Books & Reviews Archive

We are in Boston in 1919, at the close of the First World War. The novel's protagonists are Danny, a police officer from a traditional white family whose patriarch is a high-ranking official in the police department, and Luther, a Black man who could have been a formidable baseball player, but, because he is Black, must resign himself to menial jobs. This is, therefore, a deeply stratified Ameri

It is an insignificant book. It is set in Burma after 1886, when Britain transformed this vast kingdom into a province of British India, exiling its last sovereign. *The Glass Palace*, the novel’s title, is a metaphor for a world overtaken by imperialism and capitalism—forces to which one must adapt on pain of extinction or, at best, oblivion. The protagonist, Rajkumar, is a young boy, > a ra

In this novel, Tracy Chevalier, author of the bestseller *Girl with a Pearl Earring* (see the review on this site), measures herself against Venice, the “City of Water,” and one of its immortal treasures: Murano, the “Glass Island.” In the preface, Chevalier wonders > whether the artisans of the City of Water and the Glass Island seem to age more slowly than those in the outside world. (...) Pai

For many of us, childhood was a source of suffering. > And each will rewrite this story forever, knowing the sorrow, imagining the plot, inventing its meaning, and forgetting its origin . Then one day we discover that > you accepted like a beast of burden the weight of an incomprehensible curse and the unjustified threat that binds you to wounds and leaves you with a fate; and you spend your

The narrative unfolds around an Indian family of the Greek-Syrian faith and takes place in a dimension that is, in some sense, timeless. The point of departure—and also of arrival—is the death of a young girl, Sophie Mol, who arrives in India with her mother to meet her father and drowns in the river during a boat trip with her cousins, the twins Rahel and Estha. This episode forms the watershed

The novel is set in Bangladesh during the brief yet bloody war of liberation from Pakistan, from March to December 1971. The author traces the events from the perspective of Rehana: a woman who wishes merely to be a wife and mother: > she had married a man she did not expect to love; she lived a life of composure, a life with few surprises. She had asked her father to find her a husband with f

It is the mid-1950s in England. Anna is a writer living off the royalties of her successful novel, set in Africa during the Second World War. Divorced after a brief, loveless marriage, she is the mother of a young daughter and a friend to Molly, who is likewise divorced from an immensely wealthy man and the mother of a twenty-year-old son. "Free women," independent, shouldering the burden of ra

*Gomorrah* is a book about the Camorra—that is, about what is known as the "System." Yet in reality, it does not merely recount criminal affairs; it investigates the deep entanglement between economy and crime, and the awakening of a consciousness toward a corrupt world against which one must rebel, first and foremost through information and denunciation. The book opens and concludes with this n

The book is the saga of a Chinese peasant family who, from a state of abject poverty, becomes exceedingly wealthy following the discovery of a hoard of jewels, all of which are invested in the purchase of land. The protagonist is Wang Lung, an impoverished peasant who marries the maidservant of a great and powerful family. The bride, O-lan, is a plain, taciturn woman, yet tenacious and a tireles

The novel is set in New York and chronicles the life of Bruna, an Italian political science professor who relocated to the United States to follow her husband Tom, an Italian-American physician. The mother of two children, Minerva and Mario, she falls in love with one of her African-American students, Yunus, who will later go on to fight for ISIS and die in the defense of Mosul. This alone would o

Georgette Heyer was one of the most popular twentieth-century English writers. *The Grand Sophy*, recently translated into Italian, chronicles the intrusion of an independent, daring, and willful young woman into a traditional family of the English upper nobility at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The novel opens with Sir Horace’s unexpected request to his sister, the mild-mannered Lady

Crimson City > had only a single dusty street that branched off at one point into a single dusty crossroads. A church, a laundry, a post office, a general store, a bank, a hotel, a saloon. Everything had a rundown, filthy appearance, bleached by the sun, as if the surrounding desert were trying to swallow the town one bite at a time, (...) as if into the space of twenty houses and three streets

