“Only dead fish go with the current.” Sweet, attentive, unscrupulous, acute. A text that is read with pleasure and that makes you happy in reading. In the same way the protagonist (and how could she not be otherwise?), Margherita Dolcevita has a nickname that characterizes (at least in Italian language) her both emotionally and physically, the usual clever pun that the author has accustomed us to in his books. Margherita is a fourteen-year-old teenager, full...
“FRIDAY DI-VERSO” None of these things exist. You have no reason to believe me … the temperature rises, it is completely unpleasant, but the frog has weakened, it no longer has the strength to go out. If it had been thrown into the already boiling water, it would have jumped out with a thrust of the kidneys. Do you know the metaphor of the frog in the hot pot? Chomsky used it to describe the individual...
“When you are sad you need to feel your pain made into music.” Book of memoirs, in which the writer recounts her experience as a patient in a US psychiatric clinic in the late 1960s. A leap into the void crossed after a perhaps incorrect diagnosis of personality disorder, following an alleged attempt to commit suicide. The stay at the McLean private hospital will last for eighteen months, during which the writer lives in a...
“Things that don’t matter to some can be as terrible as death to others.” Book divided into two stories detached from each other Hard Boiled and Hard Luck (hence the title H/H). Although indirectly in contrast to the setting, characters and family relationships, the background theme links the two stories: the world of the afterlife, and the attempt to move forward despite the inner pain. In the first story, the protagonist is a young girl...
“Every anarchist was seen as dangerous just for being an anarchist. Ideology was dangerous, not the man.” Interesting historical monograph.To read the text, a good smattering of Italian history of the beginning of the century is recommended, otherwise you run the risk of being stranded after the first ten pages have passed. Given the importance of the city of MIlan, the history of the Milanese anarchist world is consequently that of the entire peninsula. Milan...
“FRIDAY DI-VERSO” “…surprised about how long I’d lived, still unsure how it was going to end.” Perhaps a review would be needed for each chapter. Or those scholastic questions of understanding the text, for once without the obscene hassle of a “right” or “wrong”. Because this, gentlemen, is a book that poses many questions. Starting from the choice of a population of the undergrowth as the protagonist: is it a (black) fairy tale? a satire? an...
“That old priest, not only preaches the faith of God to women and children, as his profession requires, but he himself believes in it.” Warning for the reader: this review is written by an entire editorial staff totally enchanted by Ignazio Silone’s prose. Underrated, forgotten, left to tan on second-hand stalls, for us Silone’s books are works of art to have at home without arguing. The protagonist of the story, Luca Sabatini, returns to his...
“The problem is not so much what happens to us, but how we live and process what happens.” Admission of guilt: we approached the reading of this text with some reticence because we were not convinced by the format, by the subject dealt with, by the title. In short, closed in the highest tower of a castle built on clouds of preconceptions. We had to change our minds. It is no coincidence that we decided...
“Are we over a barrel?” Interesting text, characterized by a precise journalistic slant, but without exceeding pure news. A clarity and narrative fluidity that make reading pleasant and smooth, in some ways, with few equals. The commitment made in field research, literally from one part of the globe to the other, represents the solid foundation on which the story narrated. Starting from the most remote Russia, the United States, the Maldives and a long list...
“Friday di-verso.” “There were things we expected to have and didn’t have.” How many loves does it take to give Love a name? How many times does one have to die to really feel the air in the lungs? How much pain can you endure before – how much? To some of you, this book may seem like a small thing. Not because it is ugly (indeed) or poorly written (really not), but because of...
