“FRIDAY DI-VERSO” “God had taken back that precarious peace and filled the void of silence. It was still Judgment Day.” It happens to hear combinations of words that, due to strange circumstances, are well suited to an object totally different from the original one. So it was for these: “scenario and substance”. There was talk of a city but they settled on the pages of Bae Myung-Hoon with very elegant grace and timing. So what...
“Mafia does not exist.” Pages to be framed. Take them one by one and wallpaper the walls of Italian schools, so as to remain fixed in one way or another in the minds of the students, even the most distracted. If you have already read Carlo Levi, here we are faced with something completely different, such as the structure and history of the story, the prose and the story and the power of the words...
“I think people who only have good experiences are not very interesting.” Chosen as the book for the second appointment of the GLOB reading group (Gruppo di Lettura Occasioni d’incontro – BooktoMi – BooktoMi), we recommend it for the same purpose to other readers, because it is capable of lighting fires of unexpected discussions. But let’s start with the plot. James Sveck is an apparently normal life boy of the American upper middle class. Close...
“He ended up in a mental hospital because he didn’t know where to go.” Taking his cue from the sale of the grandmother’s house in Ancona, the author retraces the footsteps of memory on the nearby asylum with red roofs (hence the title). To support him in the story, the search for medical records and the return to the houses with red roofs after many years, when the structures are now used for another use....
“FRIDAY DI-VERSO” “The heart of man does not get used to miracles.” Love, am I not your mom? No, it’s not you. Were it not for the refined but light vocabulary, for the completely cinematic taste of the descriptions, for the macchiettistica of some characters (mostly men), for the detached gaze of an orchestra conductor, these two lines would be the beginning and end of a powerful drama. inexhaustible. For the good grace of the author...
“If you want to please the critics, you don’t have to play too loud, too soft, too fast, too slow.” Do you want a book that talks about Milan without being a guide? Do you want a book to take you by the hand to the topographical and folkloristic discovery of the city, suspended between past and present? Well this book is for you. With the background of a Noir story, Crovi’s pen takes us...
“I didn’t need any God to make the revolution.” We chose to include this book in the calendar of the “Stazione BooktoMi 2022” review well before it reached the right popularity because it was selected among the finalists of the Strega Award; this already makes us understand our opinion on Bertante’s new work. In the form of a novel, the birth of one of the best-known terrorist groups is told: the Brigate Rosse. But don’t...
“The steel whale they walked in was deforming.” Let’s start talking about the genre immediately, even if the definition on the cover might seem strange, because more than a novel it is a story of a real event, with a precise and detailed search for testimonies, technically it is a non-fiction novel (translatable precisely with novel, in its broadest sense). As we have said, the book is the result of a long research by the...
“FRIDAY DI-VERSO” “So, my dear, what is it that prevents you from creating the life you want?” We stroll around New York with Zainab, looking for an answer to this question. The novel itself is a long walk through the end of adolescence, the sprint gives us the discovery of an immense and unknown city (at least, for the protagonist) like New York. Zainab comes to us from Ghana, confident, full of expectations and full of...
“But the bodies of the sick transform the other bodies.” We chose this book to break the ice on the first ameeting of the book club created together with the friends of the Mondadori Bookstore in Barona (Milan). A collaboration born to relaunch shared reading even in the suburbs of large cities, and which we are sure will last over time. With the usual sincerity, we admit that we started reading the book unconvinced, without...