The Sertão is a vast region in northeastern Brazil: an expanse of low plateaus characterized by brief, intense rains that give rise to alternating periods of drought and flood, ruining crops and bringing famine to an impoverished population historically exploited by large landowners. At the end of the nineteenth century, widespread banditry developed, blending rebellion, brigandage, and confused s

We find ourselves inside a major publishing house, in the department tasked with compiling dictionaries. Despite being a profitable business, the staff is remarkably small, not least because preparing a new dictionary is an exceptional endeavor—a difficult, complex undertaking that does not happen every year; between an old dictionary and a new one lies a process of continuous revision, which neve

> In the dust there were little craters where the rain had fallen, and there were clean spots on the corn, and that was all. (...) The dust-filled air hung over everything with a softer sound than fog had. (...) The men were silent and did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men—to see whether this time the men would break. Faced with the destruction of the

*The Grass Harp* is a coming-of-age novel, but it must be read as an assonance of wondrous images and extraordinary sounds, “a harp of voices telling a story.” And all that is left for us is to listen. As was already seen in Salvatore Satta's *The Day of Judgment*, remembrance is not a succession of events, a sequence of situations and characters; it is instead like closing one's eyes > to fix

As I set out to read this novel, my mind raced at once to another great book: *Reading Lolita in Tehran* by Azar Nafisi. The author imagines *The Great Gatsby* being put on trial; it stands accused of being the emblematic expression of bourgeois society, of a vacuous and amoral world in which all that matters is self-fulfillment. Over the course of the imaginary trial, one comes to understand th

> I wake in the darkness before dawn, flailing among the agonized shreds of dreams that still linger in my consciousness, searching for a burning sense of anticipation. (...) In every part of my body, I perceive separately the distinct weights of flesh and bone, sensations that coalesce into a dull ache within my consciousness, reluctant to resurface into the light. (...) I have slept with my arms

> How was it possible that there, at the end of the world.... something different ordered things, men, time, death, something that it would be unjust to call madness and too broad to call faith and superstition . Such are the reflections of one of the protagonists of an incredible, and in some respects indecipherable, book. Vargas Llosa recounts an actual event that took place in Brazil in 188

The book deals with the Napoleonic Wars, and in particular the French invasion of Russia, the sacking of Moscow, and the defeat of Napoleon. In the early parts of the novel, war is something distant, a matter for the powerful and their diplomatic games, whereas > life, the real life of men, with its fundamental necessities concerning health, illness, work, rest... , proceeded, as always, indep

It is a book for children aged 9–10. Guglielmo is a young boy who finds a gold coin and discovers that people, even good ones, turn false and wicked out of greed. The only bonds left to him are those with his dog and a vagrant, a former soldier. In the end, Guglielmo realizes that, if > a man is free, has friends, has honest work, cares for people, well, perhaps he has something more than one

Mohamed emigrated from Morocco to France to work in a factory, a harsh life that enabled him to raise five children. They are now estranged from him because they are integrated into French society, whereas he has remained tied to his traditions, feeling Moroccan rather than French. The daily grind of an intense working life allowed him to conceal, first and foremost from his own conscience, the

The book is set in Nigeria between 1960 and 1970 and is divided into two parts: the early 1960s in a Nigeria newly emerged from British colonial rule, marked by an apparent social tranquility; the late 1960s in Biafra (in southeastern Nigeria), where the predominantly Catholic Igbo fought an ill-fated war of independence against northern Nigeria, dominated by other ethnic groups that were predomin

Harry Potter lives with his aunt and uncle, a prosaic bourgeois family who hate, above all, that > anyone speak of anything that shouldn't be, no matter if it is in a dream or even a cartoon, (...) it might be a dangerous idea . As in the fairy tale of Cinderella, Harry is treated dreadfully by his aunt and uncle, the butt of his cousin's stupid and brutal pranks; in short, he is a victim, orp