Books & Reviews Archive

> *La Muntagna* had awakened that morning. A dense black cloud of ash loomed over the city, enveloping it. (...) The volcanic sand fell relentlessly, forming a crunching carpet on the ground and sliding off open umbrellas... E as the sky is darkened by the ashes of Mount Etna, so Vice Questore Guarrasi must unravel the mystery of an unknown woman found mummified in a dumbwaiter of a villa on the

Mikami works in the police department of a provincial city, designated generically by the author as D. After many years spent in criminal investigation, Mikami has been transferred to administrative management, put in charge of the press office. Alongside his new post, two events occur that form the cornerstones of the entire story. A visit from Tokyo by the police chief is scheduled to commemorat

*Separate Flights* is part of a short-story collection centered on a single theme: the disintegration of marital relationships within the nuclear family, now typical of the middle class. One need only dwell on the short story that lends its title to the entire volume to grasp the author’s literary traits and flee, as quickly as possible, from the tedious repetitiveness of the situations, characte

Dino Buzzati is one of the most fascinating Italian writers of the second half of the twentieth century: suspended between the fantastical and realism, he captured the existential anguish of contemporary man, the absence of hope alongside the intense desire to escape into a better world, beyond reality; he is the Kafka and the Philip Dick of our literature, so often prosaic and lyrical. A great wr

The novel is set in Turin, during these years of economic crisis and social malaise. Elisabetta, who wants to be called Bet, is the first-person narrator of a neorealist story with a happy ending. > We were a family like any other, neither too loud nor too quiet, neither rich nor poor, a working-class family like those in our building and those in the buildings next door : a normal family, unt

Anyone expecting the China routinely churned out by the mass media—whether to disparage or exalt it—will be disappointed. This novel is set in Shanghai ( > an epicurean metropolis that produced euphoric froth, a new generation of human beings, and was steeped, throughout its streets and alleys, in a frivolous, mournful, and mysterious atmosphere ), but the story could just as easily unfold in N

*Shantaram* is a book of roughly 1,200 pages and, in some reviews, has even been compared to *War and Peace*. In reality, it is a bloated potboiler, an implausible yarn that blends every Western stereotype about India with that inevitable refrain claiming economic backwardness should be celebrated as cultural authenticity. The trouble is that the novel—written, it must be said, in excellent Engl

Roberto and Emma come from two different backgrounds: Roberto is a former carabiniere who spent years working undercover within criminal organizations; Emma is an ex-actress, a single mother to a twelve-year-old boy. Their paths cross because they are seeing the same psychiatrist; both need to free themselves > from thoughts or memories. When they arrive, one must observe them with detachment

The novel opens with a paradoxical and amusing scene: an eccentric publisher summons his authors to a Parisian café for a "live reading" of their manuscripts. He read them while "expressing himself": > he was capable of biting his tongue, gnashing his teeth, whistling... (...) his lips were in perpetual motion, in a continuous slaughter, (...) even his nose played a role during these readings, (

Roger Casement was born in 1864, in the century of the West’s conquest of the world—of that which styled itself as civilization. And the young Roger believes firmly in this civilizing and adventurous spirit, to the point of deciding to go to the Congo, then a land of Belgian conquest. Yet there, reality confronts him in a profoundly different way: > those poor people whipped, mutilated, those

Asako works for a company specializing in wedding ceremonies. Her father's illness forces her to leave a well-paying job to devote herself to the family kimono shop. > She had been intimately familiar with kimonos since childhood, but nowadays almost no one wears them, except for the most important ceremonies. An anachronistic folklore, destined in any case for decline, a luxury permitted only t

Between 1845 and 1849, a famine struck Ireland, giving rise to massive emigration toward Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. It was an enormous mass of people pushed to their absolute limits, malnourished and afflicted by typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera, already reduced to poverty and starvation in previous years by the rapacious policies of the landlords. The novel aims to recount t

On May 28, 1974, in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, a bomb killed eight people and wounded one hundred and two. > Eye to eye, she waves to him. Just then, the bomb explodes. A roar. Then smoke (light grey, white, pale blue, pages upon pages of witness testimonies, poignant, grueling...)... Livia must have felt practically nothing. The image she took with her is the smiling blue eyes of her

The premise of the book is very interesting. Vera, an apparently happy wife, abandons husband, family, and job. She begins walking down a provincial road: > she started by walking, then picked up speed, her strides growing longer, quicker, tighter. One after the other . > The road is a wide road cutting across a ruined countryside. A precise, geometric destruction . > Beneath her eyes,

Morris Heller, the protagonist’s father, is on an airplane watching an old Hollywood film (*The Best Years of Our Lives*), which deals with soldiers returning home from the Second World War and having to rebuild their lives; and what an old friend, a well-known writer, once told him comes to mind: > the idea he is toying with is to write an essay about things that do not happen, about the unlive