Books & Reviews Archive

It is the second book of the Bandini saga. While the first book still revolves around the theme of the Italian family, rendered in a realistic style lacking in evocative resonance, this novel effectively abandons ethnic and folkloric references to chronicle the coming of age of an eighteen-year-old youth who reads voraciously and lives primarily through imagination and fantasy. The Italian famil

We are in the Rome of the 1970s and '80s, in an Italy stepping into the consumer society and traversed by terrorism and subversive plots. A few youths from the Roman outskirts decide to > assert undeniably a dominion destined to last forever over the Old Whore . From drifters, they become a gang and turn into the masters of Rome: they are the famous Banda della Magliana. What gives the group

The novel is set in Russia between 1987 and 1991, during the Mikhail Gorbachev years, amid those turbulent events that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December of that same year. What unfolded was > a carpet woven of countless threads , a sort of Rubik's cube across which fingers chase > the colored squares that never click into the right place. To untangle this knot, without su

The book is by an Albanian writer who writes in Italian. In the first part of the novel, the author retraces the history of her family in a small mountain village. It is a story of female characters, and in particular of the author’s grandmother: Saba. > It is a life caught in the boundless web of silence of the mountain. Disturbed only by the murmuring of trees stirred by the wind. People w

> I feel as though I have lost myself in an underground cave full of perilous crevices and labyrinthine hollows unknown to me, so many chasms into which I might slip. Questo mi succede adesso, quando guardo avanti e mi accorgo che non cʼè più strada, e allora mi volto indietro e vedo che di strada non ce nʼè neanche lì . The protagonist, the first-person narrator, is now an elderly woman living

The novel chronicles the fortunes of Julien Sorel: the son of a carpenter, he manages through his own drive and intellect to climb the social ladder, first within the provincial bourgeoisie and subsequently among the Parisian aristocracy. He is engaged as a tutor to the Mayor’s children, and soon embarks on an affair with the Mayor’s wife. He then pursues his studies in a seminary and, through a

The novel is set between 1838 and 1848 in Savoyard Turin, poised between the Restoration and Risorgimento values, between conservatism and the desire for change, not least economic. In those years, Great Britain—and London in particular—served as a touchstone for technological innovation, the growth of trade and manufacturing, and the dissemination of new ideas, which also encompassed the conditio