Reviews and Comments

A murder mystery / family drama, that revolves around the finding of a corpse in a family's country home, and the unreliable narrator's efforts to unravel what happened. Said narrator, Toby, is unreliable because an attack has left him with serious memory problems, but also because, in his mindless privilege, has gone through life unaware of the pain of others. He always considered himself a good guy, but is now forced to question his innocence, not, or not only in relation to the murder, but more in general. And the book plays with the question, what does it mean to be innocent? Wouldn't we all kill, in certain situation, if we had the chance? And his killing necessarily the guilty thing to do? It could easily turn banal or sanctimonious or lame, but the threads are weaved together very skillfully, as Toby becomes less and less likeable with every page, and more and more believable.

A very enjoyable book: original, funny, engrossing. At its core is the relationship between two sisters, Korede, tall - with unremarkable looks, an obsession for tidiness, and a strong sense of duty- and Ayoola, pretty, superficial, self-centered but devoted to her sister, and a serial-killer. T says it has won a lot of prizes that maybe would be better spent on more literary works. It's true that there isn't necessary a message or a second layer of meaning to give the book depth, but the first layer, so to speak, is never banal. I enjoyed how unlikeable but three dimensional everyone was. For example Dr. Perfect, the love interest of Korede who falls for Ayoola and turns out to be not so perfect after all. There's a great scene where Korede asks him what he likes about Ayoola, and cannot think of anything. Meanwhile Korede, who loves and hates Ayoola so fiercely, easily names many specifics that make her unique.

This was another of T's book that I read just because it was there, since she had taken my tablet for her weekend in Elqui and I got her e-reader in exchange. It is a first person non-eventful narration by a 40 something single woman in Copenhagen. Two themes stood out for me. One is related to what it means to be a single woman.The protagonist seems to want a relationship but her life is not defined by a lack of partner, nor is she unhappy. Nevertheless, she is to some extent defined by her single-ness, because that's what society does. I really like one passage (I cannot copy it here because I gave back the e-reader) where she reflects on the difference between being single in her home village vs being single in the big city, aka Copenhagen. While single women in the village are viewed as I they have failed at life, people nevertheless talk to them as people. Whilst in the city being single is a thing, to the point that a whole industry has sprung up around it. It made me think of how there is a 'cool' way of being single, meaning mainly if you date around a lot, but also if you travel or have some super career, as if you needed to make your single-ness be worth it. Which brings me to the other theme, i.e. the confusing feelings towards one's home place, particularly when home is a small village and one is attracted by the city's freedom, the permission to be 'weird', until one realises there are rule on how to be weird, and that village communities are tough but tight, more forgiving that one gives them credit for, or maybe that's just what they look like from the vantage point of the city. The book has a light, amusing tone to it, but there is a Scandinavian bleakness to it, as if death and loneliness were never far.

As one could guess from the title, this is a book about humiliation, with each short story exploring a different face of this sentiment. The hints in the blurb that it is somehow about the dictatorship are misleading, and I started to think all Chilean are marketed as dictatorship-related out of laziness or maybe because it supposedly sells. But I am going off a tangent. Almost all the stories are told from the perspective of children. I particularly liked the title story Humiliation (about a girl witnessing his unemployed dad being humiliated, and for the first time being able to interpret what has happened), Talcahuano (about being very young poor but not so unhappy in Talcahuano, and then getting old enough to lose the bless of obliviousness and being disappointed in one's parent and moving to Santiago to lead a poor and not so happy life) and the Last Vacation (about the well meaning efforts to "rescue" a child from poverty and the working-class condition, and the boomerang effect of said child's pride and loyalty to his mum. I was happy to find a good book about Chile.

50% an argument against 'fast' (neoliberalised) academia, and its negative consequences on academics' health, research, teaching and social life, 50% advice on how to resist it from within, by slowing down academic practice.

Clearly, the authors themselves are ultra-aware of the problem: fastness is a structural conditions, and individuals have only that much agency, and yet by not adopting the corporate language, by insisting that learning and understanding cannot be quantified, and by refusing to treat each other as valuable 'contacts' or tools for upward mobility we can make a difference in our own local environment.

Perhaps, a few more words could have been spent on junior and/or people with precarious contracts, for whom slowing down seems a lot more difficult. While the book acknowledges it in passing, it doesn't have any magical tricks for slowing down while keeping your job, let along getting a permanent one.

I think I was slightly disappointed, because it sells itself as a call to action, but it gives little advice, and relatively vague. Perhaps that's part of the problem: there aren't magic tricks, a matrix for 'thinking slowly' and yet thrive in academia, nor replicable formula, but just the encouragement that comes with knowing some people are trying their best.

Re-read after maybe 10 years and still loved it. I was inspired because Tascha read it in English and fell in love with it, and I was surprised, because my memory of it was that it's a book that depends on the familiar language of Northern Italy, infatti non so perche' sto scrivendo i miei appunti in inglese, le malagrazie, le negriture, scempio, e' un mondo intimo e pieno di nostalgia, la sua ma anche la mia. Forse dimostra che neppure io ho abbastanza fede nelle abilita' dei traduttori e delle traduttrici, che evidentemente se la sono cavata bene.

Un'osservazione evidente e' che Ginzburg si dilunga su certi aspetti, la descrizione di abitudini e modi di dire, di personalita' (i genitori sono entrambi cosi' convincenti, ebrei torinesi borghesi e di sinistra, un po' distaccati dalla realta' lui burbero, lei un po' capricciosa, pieni di amore per la propria famiglia e sgomento per il fascismo dilagante) e cambiamenti, mentre quasi non dice niente su altri avvenimenti cruciali, sia  a livello storico (per fare un esempio, la promulgazione delle leggi razziali) che a livello personale.