“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “It was Morris Bober and he couldn’t have been a better sort.” It’s just that you read a lot of books. The further we go, the more the pages accumulate and the shadow of the stacked tomes casts itself over the days to come, gracefully indicating the readings we would like to face next. Slowly, imperceptibly, the analogies add up, the echoes reverberate, the amazement becomes numb. Of course, we always love reading but we adjust...
“I especially remember the cold, never a sunny day, I remember the snow and that we were without socks or gloves.” What is the best gift a grandchild can give to his grandmother? To be her legacy. Honoring the elderly, and their experience from which we all derive, when they are still among us, and not regretting them when it is too late. An important teaching. In this children’s book, Calabresi tells the story of...
“Until yesterday, who would have ever thought that I would start working?” Aldino is the protagonist of the book: the diminutive already tells us a lot about him. A partially immature thirty-three year old, incapable of leaving behind a youth that had grown out of time. Without a precise plan in life, other than to live from day to day, and spend late nights in the less recommended places of a Milan that is preparing...
“People think one thing is true to the core.” Can an American novel excite and involve an Italian reader after more than sixty years? If it’s a masterpiece, yes! A modern classic of world literature. Get ready to read the story of a boy, a young teenager, to enter his head, with his language and his way of coding and reading the world. Get ready to immerse yourself in his thoughts, to filter everything through...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “There is something about this hotel that disturbs me and holds me back. I do not understand well. I don’t try to understand better.” We don’t understand well. Let’s not try to understand better – what keeps us in this book. And yet: we are there, even if upset. Like in a dream, we don’t know how we got here, perhaps a quote, an epiphany, an involuntary movement of the soul and here...
“Power cannot be managed by a village clan, which arrived there without knowing it.” From 2011 to 2022 we have witnessed constitutional forcing, reinterpretations of roles and prerogatives that were once unthinkable. Palace games and partially revealed backroom deals, which Lucia Annunziata tries to reconstruct through the direct testimony of the protagonists of that season, revelations, confidences and ex-post analyses. An approach that we greatly appreciated because, despite going into the detail of the reconstruction,...
“Life, after one dies, is called memory.” A book that is at times autobiographical (at least this is our feeling) in which the author’s pen is appreciated more than the story. The writing is a pleasure on the palate, almost a sin of gluttony, which makes you want to read again and again, but after all, knowing the stylistic register of the writer, we would have been surprised otherwise. Advice for teachers: although well written,...
“My mother and father didn’t love me like they loved each other.” How much suffering can be in a family? How can it be addressed? How deep and intense must be the cohesion of the family, or the experience of its individual members, in order to be able to respond blow by blow to the challenges that life presents? The text talks about verbal and manipulative violence, which although they may seem very distant from...
“I have never understood happiness. The idea seemed obscene.” A symphony orchestra, perfectly in time, interpreting a score written just for it. Here is the relationship that binds the protagonists of this book. The author is instead the director, who explains to the reader his own setting of the story, dictating the times of the individual lines. The center of the story is Harmony, a small town in the southern United States, similar to many...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “For an hour he remained contemplating the great pearly clouds perpetually suspended above the horizon, and from their beauty he drew a sense of resignation that did not allow his reason to examine.” We wander through the shelves full of new products on which out of intellectual humility (or decency) we do not judge but which clearly have little to tell us. Unexpected, there, in a little corner, mild and modest, a small blue...
