User Profile

Brave New World is on every must-read list, and it belongs there. Huxley's longsightedness is undisputed: as far back as 1931, he picked up on some of the most disturbing features of what was becoming our society, and showed their darkest side. I don't know why I couldn't get more into the story. Sometimes it's just a matter of timing. In fact, I remember reading it as a teenager, and liking it a lot more. Truth be told, I must have been on a sci-fi binge, because I definitely remembered it all wrong - I think my mind collated 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World in a major, majorly inconsistent dystopia of its own. I don't know if it was just me, but I have the impression that our collective memory has boxed the book as a warning bell against the dangers of a world driven by escapism, sensual pleasure, and the obsession with being happy. I had completely removed the fact that 'the Savage' actually also comes across as fairly obsessed - with religion, purity, and purification through pain - is it just me, or that is also supposed to be a little creepy? As an aside, the representation of the 'uncivilised' as a sort of native Americans was hella problematic (yes, I know, it's easy to practice critical analysis from 90+ years in the future)

(I read this book in the Italian translation by Lorenzo Flabby). In this memoir, Annie Ernaux focuses on two years in her life - starting just before her 18th birthday, in the France of the 1950's. Her struggles to fit in, her tormented enconters wih sex, passion and abuse, her eating disorder, her becoming aware of her class. After reading some reviews that characterised the book as 'shockingly honest' I was a bit surprised: if anything, what is shocking is the extent to which her experiences resonate for me with the ones of many women I know. The pressure to 'be cool' before one understands what that means oneself, the conundrum that casts every woman as either slut or nun, the aura that, in many circumstances, still surrounds the act of 'losing one's virginity' (aargh). As Ernaux spells out in the book, the point of writing the story is that some readers might find it familiar.

The story proceeds hesitantly, because the author has to reconstruct it through objects, photos, field visits and, above all, long immersion in her memory. Some books represent, and some books explore, and this one belongs to the latter category (and openly so, since this sentence is an almost direct quotation).

On another level, the book is also a reflection on the impossibility to recount the past. Or, rather, on the inevitable gap that opens up between the past as we lived it, and the version of it that we tell. And, therefore, between 'us as we were', and 'us as we are'. Ernaux formulates this reflection in plain words, in a sort of dialogue with the reader: should I use the third person when I write about my 19yo self? Should you trust what I say? What am I making up to fill the gaps? I lately grew mildly allergic to this sort of literary meta-meditation on the power of literature, but I'm positive that it's a phase, and I still could appreciate the fact that it was sensibly done.

hese 10 short stories add up, sketching the life of Yunior, his family, and a few other recurring characters. The central theme is the experience of migrants, in particular Dominicans, both at home and in the States. The various narrators all come from this perspective, and seem to leave in a state of discomfort and watchfulness, as if they were expecting something (bad) to happen to them. Longing is also something they do a lot of, whether for their fathers, a woman, a friend, or maybe a home place.

My favourite stories are Drown, and Ysrael. Not so relevant, but for some reason I really loved the epigraph to the book, by Gustavo Perez Firmat, which stuck with me:

“The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you.

My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else”

A classic I had read before, when I knew even less about colonialism, It's a fantastic book, pointing its fingers at the patriarchy and colonialism in one gesture, and managing to be more insightful and original of much of the contemporary pop postcolonial stuff. There are no good guys in the story, with most characters being troubled, grotesque and unhappy. History is not being kind to anyone in the book, not even the privileged white man (Rochester), who is tricked into marriage and clearly would not have come to Jamaica, if he has been free to choose. And yet there are oppressors and there are oppressed, and then those oppressed by the oppressed - still in no way purer or 'nicer' than the other. The writing sometimes verges on the obscure, but given that madness is a theme, it seems fitting. It also does something very clever with its orientalising of both the Carabbeans and the UK - each turned into a (magic, sinister) place that doesn't really exist, by the fantasy of Rochester and Antoinette, respectively.

White Houses is the first-person fictional biography of Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt's lover. The book interweaves several narrative strands - Eleanor's childhood and youth, her relationship with Eleanor and the time after Franklin Roosevelt's death - the point in time from which the story is told. The three strands catch up with one another, but not quite: a certain lack of coherence is perhaps the book's major flaw. Some characters come and go and it's not clear who they are or why they matter, some bits of the story seem 'thrown in' and don't quite fit with the rest...especially Hick's time in a moving circus appears as a sort of squalid dream in retrospect.

Nevertheless, I liked the book a lot. I remain of the opinion that Amy Bloom is a terrific writer and is great at writing about love, particularly between women. She describes the affection, the reckless passion, the friendship, the irritation, the longing...The early chapter about Hick and Eleanor's road trip is one of the most romantic, sexiest portrait of blooming love I have read.

Another interesting aspect of the book was the description of Franklin's presidential "court", a whirlpool of skillfully sketched characters: Franklin - a charming womaniser in spite of his illness, Eleanor, principled and stern, secretaries and assistants, in love or simply devote to their bosses, closeted politicians and greedy cousins. All living under the same roof, hiding, knowing, tolerating - I read a Goodreads review complaining that the White House sounds like a suburban home in Bloom's telling, but I think that's what is terrific. It actually sounds like a whole American suburb out of a convoluted TV series - a mix of House of Cards and Desperate Housewives.