“I know well that the weaker we are, the more we do harm ourself.” Open this book with its aggressive cover, with a black and white gaze, that stares at you and you glimpse a little the insolence of an unkind and unsolicited judgment, against you, the reader. Here, then you start reading and you understand that all that can be wrong is perhaps human judgment. Someone would say “and if this means stealing, only...
“The good thing about a church is that it doesn’t really serve any purpose, except sometimes to instill fear.” A child with no name and no history knocks one night on the door of a house in an unknown town. It is immediately clear that it is not the first time he rings the door of someone he does not know, and also his need to find his father. The entire town will take charge...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “No more bones, no more muscles, no more veins: inside himself Octavio had autumn.” There are three pages, almost at the beginning of the book, three pages that introduce us to Octavio: it is practically impossible not to want to reread them at least twice. It is the painting of a destiny, nuanced and prophetic, like those paintings that the more you look at them the more hallucinatory details appear, faces hidden in...
“The province still has the colors of the past.” Getting out of prison and trying to find your place in the world again. Finding any way to avoid being judged by looks as heavy as sentences, after you have already served a sentence. Getting out of the quicksand of invisibility in which you have been locked up, and when you are sure you have gotten out, that you have found freedom, find yourself inside again....
“It is not clear why, but as soon as the word “moral” comes into play, the clarity of thought becomes cloudy.” A book that could be deceiving in size (if someone were to think of being able to read it in a couple of hours) and title (American hallucinations have such a broad meaning!), but not in quality, which is high with peaks that are not very easy to scale; but after all, how could...
“He loved his mother deeply, but he was ashamed to show it. That’s why he was rebellious and disobedient.” We took a risk: deciding to read a book based on the cover, of which we had a superficial knowledge of the author. When we then saw that it was a book of short stories, not our favorite genre, we understood that the risk was complete. Yet, as often happens with texts with which we start...
“VENERDÌ RE-VERSO” “It was horribly clear that my life up to that point had been a mistake.” “There are books that should be prescribed in a pharmacy: read 5 pages a day. Therapeutic indications: relieves and reduces the pain of living (and immediately a young Leopardi appears to us intent on stealing the secrets of the female universe and, above all, of good humor). “I feel bad about my neck” reminded us of a...
“At some point it is easier to go to war than to return home.” Attention please. We are faced with a true narrative text, as has not happened to us for a long time, in which the story narrated, modern in many of its aspects, is combined with a dusty style (in a positive sense) typical of quality writing after the Second World War. As we like to specify, the text will last for years,...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” ““What are your requests?” – “We want to see the sun.”” There are so many things we would like to say – it is so difficult to allow ourselves to talk about such great, so unjustified suffering. However we try, because that’s what we can do. “Mulberry Leaves” comes out in 2020. We are in 2024. We would like to say that the situation has worsened but reading these pages we immediately...
“Democracy is exercised not only at the time of elections, but also through continuous confrontation between the majority and the opposition.” This is a book with a clear vision, written by one of the most well-known economists on the Italian landscape, and appreciated internationally. The text is divided into two parts, the first one in which Cottarelli describes his eight-month experience as senator of the republic, and the second one in which he tells the...
