Books & Reviews Archive

An old junk dealer, a drunkard and charlatan, stitches together a corpse from the fragments of bodies torn apart by bombs—so frequent in Baghdad during the American occupation in 2005 and 2006. An old woman lives in contemplation of a painting of Saint George, who, in her eyes, has promised the return of her son, missing for twenty-five years in the Iran-Iraq War. Hasib, a young hotel security g

The novel is set in a Russian provincial town and deals with the events surrounding the Karamazov family and the complex relationships between the father and his sons. The narrative can be divided into three fundamental parts. In the first part, the profiles of the main characters are outlined through a succession of dramatic events, in which the sons' feelings toward their father are revealed (

Among the possible meanings of the word *Freedom*, one defines it as > being able or having the opportunity to do what one wants without being restricted by something or someone (Collins Dictionary). The characters in this novel have always lived poised between the “set of possibilities” and events (what used to be called destiny), which push inexorably toward a specific direction in life. T

San Suu was born in 1945, two years before the assassination of her father, founder of independent Burma and national hero. This biographical detail is essential to understanding this collection of essays, speeches, letters, and interviews, published between 1984 and 1994. Aims and prose vary, circumstances change, yet San Suu’s concern always shines through: to understand her father’s legacy,

I have always wondered why Italian editions do not retain the original title. It often conveys the sense of the book far better, as in the case of *From the Land of Green Ghosts*, which became, who knows why, *Il ragazzo che parlava col vento*. The title "from the land of green ghosts" neatly encapsulates the autobiography of one who, to save himself, had to forfeit his own identity through deta

Mattia Pascal lives in a provincial town and has found himself, almost by chance, married, poor, and working as a librarian. He suffers from the stagnation of his existence and is terrified by the idea of living “thus, always, until death, without any change, ever…”. Seeking a momentary escape, he flees to Monte Carlo, where he gambles at the casino and wins a substantial sum. He then discovers

“If this were, for instance, a Hemingway story, by the second paragraph its protagonist would already be shooting fascists, (...) a nurse would have fallen in love with him (...). Naturally, she would be a woman so wonderful and caring that she would die along with the baby during childbirth, if only to save him from the monotony of family life. (...) However, I am not Hemingway. Looking at things

The book is part of a series that explores social and civic issues through the lens of noir. In this case, the backdrop is the Camorra. Leonardo is a businessman colluding with organized crime. Seeking revenge for a slight, he attempts to kill someone under the protection of a powerful clan boss and is subsequently forced to go on the run, accompanied by his daughter, who remains entirely unawa

Eyal, Yirmy’s son, was killed during his military service by his own comrades, who mistook him for a wanted Palestinian. Amotz, Yirmy’s brother-in-law, in breaking the news of his son’s death, inadvertently uses a cruel term: Eyal was killed by friendly fire. This is the premise of the narrative, which gets underway from the moment Daniela, Yirmy’s sister-in-law, departs for Africa, where her br

The subject of the novel is Naples: “a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition.” Diego Ventre is a brilliant and refined lawyer, but in reality a Camorrista. He learns from a volcanologist that an eruption will destroy a large part of the city. Diego sees in this catastrophe the opportunity to renew Naples, to halt its decline, but he also realizes that enormous profits can be made. He ke

The setting is an American town in Navajo territory. Jim, half-Indian and half-white, returns to his hometown only to become embroiled in a series of murders committed by an avenging shadow, unleashed by an Indian ancestor to exact vengeance for a massacre perpetrated by adventurers. It is a return to the past—both the distant one and the more immediate past tied to Jim’s childhood and his choic

The year is 1860. Chiara is the daughter of a well-known patriot, a friend of Garibaldi. Disguised as a boy, the girl manages to join the Expedition of the Thousand and thus meets Simone, with whom—predictably—she falls in love. The story is pleasant, but handled far too superficially, both from the standpoint of Chiara’s personal affairs (her desire that her father not marry a Turinese lady, h

