxication stirred within me by the flutter/of her eyelid, by the curve of her hips,/by the bewitched arrows she looses at me/(...) the sorrows have fled as at the radiant rising/of the sun, leaving the moon perplexed./Was the star of day ahead of time?/Did it perhaps already wish to put her to flight?... Why read it? Astonishing, magnificent, spellbinding, an explosion of the imagination.

If the tales of the first volume (see review on this site) have a fairy-tale quality, transporting us into a world populated by spirits and magical inventions, here the novellas have a realistic cast; the reading is less enthralling, but we derive from it a portrayal of Abbasid society, of the power of the caliph and his emirs, of court intrigues, and of the resigned obedience of the subjects. In the tale *The Power of Love*, the wretched Ghanin is severely punished on the false accusation of having seduced the caliph's favorite. Blind jealousy drives the "Commander of the Faithful" to persecute the young man and his family. When the caliph realizes his terrible mistake and asks what he can do for him, Ghanin replies that > the servant cannot in any way reproach the master for how the latter saw fit to behave toward him. (...) The servant remains the servant, and the master remains the master ; it is the young man's mother who courageously urges the caliph to reflect upon how fragile human nature is, > how often it is prone to deception and dissimulation. And think of how these wicked inclinations can be exacerbated by jealousy, to which women are all too susceptible. One must not believe that we are dealing with a sort of Arabic *Decameron* or Gogol's *Dead Souls* with a Middle Eastern flavor (see reviews on this site); in the novellas of this second volume as well, prose is interwoven with poetry, the tales interlock with one another, the beauty of men and women prevails, and one flees from reality into the implausible. Is what we recount an illusion? In the opening of the immensely long tale *The Faces of Love*, which depicts a fabulous, boundless world reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's *The Enchantress of Florence* or Abdulrazak Gurnah's *Paradise* (see reviews on this site), the beauty of the young prince is sketched with verses steeped in narcissistic desire: > He is the fawn of the gazelle with a hesitant gait!/He need only take a mirror in hand:/faithful and flattering, it will reflect/the absolute idea of beauty that his dream casts upon it. The finest novellas are those featuring Caliph Harun al-Rashid (who reigned between 766 and 809). It seems that this ruler was > fond of anecdotes, current news, and gossip ; so, disguised as a common citizen, he would go out to discover how ordinary people lived and to play pranks at their expense. How dreadfully dull life must have been in the palaces of Baghdad! In *The Sleeper Who Does Not Sleep*, the caliph, posing as a merchant, makes his way into the home of the honest Hasan; after getting him drunk, he makes him drink a potent sleeping draught; taken to the palace, Hasan spends a night as caliph, believing it to be reality: he is taken for a madman and locked in an asylum. When he comes out, he continues to live no longer knowing whether he is in a dream or in reality. > Why did you instill confusion in my mind, why did you turn my brain upside down?. And "the successor of the Prophet" candidly replies that he does it for pleasure. In the novella *The Caliph and the Madman*, al-Rashid wants to understand whether a person locked in an asylum is truly mad; what emerges is a series of interlocking tales, in a Pirandellian atmosphere, in which the wit of the grand vizier—an ever-present figure in *The Thousand and One Nights*—tests the poor lunatic; it will later turn out that, rather than wit, one should speak of deceit, for the grand vizier wished to prevent the marriage between his daughter and the alleged madman. We leave it to the reader to discover the plot of *The Persian Sage*. Here we shall merely say that a remarkably handsome "cookshop keeper," > he is the stallion/of every grace , manages to win over the splendid princess thanks to a love potion concocted by the wise sorcerer. Let us revel in these delightfully erotic verses: > Side by side, close together, with my own eyes/I saw them, I would have loved/to see them sleep together/upon my very eyelids./They were two gazelles of the desert,/and two radiant stars in the night,/two morning stars, perfect boughs,/and two incarnations of divine Beauty. René R. Khawam, the editor of this edition of *The Thousand and One Nights*, concluded after extensive research that the two books in this second volume, *Wandering Passions* and *The Taste of Days*, complement the better-known ones presented in the first volume: *Illustrious Ladies and Gallant Servants* and *Inhuman Hearts*. Naturally, I am in no position to contest the editor's choices, particularly on an issue so fraught with ambiguity due to the difficulty of imposing order upon this crucial testimony to the Arabic poetry of the Caliphate of Baghdad. It is difficult to believe that we are facing a succession of nocturnal tales, both because of the length of the novellas and because of their realistic framework; poetry too loses weight compared to prose, and the narration no longer possesses the brisk pace of the tales in the first volume. One senses a certain weariness, a certain formalistic and repetitive quality, as though the political and military decline of the great empire were reflected in its song, both nostalgic and despairing. While in the tales of the first volume there is always an ending pointing toward a happy future, here every novella concludes with an invocation of Death, of > the Destroyer of Pleasures and Severer of Gatherings, (...) May God be merciful to us on the day of that appointed meeting. Why read it? It is wordy at times, it takes effort, but it is well worth it.

Najwa is a Sudanese young woman, the daughter of a wealthy and influential family. Following a coup d'état in which her father is imprisoned and sentenced to death, Najwa moves to England with her mother and brother. Here, her life changes radically: her mother dies, her brother is convicted of drug use, and she is forced to work as a maid for wealthy London families, mostly of Arab descent. She crosses paths again with a Sudanese friend with whom she had had a flirtation in her youth, one she had ended because of his accusations regarding her father's corruption. It is a fraught and contradictory relationship: the young man often proves selfish, self-centered, possessive, yet at the same time fragile, while continuing to voice criticism of Najwa's father. In the wake of her mother's death, Najwa is drawn to the mosque community and begins to pay closer attention to Islam, which evolves into a profound faith as her relationship with her partner unravels. Moreover, faith also offers a way to reclaim her roots—no longer national, but religious. Years pass, and Najwa goes to work for a wealthy Egyptian family, where she begins a relationship with a young student, who is likewise steeped in religious ideas. Yet by now the social divide is insurmountable, and their relationship ends the moment it is discovered. The book operates on two levels. The first, and more superficial, is tied to the Muslim milieu. The quest for roots through religion is an ever-present theme, though one left largely unexplored, both in terms of analyzing the underlying motivations for the protagonist's ideological evolution (from a largely indifferent background to deep religiosity) and in the depiction of the mosque community. The second, far more substantial level concerns Najwa's personal plight: her loneliness, her attachment to her family, her yearning to recapture—if only vicariously—the tranquil world of her childhood, and ultimately her ill-fated encounters with men. Najwa's fragility and her desires are ultimately transcended through the very serenity granted by her rediscovered faith. This enables her to take the most painful and difficult step: giving the young student's mother the "key" to persuade him to leave Najwa. > She does not know, she does not know that he has his own frustrations and ideas of the world. She does not know that he is not an extension of her. I tell her. And by telling her I lose him. I give the key into her hands . In this way, Najwa forfeits the hope of a romantic and family life of her own, resigning herself to a vicarious existence, like a nun or an elderly aunt. The novel thus chronicles Najwa's inner evolution from the carefree days of adolescence through life's disillusionments to a restored inner balance—one fostered by faith, but above all by a growing awareness of solitude as a deliberate choice. It is beautifully written in a lucid style, devoid of rhetoric yet felicitously expressive. It is somewhat reminiscent of Nadine Gordimer, albeit less dense and complex.

