Books & Reviews Archive

> Behind the wall supporting one another, huddling together, forming a clot of suffering and waiting. (...) I heard them moaning, pleading, unheard: because a woman's voice is merely poor breath; and the wall is stone, cement, bricks . This novel speaks of the separateness between man and woman, of two distinct worlds whose boundary is impossible to cross. This theme is "decked out in a rag of a

Questo romanzo è un vortice dʼacqua, che risucchia lʼintero racconto in un unico incomparabile episodio, tragico ed intenso, dopo il quale niente è come prima. Il problema è che questo mulinello è una «sabbia mobile», così lento e vischioso da sfinire il lettore. Ma andiamo con ordine. Bob è un giovane di trentʼanni, padre di due bambini, sposato con una donna che lo ama; ha un posto fisso e un

Imagine a *Promessi Sposi* where Renzo and Lucia are two lunatics—or presumed to be such—the setting is a late-nineteenth-century Lecco teetering between superstition, charlatanry, and positivism, the center of the narrative is an insane asylum, and the author is not Manzoni, but a debut writer. Antonio Ghislanzoni, the only historical figure among them, tells his friend Baldo Bandini, a penniless

The decommissioning with which the book deals is that of the Bagnoli steelworks in Naples. Through the literary device of a technician, Vincenzo Buonocore, recounting his story directly to the writer, the history of the factory’s closure and its impact on the social fabric of this town in Campania is interwoven with a personal tale. > If I am to be completely in this book, and Rosaria must be i

Fridolin and Albertine are a couple belonging to the solid, respectable bourgeoisie. Their union is founded on "a perfect interpenetration of feelings and ideas." Yet, a masked ball is all it takes—where both had been courted, he "with insinuating kindness," she > at first fascinated and then suddenly offended... with an insolent swearword , for them to be brushed by, > and not for the fir

*The Shadow of the Sun* is a collection of notes from journeys across Africa spanning thirty years: from the independence of the continent to its more recent upheavals, such as the Rwandan genocide. The book encompasses both the nature of an essay and that of a memoir of lived experience, profoundly engaging for the author. A penniless reporter for an equally cash-strapped Warsaw daily, Kapuścińsk

Eugenio is a well-known Italian set and costume designer living in Los Angeles. A phone call from Italy takes him back to the origins of his career and to the figure of Olga. Many years earlier, when he was still in Italy, Eugenio had had an affair with a friend of his wife, namely Olga: > petite, pretty, dark-haired, with fringe and kiss curls à la Louise Brooks (...) she had an elusive, ambi

Renée is the concierge of an elegant Parisian apartment building, inhabited by well-to-do bourgeois families. Outwardly, she behaves like a typical concierge: obliging, reserved, and humble. In reality, Renée is a woman of vast culture and refined intellect: she reads high literature, takes an interest in philosophy, listens to fine music, and appreciates quality cinema. She never reveals these

Upon picking up this novel by Grazia Deledda, one's mind immediately turns to *Canne al Vento* (see the review on this site), hoping to rediscover the same magical atmosphere of the Sardinian author’s masterpiece. The environmental and social context is the same; here too, pain is treated as destiny, life as a journey toward death, yet that living, magical, and indecipherable nature—the hallmark o

We are in the East, in the magical empire of Akbar the Great. > If the war-torn world was a hard truth, then Sikri (the capital of the empire) was a splendid lie . It is a magical world where the mystery of the great sovereign "enchants all the earth, and the future, and all of eternity." Into this wondrous land arrives a traveler hailing from the West, who calls himself Mogor dellʼAmore. He

> When numbers and figures are no longer the key to every creature, when those who sing or kiss know more than the learned, when the world returns to free life, and returns into the world, when light and shadow unite once more in authentic clarity, and the eternal tales of the world are known in fables and poems, then before a single secret word, absurd existence will vanish . These verses expre

Massimo, an elderly retired mathematics professor, lives in solitude on an island in the Gulf of Naples: he lost his wife Maddalena a few years ago; his daughter Cristina married a wealthy northern entrepreneur and only returns in the summer for a brief stay, accompanied by her eight-year-old son, Checco. In dreams, Massimo imagines telling his wife about the fruit trees and > that sea bass and

Don Rigoberto is the director of a major insurance company, has just retired, and is about to embark on his long-awaited trip to Europe. He is a cultured man, a lover of literature: he chose a managerial career "out of cowardice," deciding to > not be a creator, only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. (...) How sad to be forced to deal with lawyers and judges, (...) instead of immersi

The Son of the Red Corsair > was a handsome young man, (...) of exceedingly elegant form that bespoke the great lord, with jet-black, fiery eyes, a black moustache, and very pale skin . One would expect a new Black Corsair. Yet such is not the case: first, because the son of the Red Corsair frequently distances himself from the pirates, even paying them out of his own pocket to prevent them f

On December 15, 1943, the Jewish De Fano family was arrested and sent into internment: Omero, «the gentle bookbinder», the elementary school teacher Alma, her mother, and little Velia, the couple's daughter, an albino child nicknamed Fiordicotone. In the chaos of the roundup, the girl was hidden beneath a man's black cape, thereby surviving. Omero and the elderly mother were immediately put to dea

The narrator-protagonist sets off from Berlin on a long journey through the countries to the east of Germany, across that vast geopolitical space where everything seems to have taken place unbeknownst to us Western Europeans. First, she visits the grand German Historical Museum in Berlin with her daughter (a visit I recommend to everyone), and in the area dedicated to the Shoah, her daughter asks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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