What is the fascination of books? Why do so many of us spend so much time reading novels and poetry? The author attempts to answer these questions through a coming-of-age story, a cross between *Harry Potter* and *Treasure Island* (see the reviews on this site). Natsuki Rintaro is the typical *hikikomori*, a term synonymous with an antisocial, apathetic, and misanthropic adolescent. To be sure, he

The book is not about Genoa, despite its title. The city is merely a setting, devoid of imagery and depth, in which to recount the life of a police officer. The protagonist is a young man without hope, who believes that life is > merely a scheme of the system, one of many, but men do not control it, not even those gathered at Palazzo Ducale. The system is a headless machine, an autonomous mac

*Gerusalemme Liberata* recounts the climax of the First Crusade, when Godfrey of Bouillon conquered Jerusalem in 1099. It can be interpreted as an epic poem (a sort of Christian *Iliad*), but in truth its interpretive keys are far more intricate than those of Homer's work. First and foremost, the poem is the narrative of a purification, both collective and individual: > thus singing, the devou

The narrative recounts the love story between the author and Micòl within the milieu of a prominent Jewish family of Ferrara: the Finzi-Continis. Two fundamental themes emerge: nostalgia for a serene, peaceful Ferrara and, above all, an intimate tale tied to personal relationships that unfolds as if suspended over an abyss: the protagonists attempt to live as though nothing were happening, but in

Who knows whether Alba de Cèspedes had read this novel before writing *Nessuno torna indietro* and *Dalla parte di lei*, published respectively in 1938 and 1948, just a few years after the 1934 Italian release of Irmgard Keun’s novel, heavily censored to excise its most transgressive passages (see the reviews of de Cèspedes’s books on this site). Even allowing for a completely different style (ele

David Martin is a young journalist, who begins writing serialized stories for his newspaper. These stories meet with considerable success, and he is consequently put on salary by a publisher to write a series of novels belonging to a cycle entitled *The City of the Damned*. With the money he earns, he rents a mysterious house, abandoned for many years and previously owned by a strange character

Vamba, the pseudonym of Luigi Bertelli, imagines having discovered *Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca* “from a portress, wife of a court usher, while she was reading it to her children”; indeed, Giannino Stoppani’s diary had long remained “forgotten among the files of the Judicial Chancellery, which will certainly come as no surprise to anyone who knows how everything concerning Italian Justice is pr

During the Second World War, a series of personal storylines unfold across a small provincial town near Rome and in the great city of London. Stefano, a legal enthusiast employed at the courthouse, marries Nina as his second wife—a restless young woman who accepts a much older husband to please her family, but is in truth in love with Sergio. At the same time, Ally is an English pilot, homosexua

A few years before his death, an illustrious jurist retraces his childhood in a timeless Nuoro; and > as in a developing negative, distant faces reappear, (...) and perhaps, as I think of their life, because I write their life, they sense me as a ridiculous god, who has summoned them on the day of judgment, to free them forever from their memory . It could easily be a mundane autobiography, in

The setting is once again Sicily, and the subject is mafia murder. A Carabinieri lieutenant from Parma, stationed on the island, finds himself investigating the murder of a small building contractor, soon followed by the killings of a peasant—a pruner by trade—who had recognized the assassin, and of a police informant who had named the instigators. Dismissing the crime-of-passion angle (the prun

The book is set in seventeenth-century Holland and recounts the story of a young maid who becomes, first, a painter's assistant and then the subject of a portrait. Layered together are the young woman’s intimate personal story (her family, her working environment, her betrothal, and the blandishments of a wealthy merchant), the depiction of the milieu, and the execution of a portrait, complete wi

The novel recounts a paradoxical story. A cantonal councillor murders a friend in a restaurant before a crowd of witnesses. Once in prison, he hires an attorney (the author of the manuscript) to identify a different killer. The attorney gathers a body of information that leads to the cantonal councillor’s acquittal before the court of assizes. Convinced he was merely a pawn of the councillor (