The true title of *The Miners of Alaska* ought to be *The Great Crossing of the Plains and the Rocky Mountains All the Way to Alaska*; indeed, the search for gold is marginal to the overall story, serving merely as an occasion for Salgari to depict the North American environment as it was related in the nineteenth century. To gain insight into the true history of the American West, and of the United States, I recommend Massimiliano Galanti’s book *La questione indiana* (Odoya, 2016). The formula is classic Salgari. There is the protagonist, Bennie the Great Hunter, described thus: > tall, muscular, with powerful arms, a broad chest, a forceful head covered with long, ringleted black hair that was already beginning to turn grizzled, with piercing eyes and a goatee trimmed to a point . In short, Buffalo Bill! Serving as sidekicks, in keeping with the traditional Salgarian mold, are: a Mexican companion of Bennie's ( > very dark-complexioned, chubby, (...) with pitch-black eyes, the true Hispanic-American type ) and two Italians, survivors of an Indian raid. Falcone has been scalped and miraculously survived; he has an intimate knowledge of the gold-rich mines of Alaska and possesses a crucial instrument for seeking the precious metal: a special sieve that allowed one to separate the gold from the dirt without wading into the water. Armando, Falcone's nephew, has only recently arrived in America, but will prove to be a skilled marksman and an excellent companion to Bennie in hunting and in clashes with the Indians. This group decides to set out for Alaska to capitalize on Falcone's knowledge and his useful implement. The long journey is a succession of adventures: not only escaping treacherous Indians, but also measuring oneself against a wild and mesmerizing nature. The pattern repeats itself with a certain monotony: Bennie and Armando wander away from camp to scout the surrounding area and track down game; they encounter treacherous terrain and must battle terrifying beasts, such as the great brown bear, wolf packs, and stampeding herds of bison. Everything is here: from mysterious dancing plants (tumbleweeds swept along by the wind) to accounts of cannibalism, all the way to the discovery of prehistoric animal remains. It is easy to smile at the travel accounts of nineteenth-century explorers, narratives from which Salgari drew copiously, naturally superimposing his own feverish and inexhaustible imagination. We must allow ourselves to be carried away by a fabulous century, steeped in prejudice and brimming with evocative charm: let us read our beloved author's descriptions of nature with relish. > The moon had set by then, and a dense darkness had fallen across the immense plain. (...) Bennie (...) gazed in all directions, tracking with his eyes the capricious fiery trails of the fireflies, and listening to the monotonous chirping of rejoicing crickets, the distant cries of coyotes, the lowing of cattle . If this reminds us all too much of our own landscape, what can be said of the > meadows formed of tiny mosses of a splendid emerald hue (...) the clearings were covered with expanses of stony, tenacious lichen, resembling dried mushrooms, or tall, pitch-black mosses, soaked with moisture . And from whom did Salgari draw this raw portrayal of the Alaskan miners? > More than human beings, they seemed beasts brutalized by hard labor and privation. They were all ragged, filthy, their shirts blackened by campfire smoke or soiled by mud from the pits, their trousers patched in a thousand ways, their boots worn through and leaving their toes exposed, hats defying description or hoods that had long since lost their fur: yet all wore belts bristling with revolvers and gleaming bowie knives . Were they not armed, they might well be our own miners from Mount Amiata or the mines of Porto Empedocle. What a contrasting attitude Salgari displays toward the redskins compared to the wretched souls prospecting for gold! The former treacherous, cruel, and superstitious; the latter greedy and desperate, yet not devoid of a kind of justice. A child of the nineteenth century, our beloved author could hardly avoid a touch of racism! Within Salgari's vast output, we are dealing with a minor novel, albeit sustained by the brisk pace of its adventures and the pursuit of the marvelous. Plot twists and gear shifts are lacking: the enemies are bound to succumb, pretty much all in the same manner—whether they be Indians, outlaws, or ravenous wolves: a rifle shot, an audacious and unexpected stunt, a prudent and shrewd strategy. Nor is there any dynamic between the characters: Bennie is a hero devoid of passion (did he ever have a sweetheart? did he suffer injustices?), and those who ought to serve as his foils are faded figures, lacking that vibrancy and irony that distinguish so many of Salgari’s minor characters. Why read it? It is packed with adventure; I particularly recommend the chapter recounting the wolf attack.

The book unfolds across multiple plotlines, difficult to trace back to a single narrative thread. A first path concerns the decline of the miniature painting technique, which had flourished in the sixteenth century under the influence of Persian and Chinese art. Ottoman miniature art justified the depiction of images to accompany books on the grounds that real individuals were never portrayed and no personal style existed; rather, figures and landscapes represented the world through the eye of God, constantly reiterating images and styles codified by the old masters and thus legitimized by the authority of the past. In truth, this approach served both as a justification and an ideal, since the miniaturist and the workshop to which he belonged would inevitably introduce subtle variations or innovatively assemble the iconography established by the great masters of the past. The Sultan decides to commission a book illustrated in the European style, introduced to the Ottomans via Venice. Given the sensitivity of the request—which risked provoking a fierce backlash from the orthodox—the execution of the book is not entrusted to the court workshop, but to an elderly artist, Uncle Effendi, who assigns individual illustrations to the workshop’s miniaturists themselves. The account of how the illustrations are executed is rendered by the author in a unique manner: from the perspectives of the various subjects depicted—the dog, the tree, the coin, the horse, Death, the color red. Through this narrative device, the author charts the history of miniature art, which has reached its twilight: following the Sultan’s death, it will be abandoned, deemed non-compliant with Islamic precepts. The history of this art form also opens up glimpses into the history of Islamic civilization (notably the Mongol invasions and the Ottoman-Persian wars) and into its predominant narrative themes, most notably the love story of *Khosrow and Shirin*. A second narrative arc takes the form of a murder mystery. One of the miniaturists murders a colleague and Uncle Effendi. Multiple motives intertwine: jealousy and envy, career ambition, and the conviction that a blasphemous book was being forged and had to be stopped. Here too, the author employs the device of narrating events from the viewpoints of different characters. The manner in which the investigation unfolds is striking: the Sultan entrusts the master of the miniature workshop with identifying the murderer among his own disciples, under penalty of torture and death for all of them. The master detects a peculiarity in the rendering of a horse—a distinctive trait that identifies the illustrator—and subsequently requests the Sultan’s permission to enter the treasury to study the antique manuscripts, thereby tracing the historical lineage of that stylistic mark and identifying the miniaturist through knowledge of his life and artistic development. In truth, the master has little concern for the investigation itself. Resolute in his desire to punish his disciples for betraying him by agreeing to collaborate on the book, his true interest lies in beholding the Sultan’s magnificent treasury one final time. An artistic heritage on the brink of vanishing, along with a history of struggles and creative breakthroughs, unfolds before the master, who resolves to blind himself in accordance with an ancient ritual of the great masters. A third narrative thread follows the romance between Black, returned to Istanbul after many years, and Shekure: a somber tale, for the woman does not truly love Black, consenting to marry him merely to secure her position and provide a father for her sons. These three narrative strands intertwine, drawn together into unity less by their plotlines than by a pervasive atmosphere of nostalgia and sorrow: a world is fading away. It is the great Ottoman Empire, and the confluence of civilizations and cultures rooted in the Islamic faith. Miniature painting cannot withstand the twofold assault of Western culture—which captures “the real” and asserts the artist's individuality—and religious orthodoxy. The master deliberately chooses to dismantle the workshop, realizing he can no longer rein in the aspirations of his disciples. The city’s streets and houses are desolate, love is reduced to mere expediency, and the children themselves appear as pale imitations of childhood. Black, who risked his life to unmask the killer out of love for Shekure, is destined to lead a somber, solitary existence beside a woman who does not love him. Why is it that we either do not change, or we change too fast, relinquishing what was handed down from the past? As the master says: > now I understand that thousands of miniaturists, drawing the very same designs in delicate secrecy for centuries, had drawn the secret and delicate transformation of the world into another world . It is not the plot events that engender this atmosphere of melancholy and decline, but the author’s style, which succeeds—through the juxtaposition of themes and the deliberate choice of adjectives—in creating a lingering sense of suspension and tender melancholy.

