“Vladimir feels he has an extra card in the deck, that his existence is rigged, that all he has to do to make it worth living is apply his own will.” Who is Vladimir Demikhov? And why dedicate a book to him? Good, excellent questions. But the most appropriate would be: why read it? Well, indeed. “Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov (1916-1998) – Soviet surgeon and researcher: one of the most renowned pioneers of organ transplantation; commonly...
“In the evening he read stories aloud to me […] and during the day he taught me how to do a handstand, because he absolutely wanted to make me see the world upside down.” Just a tip: open the book to the first page and read it aloud, steadily. We’re faced with a precise frame, like in a movie, and the camera frames, piece by piece, individual parts of a scene that we miraculously manage...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “Now everything was different. Nothing was pre-established anymore, everything had to be redone.” Many people these days may have read “Confini di classe” (Feltrinelli, 2025), the small collection of essays by Lea Ypi, in which the author technically but passionately addresses the double knot that links the class question to that of citizenship. Reading “Libera”, her autobiographical novel published a few years ago, perhaps helps to understand how one can arrive at...
“The fear of abandonment has led to not evolving, to stopping the engine, to not graduating, to not obtaining the best result.” This is a warning: if you have unfinished business with the past, or even a difficulty in relating to family affections, this book is for you. It is perhaps even more so for those who do not deny having them. The text was created in our opinion to make people reflect, to have...
“More than a [love] story it was a short story, a discount flyer.” Fresh and fun book. Despite being released in 2023, it remains current in many passages in which it addresses the hypocrisies of contemporary society, and we think it can remain so for many more years to come. A very useful text to detach from the heaviness of everyday life, and give yourself more than one smile. Understanding that you don’t have to...
“I dedicate this book to those who think that asking questions is the first step to finding answers, to those who think that the right answers are never easy…” Seven chapters of analysis and vision on seven problems that the human race must face in the medium term, but which at best aim to procrastinate. Global issues, but also more specifically domestic ones, for which everyone is involved. Unlike other essays, here however, solutions are...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “And when the driver, suspicious of that silence, turned around […] he saw them so alone in the world and recognized them in the caprice of God and in the irremediable violence of nature.” “Old village” is one of those books that when you recommend them together you say “lucky you, you’re reading it for the first time”. Because we would like to reread it right away but we are stuck in a...
“We will have, for a thousand years, peace.” An intense text, in which the author relives his memories as a soldier employed in Africa during the Second World War. Linear in the memory, as if it were a long diary, in which dreams, doubts, individual daily events are reported that together marked the fate of the conflict, up to the defeat in Sudan, the imprisonment and the long period spent in India. The detail of...
“The rain washed away the summer. It soaked the earth, and from the earth rose clouds laden with moisture that scattered among the rocks and enveloped the crests.” If you are looking for a narrative built on twists and turns or intriguing actions then this is not the right book. Time passes slowly, expanding like an accordion to its maximum extension, just to play a single note. A book to read from a stylistic point...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “And what could not be explained, not even by a fervent imagination, disturbed the necessary order.” This is not a book, but a meeting. First of all, the meeting of the author, Francesca Valente, with her friend and psychiatrist Luciano Sorrentino. Then it is the meeting with a topic, that of mental health, which always creates some problems for public attention: we act a bit like with the mad, we say “yes, yes, it’s...
