Books & Reviews Archive

The book recounts the environmental and social unraveling of Tokyo from the perspective of two adolescents. Were this story told by a Western writer, it would be steeped in violent realism or intense subjectivism. Consider the *Berlin* saga (see the review on this site), in which a city abandoned to an epidemic becomes the stage for struggles and romance within a dystopian setting, yet rendered in

Between 1945 and 1952, approximately 70,000 children, mostly from the South, were taken in by peasant families in the Centre-North; this was made possible by the Communist Party, local Liberation Committees, the National Association of Italian Partisans, municipal administrations, and the local populations. It was a remarkable demonstration of national solidarity, which came to be known as the "Tr

> My illness is fatal and death is necessary to the cause to which I have long dedicated all my spiritual resources, for which I alone could fight and I alone was designated . Dalager imagines that with this sentence Søren Kierkegaard encapsulates the diagnosis of his ailment, and his destiny, at the moment he has himself admitted to the hospital in Copenhagen, in 1855. He is a broken man: alone

> The culprit is not just that book, the book that deceived my son, but all books pouring from the printing presses; they are all enemies of our time, of our life . So speaks the protagonist’s father in the novel *The New Life*, referring to the book whose pursuit forms the core of the son’s whirlwind journey across Turkey. And in another passage of the same novel, Pamuk clarifies how > a goo

> I was heading to the beach, (...) minding my own business, when suddenly everything came to a halt: the wind, the sea, the shrubs, the beating of heart and flutter of eyelashes, (...) and in that moment of disoriented stillness the only thing moving was a small figure outlined in gold: not a body, not a pirouette of dust, not a flicker of light, but a presence that dashed along the wood of the s

> How intoxicating and magnificent is a summer day in Little Russia! (...) The towering oaks stand motionless with a lazy, carefree air, like individuals strolling aimlessly. (...) The variegated gardens are bejewelled with the emerald, topaz, and sapphire of airborne insects, and shaded by slender sunflowers. (...) Splendid is the Dnieper in fine weather: it flows free and majestic, swollen with

Varì lives in Aùrno, a “dying sandstone village” on the Ligurian coast, near the French border. The olive trees, now old, no longer provide a living, and Varì works as a *passeur*, guiding clandestine migrants into France along mountain trails. In villages steeped in sun and sea salt, amid the wind and the heady fragrance of mimosa, many characters have sought a hiding place, from others and fro

We are in Bologna in the days immediately preceding the 1948 elections, amid a climate of fierce conflict between the Christian Democrats and the Popular Front. Deputy Commissioner De Luca has just been transferred to Bologna to take charge of the Vice Squad—he who had been Italy's youngest commissioner and was renowned for having solved numerous murders. He has been demoted, somehow spared from t

*I Viceré* is a nineteenth-century version of the television series *Brothers & Sisters*. The Uzedas are an ancient noble family from Catania, counting even a saint among their ancestors. > The old Spanish stock, mingled over the centuries with island elements—half Greek, half Saracen—had gradually lost its purity and bodily nobility: who, for instance, could have distinguished Don Blasco from

Euripides is one of the three great tragic playwrights of ancient Greece (the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles) and lived between 480 and 408 B. C. in a historical period characterized by three fundamental phases: the peak years of Athens under the governance of Pericles, the prolonged Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta with the consequent decline of the former’s political and cu

Owen, the novel’s protagonist, grew up in a small town, where > sex and religion had distinct, antique smells; families were balanced like frail nests on knobby branches of preceding history . It is a world of vague certainties, which Owen leaves behind to study computer science at university. There he marries Phyllis, a brilliant mathematics student. Owen is captivated by his wife’s intelle

Christian and Noemi are two youths from markedly different social backgrounds (Christian deeply impoverished, Noemi from a wealthy Jewish family), yet both are driven by a fierce ambition and the pursuit of an “extraordinary life.” A dramatic episode from their childhood—the fire and destruction of Noemi’s home—also shatters a tender friendship and irreparably sunders the lives of the two youths.