The novel chronicles the life of Jean Valjean, a convict who, following an encounter with a bishop (a saint), is transformed into a good and righteous man: he first becomes a wealthy industrialist, then, returned to prison, escapes in order to save and raise a young girl, Cosette, who, upon reaching adulthood, falls in love with a young revolutionary. Jean Valjean rescues the young man from certain death (during the 1832 rebellion), and then chooses to disappear so as not to jeopardize the couple's future with his status as an escaped convict. Yet goodness triumphs and, as the author writes, “the night was starless and profoundly dark.” Doubtless in the shadows, some immense angel had come forth, with outspread wings, to await the soul from the supreme shadow to the supreme dawn. As Victor Hugo wrote: “the book which the reader has before his eyes at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and in its details, whatever its intermittences, exceptions, and lacunae, the march from evil to good. From the unjust toward the just, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from putrefaction to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; destination: the soul. The hydra (evil) at the beginning, the angel at the end > This conception is based on faith in progress (which Hugo identifies with God, and therefore with a humanistic and Christian socialism) and on the uprising of the world of the wretched > driven by unstoppable social forces. From this point of view, the countless characters in the novel become archetypes > , representatives of a role to be fulfilled in the great transformation of the world, and thus devoid of any true depth: feelings and motivations are only ostensibly analyzed and explored; in reality, it is merely a succession of rhetorical devices (the interrogative form predominates) to illustrate contradictions and dilemmas that do not belong to the intimate sphere (and in this sense universal), but rather to a social and historical function. One need only think of the conversion > of Jean Valjean and the analysis of the crises of conscience the protagonist faces throughout the novel (the decision to appear at a trial to prevent an innocent man from paying for his crimes, and the decision to withdraw into the shadows so as not to jeopardize the young couple's happiness): in every case, one is confronted with a sort of divine illumination and moral imperative, while the depiction of the character's resulting misery (due to the loss of Cosette) is flat and schematic. Even more paradoxical and astonishingly devoid of any psychological or philosophical depth is one of the most dramatic episodes in the entire novel. Inspector Javert (Jean Valjean’s relentless persecutor) is caught in a vice between human law, which demands the arrest of the former convict, and his conscience, which compels him to release Jean Valjean, who had saved his life. His inability to break free from this dilemma drives him to suicide. It is clear that Hugo intends to attack bureaucratic, callous approaches to the enforcement of the law—a law that is often unjust because partisan (Javert’s final piece of writing, a mere list of recommendations for the chief of police, is incisive and remarkably effective). Yet one need only imagine what a Dostoevsky would have made of the contradiction between the human conscience and the imperatives imposed by institutional rules and norms to realize how far removed the French author is from the modern spirit, anchored as he is to a cold, moralistic vision of humanity and its struggles. His depiction of French history (from the French Revolution to the Citizen King) is likewise a series of epic events governed by Providence: the very defeat at Waterloo is attributed to a destiny bent on closing the Napoleonic era in order to inaugurate a new phase of social transformation that will lead to the great upheavals of 1848. Yet do individuals and social classes truly exist, or is everything already predetermined by an obscure, immanent force, at once religious and scientific: Progress? *Les Misérables* is a deeply dated work, enclosed within nineteenth-century culture, with little left to say to the man of postmodernism and globalization. As often happens with great authors (take Dante’s *Divine Comedy* itself), the most valuable parts involve components and approaches that cannot be traced back to the stated intentions. Victor Hugo is a Romantic author who ceaselessly pursues the grotesque and the visionary: stylistic traits that occasionally render the reading cumbersome, yet contribute to producing pages of great beauty and suspense. Consider the description of Cosette, an eight-year-old child sent to fetch water in the dead of night, watching the setting of Jupiter and feeling the surrounding nature seem to stir to capture her: the tall grasses swarmed beneath the north wind like eels. The rocks twisted like long claw-armed arms, seeking to seize prey…. > ; of the episode of the trap set by the criminals for Jean Valjean, so full of twists and unforeseen turns; and finally of the magnificent chapter ( Comment de frère on devient père > ) in which the two abandoned children seize the bread thrown to the swans to feed themselves. In a few pages, the author manages to capture the stillness of the Jardin du Luxembourg, the solitude of childhood, the solidarity among children, and the narrow-minded hypocrisy of bourgeois culture. The novel’s true masterpiece is the episode of the elephant: a striking, visually magnificent scene in which a monument built to glorify power becomes the sanctuary of three children. Then there is another protagonist of the novel: the city of Paris. The author’s toponomastic precision, the minute description of streets and houses (many of which had already vanished during Victor Hugo’s own lifetime), provide a romantic setting for the novel and its backdrop. This is prior to the grands boulevards, in the midst of a reticular city where it is easy to lose oneself and disappear. The pages devoted to the Parisian argot spoken among the wretched" are also of great interest, indicating an almost anthropological attentiveness on the author’s part. Yet is the idea of Progress truly authentic, or merely literary and political, concealing in truth a Romantic nostalgia for the Middle Ages and pre-revolutionary history? The novel is, on the whole, prolix, tedious in many stretches, and fundamentally a potboiler.

> Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale, In his ocean home will be, A giant in might, where might is right, And King of the boundless sea . This anthem closes a vast preamble in which Melville, like "a mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub," compiles an extensive catalogue of citations on the Whale, spanning from the Bible to world literature. Self-taught and an insatiable reader, Melville seeks to forestall the accusation of being a mere chronicler of seafaring life. We must not fall into this trap. *Moby Dick* is the greatest sea novel ever written; and it is so because Melville truly lived the experiences he recounts. > I, Ishmael, was one of that crew. (...) With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge . What misleads the reader is the pervasive, intense religious atmosphere; yet it could not be otherwise. For Melville, as for most of his contemporaries, the Bible permeates every facet of life: hence the metaphors, the reflections, and indeed the anxieties that define the novel. The narrative may be divided into four parts. In the first, the narrator and protagonist is Ishmael: still a youth, he resolves to ship aboard a whaler out of a vague yearning for adventure and knowledge. In the mid-nineteenth century, Nantucket stood as one of the premier American ports for fleets engaged in the sperm whale fishery; with a narrative style suspended between Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe, Melville crafts a portrait of it that is simultaneously realistic and hauntingly evocative. One is captivated by the figure of Queequeg, a cannibal with whom Ishmael forges a profound friendship. The pivotal moment is the sermon devoted to the biblical episode of the prophet Jonah, swallowed by the whale by the will of God and saved by God alone. It is no myth; it is the truth, thundered to the faithful (sailors and the widows of men lost at sea), that they may know that salvation proceeds solely from faith, from the literal, devout reading of Scripture. He who flouts the words of the Lord is doomed to self-annihilation and damnation. > The world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow . At last, the vessel sets sail on a long voyage. > We found ourselves almost defenseless upon the hostile ocean. (...) Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dread creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. (...) Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began . (...) As this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return. > The second part introduces the novel's dramatis personae: the mates and the harpooneers, delineated in chapters bearing evocative titles: Knights and Squires > . It is an effective depiction, for what revolves around Captain Ahab, the monomaniac "protagonist," is essentially a feudal system. He looked like a man cut away from the stake. (...) His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus > . Yet it is not his physical semblance that marks Ahab’s defining trait; it is his soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom > . A scene of mesmerizing power concludes this gallery of characters and constitutes a watershed for the entire narrative. Ahab reveals to the crew that the voyage's true quarry is the white whale: Moby Dick. Amid a crescendo of collective frenzy, only the first mate, the pious Starbuck, dissents, knowing as he does that it was Moby Dick who reaped Ahab’s leg. Vengeance on a dumb brute, that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous > . The pious Starbuck is right, the more so because what Ahab seeks is not mere vengeance; the captain repudiates his own destiny, even in defiance of God's will. They think me mad; I am demoniac, I am madness maddened!(...) The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. > The third part chronicles the circumnavigation of the globe's oceans and the pursuit, slaughter, and flensing of the whales. It constitutes a monumental treatise on marine zoology, authored by a scientist enchanted by, if not enamored of, these great cetaceans. Only intermittently does the plot resurface, now narrated in the third person, so that it may cease to be the mere impressions of a boy and become the chronicle of a detached observer. Certain scenes remain indelibly etched in the imagination: the sharks ravenous for blood while the whale is flensed; the valiant Queequeg plunging underwater amidst the sharks to rescue a fallen shipmate who, like the prophet Jonah, has tumbled into the dark cavity of the whale’s cavernous head; and like a divine obstetrician, he, the cannibal, delivers his friend into new life, pulling him forth from the cranial vault. And what can be said of the enthralling Chapter 87, entitled The Grand Armada > , in which the whaleboats pursue a vast pod of cetaceans, complete with nursing dams and their calves? Equally arresting are the gams with other vessels, they too years into their voyages, aboard which one frequently encounters fanaticism and collective lunacy. After all, there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men. (...) For, lurid-like, as the slaughtered monster slues you deeper and deeper into the panics of the herd, our whole panoply of reason falls from us; we live only in a delirious gasp > . At last, one arrives at the final section, an authentic tour de force. The White Whale is finally sighted: the desperate chase commences. A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. (...) From each soft side, (...) from each bright side, the whale shed charm upon the sea > . With that very elegance, yet within a terrifying vortex, Moby Dick hurls himself upon the whaleboats, and upon Ahab in particular. Oh, Ahab, cried (the pious) Starbuck, it is not too late (...) to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him > . What hast thou done, Ahab? How couldst thou contend with the great Leviathan? How couldst thou set thyself against the will of God, rather than surrendering to Him as did the prophet? Without ever losing sight of Melville’s principal design (to illuminate the whaling industry, so little understood and appreciated), *Moby Dick* lends itself to diverse interpretative lenses, and herein lies its modernity. One fruitful avenue of inquiry is to examine the novel through the prism of how humanity has depicted animals across literature and art. A fine study by Gianni Valente ( *Dall’arca di Noè a Moby Dick* > , Edizioni Blu 2004) provides compelling avenues of reflection for assessing the work. Ever since the Bible, our relationship with the animal kingdom has been fraught with ambivalence: symbols of vice and virtue > . We are all familiar with the sinister attributes of the biblical serpent, yet in numerous other passages of the Old Testament, animals bear a redemptive image: as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God > (Psalm 42:1). Animals serve as the expression of a wondrous, vital force; thus are they chronicled by Marco Polo, celebrated in *Orlando Furioso*, and delineated in the travelogues and cartography that accompanied the Age of Discovery. Animals are likewise the object of scientific, artistic, and moral inquiry (witness Leonardo da Vinci). Indeed, all these facets (emblems of vice and virtue, wondrous vitality, empirical science, and morality) converge within *Moby Dick*. The White Whale is an extraordinary monster, the supreme beast of Creation, an emblem of enduring fortitude and eternal solitude, a cruel and terrifying presence propelled by demonic fury. Simultaneously, the great sperm whale is anatomized, dissected with fastidious precision, the subject of dispassionate scrutiny. Viewed through the perspective of our relationship with the animal realm, *Moby Dick* is an unfinished project; it demonstrates the difficulty of establishing a harmonious footing toward our fellow creatures and toward nature as a whole. We project onto the animal our own rational constructs alongside our deepest phobias; we fail to apprehend it as an other > , endowed with an autonomous essence. It is an arduous text, and in many stretches, outright tedious. Its architecture is intricate, marked by an incessant shifting of narrative voice (Ishmael, the third-person narrator, the scientist > , Melville the declamatory orator, Ahab as Melville’s tormented conscience), and by an incessant layering of disparate registers—clinical, evocative, allegorical, and picaresque. The dense fabric of quotations, whose provenances are often vexingly difficult to trace, hardly eases comprehension. The prose is, naturally, laden with the nautical lexicon of the whaling fishery; yet this is not what renders the reading so demanding. Rather, it is the syntax—frequently tortuous and punctuated in a manner that arrests the cadence of thought. It must also be said that one has to let oneself go": surrender the impulse to decipher every nuance, abandon oneself to the evocative resonance of the phrasing, and pursue the musicality of its stride. Finally, the scientific and anatomical digressions regarding the whale are so frequent and protracted as to render the reading genuinely cumbersome; a word of advice: just as one did in one's youth with *War and Peace* and *Anna Karenina*, skip the pages outright, without the slightest pang of guilt. Why read it? It is magnificent; do not labor to absorb every word—heed your own instinct.

