“Cooking your own food for the next day is one of the saddest things that can happen in life.” The protagonist of the story is a girl like many others lost in the life of the big city, forced to go through a series of changes in her life, for which she is not prepared. The first is the end of a romantic relationship (not decided by her); the second is the dismissal and the...
“This woman bring back luck to me.” First work in prose by the poetess of the Navigli. A pleasant discovery, characterized by a revelation text on the human condition, in its normality and in what was defined as “non-normality”. Written in the form of a diary, with a final part containing epistles, the book traces the ten years lived by the author in the Pini psychiatric hospital in Milan. An experience that, as it is...
“I do not know, and perhaps I will never know if one day I will make myself worthy of my children.” Book of complaint, without too many words, capable of exposing, with the simple description of the facts, the Italian national insurance system, and the state of abandonment of the sick, especially the most serious ones. But let’s try to go in order. Let’s take a modern family from Milano: mother, father and two teenage...
“The way in which love is generated derives from a series of precise rules and formulas, which can neither be ignored nor discarded.” We have been missing for a long time to read, in the panorama of Italian literature, a beautiful and engaging family story! We were overwhelmed by the private and non-private affairs of the Casadio family, who live in the small village of Stellata, in the province of Ferrara; these events span the...
“The Nazis never succeeded in inculcating the idea that being Jewish is a sin.” Trudi Birger is just a child when the end of the world bursts into the normality of her family life in an unexpected way. Returning from a trip out of town, her car driven by her father is stopped by a checkpoint of some Nazi military, and since then nothing will be the same as before. The family, forced to leave...
“I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you can never find out the rules.” A story to be read in one breath, the narrating voice is so fresh and agile. It is a first-person story; the narrator is the protagonist, Christopher Boom: a fifteen-year-old boy who has Asperger’s syndrome, hence behavioral disorders and developed mathematical skills. We were overwhelmed by this game to which we were subjected by the author,...
“…I had never been able to find anyone suitable for the spaces that were created within me.” “Eleanor Oliphant” is fine has been a resounding editorial success in recent years; we read it with care and curiosity to find out the reasons and we think we have found some. Eleanor Oliphant is a sober thirty-year-old, with an anonymous “office job” which she has been fulfilling promptly and without any trace of enthusiasm, five days a...
“It never happens: faith and hope do not interact with the things of the world.” The Milanese railing houses have a particular history, hidden over the decades by real estate speculations and layers of renovations done in a hurry, in order to be able to resell at exorbitant prices what were once social housing of zero value, for the last people of the society. A charm known to very few, perhaps only to those who...
“Hate is a constant gangrenous fear, it is a defense that has become misunderstanding.” Almarina is the story of Elizabeth who carries within herself a hidden tear, a profound pain on the basis of which she calibrates all her days; is the story of a teacher in a special school, detached from the earth and reality: we are in the juvenile prison of Nisidia, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean sea. It is...
“For each of us there remained the certainty of the other at the bottom of the pain that we never confessed.” The Arminuta is back, ready to offer itself to the reader with her story which, after a troubled childhood, continues to be difficult and full of deviations always dictated by the decisions of others. Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s new book, Borgo sud, continues to tell us the story that the reader had already grown fond...
