This book was given to me with a simple dedication: “To those who melted the snow.” Since then, it has become one of those books that you never really leave — that live silently in your heart. And I assure you that it will also melt the snow that perhaps you didn’t know you were carrying around with you. The amazing journey you will immerse yourself in, in fact, will not only be within the...
The midday thread marks the second stage of the Autobiography of Contradictions, the monumental interior journey in five stations in which the Italian author Goliarda Sapienza lays herself bare. A descent into the underworld of identity, where each page is a step towards dissolution and rebirth, in the never-ending attempt to contain an uncontrollable life. In this second volume, Sapienza narrates the delicate and tormented path of psychoanalysis undertaken with Dr. Majore following her first...
Neorealist novel, partisan short story, proto-feminist diary, psychological memoir and metanarrative reflection on writing: all this – and much more – is Dalla parte di lei. First published in 1949 by Mondadori, in the heart of an Italy still stunned by the end of fascism and the war, Alba de Céspedes’s novel remains a marginalized work in the official canon (still all-male), despite its anticipatory force and its profoundly modern voice. Like many novels written...
Valley of Flowers by Niviaq Korneliussen is undoubtedly the novel I loved the most last year, a book capable of getting under your skin, uncomfortable and powerful just like its author. A writer who had already established herself in Greenland in 2014, when with her debut she had spoken, for the first time in her country, of queer issues. Issues so current that they return in this novel too. The story is that of an...
Anyone who has read Sostiene Pereira by Antonio Tabucchi knows that it is a novel destined to last beyond the time and space of the fragment of history it tells. I read it just a few weeks ago, while I was in Lisbon. I read it on the plane out, on the famous tram 28 that crosses the city and then sitting on a bench, in front of the sea. And yet, although my scenario...