The novel opens with the arrival in Paris of Xie Qing, an unassuming and unambitious man, a truck driver who has spent his entire life in Wenzhou, a provincial city near the East China Sea. He finds himself in France having been called to identify the body of his ex-wife, Yan Hong, who died in a car accident. The French police would like Xie Qing to diligently complete the paperwork, collect the insurance payout, and leave the country as soon as possible. Xie Qing refuses, partly because he wants to understand what really happened (his wife made a mysterious phone call before dying), and partly because he wishes to truly know Yan Hong. Ever since their separation, sudden and inexplicable to him, Xie Qing > had never managed to rid himself of the resentment of one who feels cheated . For the reader, the premise seems to herald a tale of intrigue, bordering on a thriller, enriched by the quest for a bond severed yet rooted in childhood and youth. Unfortunately, the novel takes a turn. A wealthy and powerful Chinese woman, who has taken the naive and disoriented Xie Qing under her wing, convinces him to radically change his life. > You didn't ask to go abroad, you didn't even run the risk of leaving as an illegal migrant; you had the opportunity to leave China only because your wife died. And an opportunity like this was your good fortune! (...) A man who embarks upon no enterprise has come into this world in vain . Thus, the unambitious truck driver finds himself involved first in human trafficking, and then in major real estate speculation in his hometown. He partakes, by chance and with no great merit of his own, in the “great enrichment,” built upon criminal acts, corruption, and contempt for the old China, which is nonetheless yearned for with a false nostalgia. > Like a caterpillar that, having painstakingly crawled among leaves and shrubs, turns into a butterfly, Xie Qing felt profoundly different from when he first arrived in Paris. His metamorphosis had been completed when the ship laden with illegal migrants sank in the Strait of Otranto, sacrificing dozens of lives in the prime of their youth . The tragedy, for which he is partly responsible, accelerates the process of enrichment while transforming the protagonist into a cynical businessman. What emerged was no butterfly, but a blowfly! Alongside Xie Qing’s story, and his metamorphosis, the novel recounts the life of Yan Hong. > She was solitary, friendless; outside of work she read, wrote, or simply sat there reflecting. Xie Qing had never managed to discover whether the deepest darkness or an invisible light reigned in that mysterious inner world of hers . Through her painful tribulations, we readers know that within Yan Hong lies a yearning for authentic values, constantly nurtured by the memory of her father—an upright man and revolutionary who took his own life rather than betray the trust placed in him by a high-ranking Red Army general. Splendid verses give voice to Yan Hong’s inner world, her bond with her father, and, at the same time, the strength of her values. > But one alone loved the pilgrim soul and the torture of your changing face. Bend down, then, over this grate of glowing embers and murmur to yourself softly: Love, see how you flee to the mountains and hide your weeping in a swarm of stars. This ever-renewed yearning for the authentic impels Yan Hong to volunteer for the re-education camps for “educated youth” during the Cultural Revolution; to stubbornly seek out her father’s secret documents to hand them over to the general’s children so as not to jeopardize their careers in modern China; to accept, surprised and intrigued, the offer to move to Paris (mother of all revolutions!) from a “pathetic” yet powerful club of revolutionary nostalgics; and ultimately to refuse to live in a villa, choosing instead to work as a laborer in a textile factory and later as a street vendor on the Atlantic coast. She wants to live like her compatriots, immigrants and undocumented workers! And like *Anna Karenina*, Yan Hong refuses to be the Parisian mistress of a high-ranking Chinese government official, demanding love for herself and for the son she had with him. And, like Anna, in her quest for an authentic life, she meets her death. The novel narrates two stories, divergent ways of conceiving modern China: unscrupulous enrichment and the desperate refusal of that life choice, the assertion of different, ethically potent values. It is the search for a new moral vision, one that cannot take root in the old revolutionary tenets that once underpinned China's liberation and rebirth. In the background, the author recounts the plight of undocumented migrants, how they made their way to Europe, and how they live and work on our continent. At the same time, there is a continuous reference to the old China: a tender melancholy for a society that now exists only in the imagination. What compromises the novel—which is otherwise well-written—is the excessive space granted to its seemingly more captivating thread: that of human trafficking; not because it lacks interest, but because it remains on the surface, bearing the hallmarks of crime fiction and detective narrative, without delving deeply into the stories of the protagonists: namely, the undocumented migrants themselves. It is a section that feels contrived rather than lived. Why read it? The figure of Yan Hong is compelling, fascinating.

Il romanzo è ambientato a Roma alla fine dell'Ottocento. E' ancora forte la rottura tra la Chiesa e il nuovo Stato italiano, ma la frattura si va lentamente ricomponendo nel crescente clima di affarismo e nazionalismo che pervade la classe dirigente. Di umili origini, un tempo rinchiusi nel ghetto, «all'ombra delle nostre vecchie sinagoghe, isolati in un mondo ostile», i due fratelli Moncalvo, Giacomo e Gabrio, si sono affermati nella società, seguendo però strade differenti: Giacomo ha fatto una brillante carriera in campo scientifico, ottenendo riconoscimenti accademici anche se non economici, Gabrio si è arricchito enormemente in Egitto per tornare a Roma e divenire un esponente importante dell'alta finanza. Sono diversi approcci alla vita, ereditati da Giorgio e Marianina. Il primo è il figlio di Giacomo e, come il padre, è dedito allo studio e all'insegnamento, indifferente alla ricchezza, morigerato e intriso di valori morali. Marianina, figlia di Gabrio, è ambiziosa, amante del lusso e dei salotti dell'alta borghesia, pronta a tutto pur di ascendere nella scala sociale. Domina un comune «indifferentismo» religioso. I Moncalvo si sentono ebrei più per tradizioni familiari che per fede e pratica. E' un tratto ricorrente in molta borghesia ebrea, desiderosa di integrarsi e influenzata dai valori positivistici, nazionalisti e affaristici di fine Ottocento. A pregiudicare la fragile unità familiare è la conversione di Marianina al cattolicesimo per poter sposare un esponente dell'aristocrazia "nera > , so designated for its ties to the Vatican, and thereby attain the rank of princess, entering the ranks of high society. It is her parents' design, yet it is the young woman who pursues it with a determination and awareness astonishing for a spoiled, wealthy heiress. Over the course of the novel, Marianina is described as a Lucifer," a "Sphinx > , a personality both mysterious and baffling even to her own parents. To attempt to understand her character, one must dwell on an exchange between the two cousins. Giorgio is distraught with passion: she would have given him an hour of intoxication, and he, the rigid scientist, swept away by a gale of madness, asked himself whether, to attain this hour, it was not worth sacrificing his entire life." In his presumption, Giorgio believes he is offering with his love "a lifeline" to prevent his cousin from casting herself "into an abyss of cowardice and deceit," buying "a wretched coat of arms at the price of your body and your soul." > She shrugged her shoulders. You are raving (she said). (...) My heart belongs to no one. (...) We should have grown up in the old town from which our families originate, within the old enclosure that penned in the people of our race, (...) narrow in ambitions and ideas, trusting only in the mission of our people.... Then, yes, we could have married and been happy.... Today it is impossible . The emblem of a daring feminism, Marianina is a personality of the future, a modern and liberated figure. The novel ends with Giacomo's bitter reflections on late-nineteenth-century Italian society as a whole. > Almost everywhere there was a debasement of character (thinks the austere professor), a shipwreck of convictions, a cynical contempt for the heroic virtues of renunciation and sacrifice, a frantic scramble toward ephemeral honors and sudden riches... This was likely Castelnuovo's objective in writing the story of the Moncalvos, and this moralizing stamp has led many critics to label the novel as "ideological": a juxtaposition between the heirs of Risorgimento values, by then unraveling, and the new, cynically upwardly mobile social class; all steeped in melodramatic tones (witness the figure of Giorgio) and D'Annunzian inflections (how remarkably Marianina resembles Sibilla Aleramo!). It is an engaging depiction of Giolittian Italy; moreover, the novel illustrates the Jewish bourgeoisie's inclination to embrace dominant values to the extent of turning a blind eye to the racial components of Fascism. For this alone, the book would be worth reading. The enigmatic figure of Marianina offers something more, granting us a glimpse into a complex and fascinating character. The literary style is spare, distinguishing itself from the prevailing rhetoric of late-nineteenth-century Italian literature. It is a virtue not to be underestimated. Why read it? Historically compelling, with a magnificent portrayal of Marianina.

