Un bambino di undici anni sparisce nel nulla in una Bolzano diafana. Intorno a lui, …
A plane read
3 stars
Del dirsi addio is a crime story set in Bolzano, where the mystery around the disappearance of a kid is little more than a backdrop to the personal story of the detective investigating the case. Sergio is in love with a younger man, is in the closet, and is trying to patch up his relationship with his dad, and his memories of his deceased mum.In spite of these intricacies, I found the book easy to read, and read it whole on a single plane journey (admittedly a 20 hours one). The characters - including Bolzano, the town where the story is set - are not explored in great depth, but they are alive enough to make for an interesting read. I don't understand why authors so often need to let you know what they have read and learnt, but that's probably just me.
Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a …
To laugh until you cry
3 stars
Don't let the two stars fool you: this book is funny, at times even laugh-out-loud funny. If you are an academic, or someone who has had to deal with the absurd rituals of recommendation letters (on either side of the equation), you'll almost definitely laugh. I cannot speak from experience, but I suspect if you are an academic in an American institution, you'll laugh even harder. If you are an academic at a Literature/English department in an American institution, you'll probably cry a little too. In spite of all the laughter, the story is a little too thin to carry the book: after the 25th letter, one gets the gist. I also grew to dislike Prof. Fitger so much, that I became unable to appreciate his sarcasm.
Originally published in 1932, this outstanding work of literature is more crucial and relevant today …
A classic for a reason
3 stars
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 …
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)
Loved it. The portrait of a woman, Aaliya, and a city, Beirut, nested inside each other. And through these portraits, Alameddine says many insightful things about aging, war, literature, music, love, friendship, mourning, and family. The writing is at times humorous, at times scathing, at times melancholic, always beautiful. My main reserve is that the literary reference and name-dropping are a little intense, though I'll admit they sit well with Aaliya's character.
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk …
On time passing
4 stars
The book contains a series of short stories linked by recurring characters. While each story could stand on its own, read together they add up, tracing the lives of those characters over several decades: from teenagerhood to success, from success to failure, from failure to recovery, etc. At times it is hard to keep track of the ways in which the stories connect, but in the end it doesn't really matter: you can lose track and still enjoy the book (I did). If one was to look for an overarching theme, without a doubt it would be time passing, and the experience of realizing that time has passed. I weirdly enjoyed the last chapter, set in the future, and especially Egan's guesses about the evolution of language.
I was given the book with the warning that the story were hit and miss, but I was positively surprised. My favourite were: Fat, about a Korean boy who tries to gain weight to avoid the military service; Mrs Dutta writes a letter - perhaps my favourite overall, about an old Indian lady moving in with her son's familty in the States. Walking the Wok, about a cooking school in Kenya (also great)
I love food, and enjoy cooking, and suspect that's why I got given the book. Yet most stories are not about the pleasure of eating/cooking, but about the ways food becomes a battleground between people who love each other.
Estate 1958. Per la prima volta lontana dalla famiglia, educatrice in una colonia di vacanze, …
On girlhood
3 stars
(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 …
(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.
Published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Stories about imperfect belonging
4 stars
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 …
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”
When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, …
Read at the wrong time
3 stars
Content warning
Major spoilers!
Art, a twenty-five-ish blogger, is going through a break-up and hires Lux, a stranger met at a bus stop to impersonate Charlotte, i.e. his ex, so we won't have to tell his mum Sophia - who is about to meet Charlotte for the first time - that he has just been dumped. When Lux and Art find Sophia in a bad state - underfed, neurotic - they call Iris, Sophia's sister, to care for her.
This four characters - Art, Lux, Iris and Sophia - go on to have a very intense but ultimately meaningful Christmas, with many arguments, flashbacks and visions. As I realised a bit too late, the book plays with the Christmas canons, with Art and Sophia receiving the visits of Christmas spirits, in the form, for example, of floating heads and landscapes, as well as dreams. I didn't love these parts of the book, though I now get what was Smith's intention. What I was able to appreciate were some of the dialogues - sometimes really funny and witty, poetic and clever. I also enjoyed that instead of going down the easy path of romance, the book explored family relationships, the difficulty of growing up - not just as kids but also as young adults trying to become functional, good human beings - and above all navigating different mindsets and worldviews.
Iris is what some would disparagingly call a social justice warrior, she cares deeply about politics and actually does stuff about it - protests, gets enraged, tries to make a difference through her work. Admittedly, she's also annoying, preachy and insensitive to the feelings of those closest to her. Sophia a art-loving business lady - not a cynic as much as someone who'd rather to see all the messed up things that go on in the world. I like to think that Iris and Sophia are not too kind of people, as much as two drives that we all have in us, though the Sophia in us is often having the upper hand...
Born into an oppressive colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who …
Inadequate notes on a great book
5 stars
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 had 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 …
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 had 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.
"Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. …
Where House of Cards meets Desperate Housewives
4 stars
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, …
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.
Originally published by Coward-McCann, New York, 1952.
And they lived on...
4 stars
Content warning
Minor spoilers
When I read this book a couple of years ago, I had just seen the film Carol, and the two blended in my mind. I would read the name Carol, and see Cate Blanchette holding a cigarette with her polished many merits, but, it seems to me, they are mainly connected to its context. Yes, Patricia, we are all very grateful that you allowed the lesbians to live on, perhaps even happy ever after! Another striking feature, in a positive sense, was that the world's homophobia and repression were almost side issues - serious enough, but the troubles with love are made of other stuff: indecision, lust, obsession, jealousy.
The main issue I had with the Price of Salt is that the characters are so unlikable, but not on purpose I don't think. Generally, I hate it when readers complain about characters being unlikable, because unlikable people are worth writing about, of course. But when there is a subtle moral teaching running through the book - even one that may have been put there just pro-forma, to make the publisher or the censor happy, then one wonders whether this or that character are supposed to stand in for a group of people. Most annoying of all was certainly Therese - my god, she's self-centered, childish and whiny. Granted, those may be realistic characteristics of a 19 year old in love - but she's impossible. And Carol...for a while I thought that all that playing it cool for three quarters of the book meant she was actually very insecure and afraid to be hurt, but no, she's just playing it cool in a Hollywood kind of way.
Several episodes remained unclear: what's the deal with sister Alice? More to the point, with the elderly colleague who she follows home at the start of the book, only to leave disgusted at the sight of her decaying body? What are we supposed to make of it? How does it link to the romance? Is it just showing Therese's growth as a character, from horrified-by-flesh to sending-ham-by-post? Abby was by far my fav and I wished there was a sequel just focusing on her - the low key butch with real emotions.
