The light words between us
” – But what good is it to be smart? – To keep company with myself.” A caress over two hundred pages long from a mother to her son. This was the feeling that accompanied us in reading. If we want, a...
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Sandro Penna
“Life… is to remember a sad awakening in a train at dawn.” The book is a small essay, coming from a degree thesis. The style is therefore that of a scientific work, where the narration is often interspersed with quotations, engraved by other authors and, precisely, accurate reproposition of poetic verses by Sandro Penna. A literary criticism beyond the usual stakes, in which the author offers us his litmus test to understand Penna as an...
Once there was love but I had to kill it
“Men dream of being the first and only lovers of the woman they love. Women say the last one sings victory.” A double roller coaster ride without the safety bar pulled down, while when we bought the ticket we thought we were going on a quiet panoramic train among the ruins of love (and certainly in this the title of the book partly misled us). Once you have managed to survive the first carousel ride...
The man’s monopoly
“Only by becoming economically independent will the woman escape moral parasitism, and will be able to conquer her freedom, dignity and true respect for the opposite sex.” The book is a milestone in the history of female emancipation, written by one of the most symbolic characters of European political and social life of the early twentieth century: Anna Kuliscioff. This is not an indictment against men but the legitimacy of rights commonly denied to women...
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“In life, if one wants to understand, to truly understand how things are in this world, he must die at least once.” During a car trip with a couple of friends and their child, in the countryside of central Italy, some reflections on the Etruscan civilization open the doors of the author’s memory, who finds himself in a moment to remember events that occurred during his youth in his Ferrara. A dip in the past...
The hug of Mrs. Sun
“Even though I wasn’t happy with my situation and that relationship, I was afraid to get out of it and I was beginning to be a slave to my fear.” The book is the raw chronicle of a physical and psychological violence suffered over time by a girl. Salt on the open wounds of our society that must make us think, because it is not a fictional story, but experienced firsthand by the author. So,...
The Cold War 1945-1991
“The Vietnam war has been revealed by the most disastrous of all America’s ventures in all two hundred years of its history.” A historical monograph that is always pleasant to read. A flight suspended over almost fifty years of political and geopolitical events explained in a clear and linear way. The absence of frills and quotes, or an excessive load of dates, makes reading them pleasant and, even more important, smooth. Having a good base...
Don’t move
“Everyone has many reasons to cry, funerals are just a good opportunity.” A book that goes straight to the heart, to shatter and reassemble it in a decomposed way, and then still shatter it and then still reassemble it for better and better. Much undeserved pain for the main characters, which reverberates on the reader like the last light of the sun before going to die at the end of the day. Timothy is an...
La llorona
“I tried to find out how many layers of skin need to be changed before die. How hard it is to become an adult.” The bond that merges every mother to her children is something inexplicable. An invisible thread, resistant to any kind of misfortune or bad luck. The protagonist of the book will face the toughest test to which a mother is called, the death of her newborn daughter. An event as catastrophic as...
Chocolate from Hanselmann
“History is a fish inside an aquarium, it comes and goes under your nose without you ever catching it. You can only imagine about how it could once, but nothing else, nothing else…” Set in the 30s of the last century, with the noises of the Second World War, first weak and then louder and louder, the book deals with the events of a family of the Italian-Swiss upper middle class. In the muffled atmosphere...