In the neighborhood of Belleville lives the Malaussène tribe, and with them a myriad of characters. Belleville is a Parisian periphery, ravaged by the postmodernist manias of architects, the stupidity of politicians, and the greed of speculators; but it is also a magical place, a sort of Sherwood Forest, where Robin Hood is Benjamin Malaussène and the Sheriff is embodied by those who seek to evict long-standing tenants to demolish the old buildings and erect new ones for corporate offices and the wealthy bourgeoisie. > If one day you ask me what happiness looks like, and you will ask me, I will answer: like here In Belleville, where it is possible to screen the last film in the history of cinema (a film destined to be destroyed afterward) in a forgotten theater, where it is possible to tattoo all the streets of Belleville onto a person's body as a living testament to the neighborhood. In Belleville there is also an illusionist, who makes you see things that are not there; in Belleville > angels, who at times grow bored, are drawn toward us by the warmth and the surging of feelings and are personified in a detective nun. The novel features countless characters and a wealth of intertwining events: murders, disappearances, love affairs, bizarre twists of fate, persecutions. At the center, hero-like, stands Benjamin Malaussène, a fixed point in a magic lantern, in a kaleidoscope full of lights and illusions. There is no real plot, and the novel is difficult to follow. I must confess that I was unable to read it to the end, having lost my way among so many characters and so many words. Yet perhaps this was the author's very purpose: to demonstrate that no rationality governs existence, and that everything unfolds along a tenuous boundary between reality and imagination. Why not read it? Quite frankly, it is deeply muddled and verbose.

"I wonder: is there, in the listener, / a place where my voice may rest? / A harpoon, / tiny and concealed, / to hold memory fast before it scatters." (from Francesca Mannocchi, “The Harpoon of Memory,” from the collection *Crescere, La Guerra*, 2026). Is it possible to anchor ourselves to something within, so as not to forget "the particles of blood-soaked dust and the sickly-sweet smell of decay exhaled by unravelling lives and desertified soils"? Is it right to "live within the serene depths of the sea, where cries and weapons cannot be heard, and the stench of death does not reach"? Amal, the protagonist, lives between these two sides of consciousness: a dilemma not of her choosing, yet one that ensnares her entire life. She was born into a happy family, in a Palestine glowing with olive trees and vibrant hues: an ancient society that weathered the various empires that dominated it, forever anchoring itself to the land, its genealogies, and its sweet, centuries-old narratives. "Amal with the long vowel means hopes, dreams, (...) we place all our hopes in you." So her father told her when Amal was still a child, but he added: "we come from the land, we give our love and toil for it, and it feeds us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a sense, it owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to it." Amal's life is punctuated by the tragic milestones of post-WWII Palestinian history: the Nakba (the catastrophe) of 1948, with the forced exodus of 700,000 Palestinians and the Jenin refugee camp, where up to 50,000 people were interned, and where Amal’s family was forced to live in the narrative; the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, when several thousand Palestinians were slaughtered by Lebanese Phalangists under the compliant gaze of the Israelis, and where Amal lost her husband and her brother's family; the Second Intifada in 2002, when Israeli troops assaulted Jenin, massacring hundreds of civilians, and where Amal met her death. After the Nakba, Amal had the opportunity to go to the United States on a scholarship, resigning herself to being called "'Amy', Amal without the hope, (...) a word drained of all meaning. A woman hollowed out of her past." In her heart dwell the profound sentiments of longing and abandonment: longing for "the sun that embraced everything it touched while the sumptuous aroma of lamb and cumin dispelled anguish, (...) the air filled with joyous sounds from people drunk on the fruit of trees that had survived across centuries, piercing the fog of exile"; abandonment, through the estrangement from her brother Yousef and her childhood friend Huba, the inability to understand why her mother had never embraced her as other mothers did, and the yearning to see her missing father once more: "I closed my eyes and kept them that way for as long as I could, opening them only as much as was necessary to banish the images from my mind." Amal returns to Palestine, reunites with her brother, and reclaims the familiar sights, sounds, and colors of her people. She falls in love with Majid, marries him, and becomes pregnant. Everything is suffused with Love and a serene anticipation. This is mere months before the 1982 massacre, preceded by the Israeli army's siege of Beirut. As an American citizen, Amal can return to the United States, while her husband remains behind in Lebanon to lend his medical skills to hospitals in critical need; and it is there that Majid meets his death. Amal, once again "Amy," gives birth to a daughter. The Palestinian tragedy recedes once more into memory, yet it seeps deep into Amal's heart, barring her from bestowing Love upon her child. "God forgive me, the more she grew, the more I feared being close to her, touching her. I was afraid of passing on to her my icy hardness, that my touch might have hardened her, that it would be the wrong complement to her soft, unconditional tenderness. So, I fulfilled the duties of motherhood, containing the ardor of my love behind the cold walls of fear and long hours of work." Only a feminine sensibility could grasp the sheer depth of pain inflicted upon a refugee's heart by the loss of what is gone: one's homeland, one's culture, and one's loved ones. It is no coincidence that the author titles the final section *Nihaya* and *Bidaya*, with the seemingly contradictory subtitle "an end and a beginning." In Arabic, *Nihaya* means "end," and Amal knows that in returning to Jenin in 2002 she is going to meet her death, for this is her destiny, foretold by her father. *Bidaya* in Arabic means "the beginning of a story." During the Israeli siege of Jenin, "I kept my daughter sheltered in a dream entirely my own, falling in love with her as though I had just given birth to her anew. We spoke for nine days, dismantling the unspoken words of a lifetime. As death rained from the sky and bullets struck the outer walls of the house, Sara and I laid bare the grief and bitterness each of us held so dear, finding our shared sorrow for Majid despite, or perhaps because of, the terror we felt." And so, as the poet sang: "if in the twilight of memory we / should meet once more, / we shall speak together again / and you shall sing / to me a deeper song. / And if our hands should meet / in another dream, we / shall build another tower in the sky." The writer has struck a difficult balance between Grand History and the "small" stories of the human beings who are simultaneously its protagonists and its victims. We traverse the tragic fate of the Palestinian people, horrified and at once embarrassed as Europeans. The author does not shrink when forced to delve into the horrors of persecution; she does so almost like a historian, albeit an engaged one, and when she fears losing composure, she relies on the pen of a great journalist like Robert Fisk, who penned monumental reportage in his *Pity the Nation* (*The Martyrdom of a Nation*). Beside the dramatic events of "Grand History" lies the world of emotion: on one hand, that which is universal and eternal (such as the bond between mother and daughter); on the other, how such emotions are shattered by events unfolding beyond the pale of fundamental human relationships. Horror induces indifference in those who can keep their distance; for those trapped within it, however, grief leads to emotional desiccation, to a feeling of incapacity to bestow Love, to the dread of passing on one's own barrenness—the necessary armor—to someone untainted by it. And yet, one cannot withhold the truth from those one loves, for sparing the beloved means betraying them. In the relationship between Amal and Sara, one senses the author's own fraught experience, confronted with the dilemma of whether to shelter her daughter or make her part of her people's destiny. Within such an intense narrative, the father's friendship with an Israeli and Amal's reunion with her brother—abducted as a young boy and adopted by a Jewish family—feel redundant. Did the author wish to grant humanity to the "enemy"? Eighty years of war have inflicted suffering upon the Israeli people as well: one need only think of David Grossman's *To the End of the Land* (see the review on this site), but let each people bear the duty of mourning their own fate. The prose reflects the balance of the narrative. Shifting deftly from passages of intense lyricism to analyses of remarkable psychological depth, the language is rich in cadence, interweaving the musicality of Arabic with the resonance of English. The lexicon is played like a piano keyboard, with a harmonious and evocative command of words, particularly verbs—words consistently woven into elegant, fluid grammatical structures. It would be fascinating to know the linguistic gestation of this novel, especially considering the author's scientific background and how she came to write this book spurred by a surge of indignation—a cry that lends vigor to the entire narrative. If one truly feels something within, one can become a great writer without being one by profession. It is a welcome sign of hope, and a lesson for many Western—and Italian—authors! Why read it? It is a masterpiece, a stinging slap in the face to our timid and hypocritical selves.

