“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “At the point where I am, I can neither be what I always am nor transform myself into what I could be.” A summer is an indefinable time—expanded yet dense, charged with meaning yet fleeting, it ends just as you think you’re beginning to understand it. Claire Keegan has inhabited this time with an elegance, clarity, and precision that border on perfection. Perhaps it’s the short form that conveys this impression; as we...
“They only think about living in peace; they have everything they need to be happy: work and youth.” Reading a book by Irène Némirovsky means taking care of yourself, loving yourself. For every topic she addresses, she is capable of capturing hidden nuances, shamefully suppressed perspectives, and the most appropriate words. Whether we find ourselves in a wealthy, bourgeois family in the city or at a provincial landowner’s court, Némirovsky is capable of penetrating to...
“Lying on her side with her dead daughter on her chest, she felt her daughter slowly cooling. Then she had no more tears.” It’s a white book, with a sincere and far from banal title; skimming the table of contents, you’ll find yourself thinking: snow, fog, and so on. You’re probably thinking of a simple book, imbued with the purity to which Korean literature, and specifically Han Kang’s, has become somewhat accustomed. We’re faced with...
“The comic is more cruel: it brutally reveals to us the insignificance of everything.” Born from the union of two short texts published in the 1980s in Le Débat, the book offers an even more intimate insight into Kundera. In both the first essay (Prague, Disappearing Poetry) and the second (Eighty-Nine Words), one gets the impression of a champion of beauty, memory, truth, and a firm resolve to avoid compromise. With the Force of Reason,...
“She is so surprised to see her mother leaning over her that she forgets to cry.” We are certainly witnessing a narrative experiment. A successful idea, but one that we weren’t ready for at the beginning of the novel, and in fact, we read the first five pages twice. Written almost entirely in the second person singular, the book immediately conveys a sense of alienation, as if the narrator wanted to simultaneously care for the...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “There was something unpleasant in that wait, it was as if everything around him was about to explode.” The writer of this review has an (unhealthy?) passion for stories about the wickedness of children. One of the best novels on the subject (leaving aside Golding) is “Nothing” by Janne Teller: we recommend it. Let’s be clear, ours isn’t a morbid curiosity; rather, it’s about dissecting that part of the self that is then...
“Violating the conventions and beliefs of his world proved neither an ethically sound nor a politically astute choice.” Understanding the constantly and rapidly changing world of international relations means relying on the knowledge and quality of scholars and intellectuals who can help develop lateral thinking about the implications of a given event and connect them. Since the early 2020s (although some specify since the early 2010s), the liberal international order seems to have reached its...
“The war never ends, it just moves on a little.“ Books born from journalistic investigations have the ability to profoundly shake society. Moreover, if the topics covered address transnational issues, they can even rewrite part of the history of certain nations. The deeper the search for truth digs, the more the veil of hypocrisy, steeped in clichés, is stripped away, revealing the stark reality of the facts, which our consciences must confront. Ezio Gavazzeni’s book,...
“As soon as I saw Alisia get off the train I thought with relief that we had reached the point: she was finally leaving me.“ Silvio and Alisia are a non-couple. They have almost nothing in common, yet their relationship continues like a stone thrown into a lake, which continues to sink until it reaches the bottom. As a couple, however, they work because, as the author writes, the most successful couples are those who...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “Expecting mirages to take us where we want to go is madness.” Morgana is the deceptive fairy who distorts reality through strange visions, making hallucinations something we must necessarily confront. The treatise on imaginary ethnography that Celati presents us does more or less the same thing: it forces us to immerse ourselves in the lives of a nonexistent people, describing their habits, stories, and characteristics, mocking a certain colonial descriptivism and leaving...
