“I especially remember the cold, never a sunny day, I remember the snow and that we were without socks or gloves.” What is the best gift a grandchild can give to his grandmother? To be her legacy. Honoring the elderly, and their experience from which we all derive, when they are still among us, and not regretting them when it is too late. An important teaching. In this children’s book, Calabresi tells the story of...
“Until yesterday, who would have ever thought that I would start working?” Aldino is the protagonist of the book: the diminutive already tells us a lot about him. A partially immature thirty-three year old, incapable of leaving behind a youth that had grown out of time. Without a precise plan in life, other than to live from day to day, and spend late nights in the less recommended places of a Milan that is preparing...
“People think one thing is true to the core.” Can an American novel excite and involve an Italian reader after more than sixty years? If it’s a masterpiece, yes! A modern classic of world literature. Get ready to read the story of a boy, a young teenager, to enter his head, with his language and his way of coding and reading the world. Get ready to immerse yourself in his thoughts, to filter everything through...
The books chosen by Andrea Salonia This review is available only in the original language _________________________________________________________________________ Credo che un libro così dovremmo leggerlo un poco tutti. O meglio: tutti attraversiamo almeno un momento tanto particolare nel corso delle nostre esistenze da rendere utile, fin necessaria, la lettura di un romanzo come Naif.Super. Naif.Super esce per la penna di Erlend Loe, scrittore norvegese classe 1969, nel 1996; io l’ho lasciato sullo scaffale delle librerie più volte, non avendone...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “There is something about this hotel that disturbs me and holds me back. I do not understand well. I don’t try to understand better.” We don’t understand well. Let’s not try to understand better – what keeps us in this book. And yet: we are there, even if upset. Like in a dream, we don’t know how we got here, perhaps a quote, an epiphany, an involuntary movement of the soul and here...
“Power cannot be managed by a village clan, which arrived there without knowing it.” From 2011 to 2022 we have witnessed constitutional forcing, reinterpretations of roles and prerogatives that were once unthinkable. Palace games and partially revealed backroom deals, which Lucia Annunziata tries to reconstruct through the direct testimony of the protagonists of that season, revelations, confidences and ex-post analyses. An approach that we greatly appreciated because, despite going into the detail of the reconstruction,...
“Life, after one dies, is called memory.” A book that is at times autobiographical (at least this is our feeling) in which the author’s pen is appreciated more than the story. The writing is a pleasure on the palate, almost a sin of gluttony, which makes you want to read again and again, but after all, knowing the stylistic register of the writer, we would have been surprised otherwise. Advice for teachers: although well written,...
The books chosen by Andrea Salonia This review is available only in the original language _________________________________________________________________________ Stefania Spanò: ma dove sei stata fino a oggi? Ricordo sempre con affetto commosso l’amico Alberto Garutti, artista e persona di raffinato intelletto, un cuore che lo occupava tutto; il Garutti e una delle sue opere pubbliche che più amo; queste le sue esatte parole: “tutti i passi che ho fatto nella mia vita mi hanno portato qui, ora”....
“My mother and father didn’t love me like they loved each other.” How much suffering can be in a family? How can it be addressed? How deep and intense must be the cohesion of the family, or the experience of its individual members, in order to be able to respond blow by blow to the challenges that life presents? The text talks about verbal and manipulative violence, which although they may seem very distant from...
“I have never understood happiness. The idea seemed obscene.” A symphony orchestra, perfectly in time, interpreting a score written just for it. Here is the relationship that binds the protagonists of this book. The author is instead the director, who explains to the reader his own setting of the story, dictating the times of the individual lines. The center of the story is Harmony, a small town in the southern United States, similar to many...