A teacher who has always led a quiet, monotonous life is thrown into turmoil by the murder of a young woman who had been staying with him for several months. One evening, in fact, the protagonist finds himself home alone, as his wife has gone out to play cards with friends. The girl returns home, gives an absent-minded greeting, and goes straight to her room. In the morning, she is found dead. The suspicions of the police, as well as those of the neighborhood, turn immediately toward the man. The protagonist sees his world collapse; he feels ostracized by the community, whose members felt bolstered listening to the pastor's words, writes Simenon: > they felt they were the law, they were justice, every new sentence uttered over their heads made them stronger, while Ashby, in their midst, grew weaker and more isolated . The police also delve into the protagonist’s past, discovering that his father was a drunkard who squandered the family fortune before committing suicide. This inquiry casts the protagonist back to the anguish of his youth—to the prospect, that is, of becoming like his father: > what struck him was not so much this or that particular vice, a definite danger; what drew him was something vague, belonging to certain quarters of big cities, to certain streets, certain lights, even certain smells . The fear of being inexorably drawn toward vice and depravity had driven him to seek security, peace, and order, to the point of marrying a woman for whom friendship prevailed over passion. Feeling unjustly accused, abandoned by friends and community alike, along with the resurfacing of his past, are elements that bring this fatal attraction back into the open, shattering the shell the protagonist had fashioned for himself. Inexorably, as if driven by a fateful force, the protagonist murders a young woman, committing the very crime of which he had been falsely accused. This is only ostensibly a detective story. In truth, Simenon masterfully outlines the falsehood of life within a hypocritical community that ambiguously casts out one of its members merely because he is suspected of a crime. To everyone, it seems only natural that Ashby had become infatuated with the girl and killed her in a fit of murderous passion. Yet Simenon’s skill also lies in crafting a protagonist torn between two opposing forces: social order and the lure of lust and violence. When the rules of social coexistence—in which the protagonist believed and which had served as a bulwark against his own impulses—dissolve and reveal their utter vacuity, he gives free rein to his true inclinations. A profoundly relevant theme is thus explored: the relationship between communal ties and the complexity of individual feelings and dispositions. The crime is nothing more than the catalyst for a polarity rooted both within society (solidarity versus hypocrisy and confinement) and within the individual (the pursuit of peace and stability versus the urge toward transgression).

The protagonist is a renowned man of letters. > He had never known idleness, never the carefree negligence of youth . He had led > a life of self-conquest and of "in spite of all," a harsh, tenacious, and temperate life, which he had shaped into a symbol of a delicate heroism commensurate with the times . Yet deep within him there had always been an inner restlessness, “a strange expansion of the soul,” channeled by an unyielding daily discipline toward ideal perfection in art and the representation of elevated moral values. Now in his sixties, at the pinnacle of his fame, during a walk through the city streets he happens upon a foreigner whose gypsy-like, exotic features leave a deep impression on him, stirring within him > a youthful thirst for distant lands, a longing so intense, so new, or at least so long set aside and unlearned... he questioned his heavy, weary heart to discover whether a new enthusiasm, a new perturbation, a belated adventure of the sensibilities might still be in store for the indolent traveler . It is therefore not merely a desire to travel, but a dream-like vision of > all the wonders and horrors of the multiform terrestrial globe . With this “enigmatic desire,” his destination could only be Venice, > the flattering beauty, the city, half fairy-tale, half foreigner’s trap, in whose miasmas art once bloomed in voluptuous profusion, and which inspired musicians with lulling, caressingly languorous notes . He takes up lodging in an elegant hotel, frequented by the wealthy and variegated bourgeoisie of early twentieth-century Europe. He spends his days contemplating the sea, visiting “on warm nights” St. Mark’s Square and the *calli* of that marvelous city. > The pleasantly constant rhythm of that existence had already held him in its thrall, the soft and luxurious sweetness of that way of life had swiftly seduced him . When, as he lost himself in the “vast expanses of the sea,” > the horizontal line that marked the boundary of the earth was suddenly intersected by a human figure... he saw the beautiful boy pass before him on the sand and from that moment > mind and heart were intoxicated; the demon that delights in trampling human reason and dignity guided his steps . He, an aging man, a man of letters acclaimed for his classicism and for the rigorous rules of his art, becomes infatuated with, and ultimately falls in love with, the splendid youth, and > his soul savored the lust and the frenzy of dissolution . After all, > what value could he still ascribe to art and virtue, faced with the advantages of chaos? Falling in love is accompanied by the draining of energy in an already frail body, by “an ever more violent anguish,” by a “sense of the absence of any way out and of all hope”: he moves toward a voluptuous death. Before the expanse of the sea and the beloved boy gazing at the horizon, “an absolutely isolated and unrelated figure,” the protagonist lets himself die, as if absorbed in a deep slumber, “hovering into an immensity full of promise.” The novella, clearly autobiographical, can be interpreted in three distinct ways. The first interpretive key is the simplest. An elderly gentleman discovers, at the end of his life, his own homosexual orientation, perpetually repressed to conform to narrow-minded bourgeois norms. The author seems intent on lending this revelation the sense of a moral dissolution, yet in truth the protagonist willingly lets himself be carried away by passion, seeing it even as a liberation. > Joy, surprise, admiration could openly depict themselves there when his gaze met... the beloved image . And he was overcome by the desire > to kiss the sweet lips of his shadow, coquettish, curious and faintly anguished, seduced and seducing . It is an explicitly erotic and sexual desire. The second interpretive key, conversely, regards the novella as a spiritual construct, a sort of meditation on the author’s artistic journey. We will never know whether Thomas Mann was homosexual, but it is clear that the dichotomy of “reflection and restlessness,” “order and eros,” constituted the undercurrent that gave life to a literary oeuvre outwardly nestled within the riverbed of the typical bourgeois novel. In this sense, the boy embodies this contradiction between classical beauty and decadent disorder: the failure of that civilizing mission (we are, after all, on the eve of the First World War) which the writer entrusted to Germany. Yet this was also a phase in which the bourgeois novel was opening itself to new ventures, searching for innovative forms capable of narrating the European conscience, now in crisis. > The face, pale and gracefully impenetrable, framed by ringlets of honey-colored hair, with its straight-descending nose, charming mouth, and expression of sweet and divine gravity, recalled Greek sculptures of the golden age , but > care had been taken never to touch with scissors his beautiful hair, which curled over his forehead, above his ears, and even more thickly at the nape of his neck . And finally, the last interpretive strand, undoubtedly the most complex, is the oneiric, composed of dreams and imagery. Here the author abandons himself to fantastical visions, which find their transposition into reality through the description of Venice. And what if Venice were the synthesis of these three interpretive strands? Voluptuous decay, forms both classical and unbound at once, dreamlike wonders—these are the traits that make the city the mirror of the poet’s disheveled soul. Venice is not merely a background context, but the dominant protagonist of the narrative. Why read it? It is magnificent, above all for its writing—alluring, baroque, multiform, yet wholly consistent with the novella’s aims and its overarching narrative design. A true masterpiece!

I read Recami’s *La Casa di Ringhiera* in one breath (see review on this site), finding it one of the finest noirs in the vast panorama of Italian literature: the felicitous conjunction of a comedy of manners with the pacing typical of the best detective fiction. That is why, as soon as I read the review of *Il mostro del Casoretto*, I rushed out to buy it, anticipating the pleasure I had experienced with *La Casa di Ringhiera*. Perhaps because my expectations were so high, the disappointment proved all the more painful. The book is a collection of short stories which, with the exception of the last, feature the pensioner Amedeo Consonni, the grandfatherly detective. In the first story, *Il mostro del Casoretto*, Consonni is accused of sexually molesting a young girl; to punish him, the child’s relatives lock him in an abandoned farmhouse to make him pay. Consonni manages to break free, but is persuaded by Angela—whom we discover to be his aging sweetheart—to return to the scene of his captivity so the police can catch his tormentors red-handed. It is a flimsy plot, relying on salacious situations rather than narrative twists and social atmosphere. The second story, *Chi ha pane non ha denti, chi ha denti non ha pane*, is undoubtedly the most pleasant of the collection. Here we find the return of several characters and situations already familiar from *La Casa di Ringhiera*: Mr. De Angelis holds a grudge against a neighbor’s dog that keeps urinating on the wheels of his BMW, and decides to lock the animal inside an abandoned cold-storage unit in the building’s basement. It will be Gianmarco and Margherita, two children from the tenement, who inadvertently free the little dog, sparing De Angelis an indictment for pet theft and animal cruelty. It is a light and wry tale, in which Consonni returns to being the kindly grandfather figure. Later, perhaps at a loss for how to further develop the world of the tenement, Recami departs from the Lombard setting, moving the stories to Florence and Sardinia, with Consonni cast as the victim of misunderstandings. It is pointless to dwell on these stories. The verdict cannot be anything but harsh. The stories lack both plot and character development. Consonni emerges reduced to the figure of a lecherous, rather foolish old man who takes Viagra to engage in sexual intercourse, with the sole result of being caught in his underpants with an erect male member (why insist on such vulgarities?). His girlfriend Angela is a stout woman still in pursuit of sex, and the relationship between Amedeo and the lady bears none of the grace found in the poems of an elderly Ungaretti, still capable of falling in love: > you appeared at the doorway/in a red dress(...) it was on a Monday/to hold hands/and speak happily/no refuge was found/save in a sad garden/of the convulsive city . (September 12, 1966, from the collection *Ungà 1966-1968*). How difficult it is to chronicle the affections and dreams of us old folk! Why read it? It is a disappointment.

The novel unfolds in London over the course of a single day, in the years immediately following the First World War: for most of the time, the characters move, reflect, and dream in the streets and parks of the British capital, readily recognizable locations. One’s mind immediately turns to Joyce’s *Ulysses*, a comparison valid only due to the "anti-novel" nature of Woolf’s book, just as with that of the Irish writer. While the latter intends to write an "Homeric poem"—and thus a mythic one—grounded upon a fiercely realistic premise (Dublin and its inhabitants are flesh and blood before Bloom), Woolf operates within a stream of consciousness in an interior space and time, transcending external context, present, and past. As the writer remarked in a 1919 essay > life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end . (from the introduction by Sergio Perosa, Oscar Mondadori Edition, 1979). It is > a magical suspense like that of a swimmer before diving into the deep, bright sea beneath him, with waves threatening to break, yet gently parting only the surface, stirring it, hiding and covering it as if spreading pearls over water lilies. We should not expect a plot; we must instead look for flashes of suggestion and poetry within a story that is simple, mundane, and intense all at once, because it speaks of the recognition of oneself. There is a first core, consisting of Clarissa Dalloway, an English noblewoman in her fifties, well-married with offspring, who awaits the return of an old flame from India. Is it the moment to reflect on her past, on missed opportunities? Only in part; in truth, Clarissa, entirely absorbed in her role, is particularly disturbed that her husband has left her at home to attend Lady Bruton's renowned gatherings. Walking through London’s noisy and crowded streets—so deeply loved by her for that very reason—Clarissa > felt the oddest sense of being invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, being Mrs. Dalloway, not even Clarissa any more, only Mrs. Richard Dalloway . In those moments, a contradictory feeling overcomes her: of estrangement from life and, at the same time, immersion in it, in its background noise without the filter of imagination and poetry: in this frame of mind, locked within her own consciousness in a baffling autism, Clarissa recognizes herself, her prosaic contentment in a solid and socially accepted life. Ultimately, what has she suffered? The absence of an erstwhile presumed lover. Far more dramatic is the second core, unfortunately merely sketched out. It is the tale of Septimus’s madness and the desperate love of his wife, Rezia. The man fought in the First World War, witnessed massacres, was present at the death of his closest friend. He suffered profoundly; what point is there in living on? > Rezia put on her hat, and ran through fields of wheat, where could it ever be?, up a hill, somewhere near the sea, for ships could be seen, gulls and butterflies; and they were sitting on the top of a cliff, (...) and the caress of the sea, which seemed to cradle them in the hollow of a shell, and murmured in her ear; and she lay upon the beach, strewn it seemed to her she was, like flowers scattered over a grave. He is dead, she said, smiling at the poor old woman watching over her . The narrative style is highly poetic and constitutes the novel's defining feature. Plot and characters dissolve within consciousness, serving merely as an occasion for a richly evocative prose, abundant in metaphors and heavily reliant on reverie. Woolf fails to give realistic depth to the narrative, and whenever she abandons the poetic style, she easily lapses into melodrama, as in the cited conclusion of Rezia’s ravings. The writer rejects involvement; she pursues, regrettably, philosophical and psychological aims prevalent in her time, seeking detachment from her characters and their story, and in doing so, she pulverizes and renders sterile the entire narrative. Why not read it? Boring, prolix, inconclusive.

*Il Mulino del Po* is defined by its author as a historical novel, chronicling the fortunes of a family of millers from Ferrara between 1815 and the First World War. Bacchelli’s aim is to narrate the history of Italy from the perspective of the humble, > to win for poetry a century, a moment of the mighty humility of the common people, civilized in Italy with a civilization of their own, at times evasive and secret, yet always unmistakable and never crushed by so great, so illustrious, and yet so heavy a burden of history . In the first volume, *Dio ti salvi*, Lazzaro Scacerni finds himself, despite himself, swept up in the great rout of Napoleon's army in Russia. During the disastrous retreat, a dying Italian officer reveals how to recover a cache of precious sacred objects looted from the churches of Ferrara during the Jacobin era. Having returned to Italy, Scacerni uses the proceeds from selling these objects to build a watermill, the *San Michele*, thus becoming a miller of the Po. Until 1860, the Po served as the border between the Papal States and Austria, a hotbed of smuggling frequented by thieves and scoundrels. Scacerni is blackmailed by a fence and gang leader, the Raguseo, to whom he had sold the precious items. Just as he resolves to kill the Raguseo, the latter is murdered. Scacerni saves both himself and his soul. > The question arose explicitly during the long, brooding hours beside the millstones of white and yellow flour, as he reflected on all that God had wrought to save him: and why did He do it? Yet he understood there was no answer, save in an act of grace . The second volume, *La miseria viene in barca*, centers on Giuseppe—nicknamed Coniglio Mannaro—son of Lazzaro, and Cecilia, daughter of the Matto di Paneparso, another Po miller. On a stormy day, Cecilia’s mill is swept away by the tumultuous current and saved by Lazzaro, who virtually takes the girl in as his daughter. Coniglio Mannaro rejects his father’s trade and, greedy for money, embarks on a career as a broker, often by dishonest and unscrupulous means. Cecilia, by contrast, is rugged, wild, and upright, devoted to the mills and the Po. Coniglio Mannaro tricks Cecilia into marriage, and she bears him seven children. The two spouses remain forever estranged, deeply divided by their values and allegiances: Cecilia bound to the river and the children, Giuseppe to the land and to money. Above all, she is revolted by her husband’s dishonesty in personal relationships and business dealings. But retribution > would come from the river; of this she was certain, born as she was in a land where everything—the land itself, good and evil alike—was given and taken away by the river, so that river and fortune were one and the same . Indeed, during the great flood of 1872 (among the book’s most gripping pages), Coniglio Mannaro loses his lands, swallowed forever by the waters of the great river. In a dramatic scene, amid the height of the storm, Cecilia rescues her husband, who, driven mad, had lingered on the embankment and was about to be swept away by the raging waters. In the third volume, *Mondo vecchio sempre nuovo*, Cecilia, battling poverty and hunger, is forced to send two of her daughters into domestic service. One of them, the fair and virtuous Berta, goes to work for a peasant family, where a young man, Orbino, has long been in love with her. In a magnificent chapter, *I giorni della ghirlanda*, which ought to be read in every school, Bacchelli retraces the cycle of rural life throughout the year up to the harvest festival. These pages reveal the author’s profound love for the countryside and the life of the peasantry. Yet alongside the passage of the seasons, the love between Berta and Orbino matures—a modest, well-guarded love, for the two youths have resolved to "fare la prova" (as consummating love before marriage was called back then) only once their union has been sanctioned by their families. A curse weighs upon the destiny of the Scacernis, born of an original sin. It is an era of struggle in the Ferrarese countryside between landowners and the peasant league. Cecilia sides with the masters, solely because she is a woman of the river, bound to tradition, who refuses to take orders from the peasants. Not only must the two young lovers part, but the hatred toward the Scacernis leads to slander against Berta to such a degree that, in a moment of madness, her brother murders Orbino. As in a Greek tragedy, on the banks of the Po, one witnesses the ritual purification of the poor youth's corpse by his unconsummated, chaste bride. For Bacchelli, this is a metaphor for life and death. > The world is no more than misfortune, against which rebelling is even more futile than suffering. To be born is nothing other than to come here to die, as vain as the flowing of the river.... like the river giving up corpses, man's hour dissolves into the time that bears it. There hope falters, charity dies, faith is lost . Just as the saga of the Scacerni family comes to a tragic close, so too ends the history of the mills of the Po, supplanted by steam mills. And with them dissolves the hope of Bacchelli the man and of his world, that of the peasantry. > A family, a people, a land: I did not invent them, I came upon them.... he who has told their tale suddenly feels the void . It is a great book, open to multiple readings. First and foremost, there are the great river and the Ferrarese landscape. This is the most compelling aspect, not merely as a historical testimony, but for the author's ability to depict both the world of the waters and that of the peasantry. Secondly, Bacchelli creates an expansive historical fresco of Italian history, grounded in the contrast between the waning values of the Risorgimento and the resilience of the Italian people—a strength the author traces back to the Catholic faith. And here Bacchelli’s nostalgia emerges unmistakably for a world that modernity has weakened, engulfed, and radically altered: that temporal realm of the popes, which may have been hypocritical, antiquated, and rife with privilege, yet allowed poor folk to survive without being crushed by an extortionate landlord, by taxes, and by the trade union leagues themselves, which the author sharply criticizes. Finally, there is the religious theme: God’s mercy is mysterious, yet it unfailingly operates to grant the righteous their due. Why read it? Reading the work in its entirety is very heavy going, as Bacchelli struggles to sustain the narrative momentum; nevertheless, certain passages, particularly those bound to the natural environment, are strikingly beautiful and insightful. It is best read as a curated selection of excerpts.

This is a short story, divided into three chapters. In the first, the corpse is discovered and, as in classic detective fiction, the inspector arrives with his assistant. The author seems to take pleasure in reconstructing the dynamics, well-tested by crime literature, between the seasoned superior and the young officer. From the outset, however, certain peculiarities emerge. The inspector claims to have arrived too late to save the victim (did he know then that he was about to be killed?), who deserved, according to the inspector, to be murdered, being a blackmailer who had numerous affairs with women. Solving the case is difficult, he then adds, “as there are five hundred men, and other women, with a motive.” It must be said that the reader is left disoriented by the first chapter, sensing something unusual yet not quite able to grasp the direction of the story. The second chapter opens receptive to any development. The inspector visits the alleged killer’s house (and, tellingly, goes alone, without his assistant), and here the narrative turns into a continuous oscillation between past and present. The inspector addresses the suspect, who does not reply, reminding him of bygone events: the man had once been in love with a woman who ultimately chose the victim over him because he was wealthy and powerful. The story now abandons the order and rationality of a detective tale, increasingly becoming a sequence of images from the inspector’s mind. The memory of his life resurfaces: > a succession of images drifted through his mind, of days and nights of great passion, tenderness, and continuous peace. He forgot the days during which he had watched the slow disintegration of his own personality and corruption; he even forgot that he was Detective Inspector Mason of Scotland Yard . Yet the bond between past and present is like a mirror in which one is reflected, and through which one can view the present from the past and vice versa. At this point, the mystery grips the reader, and, as in all detective novels, the solution is simple: the inspector is the murderer. One realizes that the second chapter has conveyed the inspector’s thoughts, and that the entire sequence lasted only a few minutes. The third chapter details the mechanics of the crime as well as the evidence that pins down the murderer. A brief yet fascinating story, albeit a challenging read. First of all, the theme of reality’s ambiguity emerges, which only in death finds a consistency beyond imagination: “after all, everything was reduced to a biological fact.” Secondly, the story is a display of virtuosity, both in terms of narrative structure—capable of generating disorientation and suspense in the reader—and in its writing technique. The author readily resorts to idioms and vocabulary belonging to colloquial speech, which does not always make the text immediately accessible: this contributes to the mysterious allure of the story. Why read it? To appreciate the author’s narrative technique.

To comprehend this literary "gem," one must return to an earlier novel by the author: *Aniko*, a review of which can be read on this site. Aniko has abandoned her people, the Nenets, to live far away, leaving behind Aleska, her childhood companion, and her father, Petko. The tale begins with the decision of Aleska’s mother to find a wife for her son. > Her husband had died, (...) yet the hearth had not gone out after the master's departure. There remained another task to accomplish (...): to engender a living current that would not scatter or dry up like a puddle in spring, but would continue to flow like a river within its banks. At twenty-six, her son was not yet a true man. (...) He had to be married at all costs.  Aleska's heart, however, is weighed down by his love for Aniko. If as a child he felt > like a defenseless fledgling with wings not yet formed , now he is > a spiteful, wounded vulture. He felt like a bird of prey that, spreading the talons of self-regard, leans against the deaf wall of life without anyone being able to understand his sorrow. At night he dreams of Ilne (as Aniko is called in the book), of her seductive smile, and he possesses her. (...) When he realizes that it is merely a dream and not reality, he is consumed by longing. Longing is like a black, hairy spider. The touch of its legs poisons the soul. The novel recounts Aleska's liberation from awaiting Aniko's return, and it does so within a society—that of the Nenets—now in dissolution, yet still anchored to old values, to the stubborn determination to preserve its own culture. At the center of this world lies the hearth, the fire kept perpetually alight—the woman's duty and prestige; hers is the task of bearing and raising children, hers the burden of preserving and passing on Nenets culture. Hence arises the enormity, for the old mother and the entire community, of a man who refuses to marry, obstinately bound to a "distant" love. The two narrative planes, the individual and the collective, overlap, alternating oneiric moments with choral tales. In the dream, > Ilne stared at him and smiled. She was no longer the same Ilne who had invited him to follow her. A sly, knowing smile, which he had never seen on her face and which for some reason unsettled him, never left her lips. (...) He realized that he wanted to wipe that smile from her face; (...) hers was an invitation to a game of love that was nothing but an illusion. If Aniko turns into a painful remembrance before fading from Aleska's heart, with the surrender of her sledges old Petko declares before the community that Aniko will never return; there is no need to keep the dowry, > ten abandoned sledges (...), like orphans, guilty before men and life. (...) The chum was silent, as though immersed in sleep. Yet the young man knew that, motionless, the two women (the mother and the young bride) awaited him, kneeling before the fire. (...) Parting the tent behind his shoulders with a wide gesture, he entered. Thus enters a boy who has become a man. There is a hidden protagonist, and it is Aniko. She appears suddenly, unexpected, with a sort of declaration of love in which Nerkagi seems no longer able to restrain her own "I," in a novel where the narrator is "omniscient." > I love old trees, says Aniko, (...) I love them for all the summers gone by, for the mystery of life they conceal, for the murmur of the leaves that might be mistaken for a song or a lament, a confession or a tale. Ancient trees resemble the old. And it would be wonderful to be certain that they, indeed, are still the keepers of that Golden word of truth, forgotten by mankind heaven knows when. Moreover, in this deceptively simple narrative—much as Dante stands behind the figures of the *Commedia*—there are certain characters behind whom Nerkagi conceals herself. To be sure, one of these is Aleska's mother, the emblem of a stubborn attachment to tradition; yet there is another figure, so delicate as to seem superfluous to the plot. It is the young bride rejected by Aleska, reverent toward the mystery of her husband's soul. Through a splendid simile, Nerkagi thus sings the sorrowful and resigned plight of an unreceived bride: > the girl's world was like that of a tiny flower blossomed by the will of fate at the bottom of a ravine, where the rays of the sun penetrate only in the early morning and the hostile stones exude cold. Covered in a slimy moss, they emit a foul stench and envy the beauty and sweetness of the flower's petals, blind to the light that its corolla radiates into the darkness. I have remained silent for too many years, the author confesses, and now it is time for the moss to turn white. The style is a gentle flow of words, at times elegiac, at others lyrical, rich in similes drawn from the natural world, from trees and animals; a seemingly motionless nature that contrasts with the shifts in the Nenets world and the enigmas of the human soul. Such is the sweetness of the prose that a kind of metamorphosis takes place within the reader, allowing one to measure oneself against the mystery without deciphering it. Why read it? Outside of time and space, it is a hymn to our human condition.