“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “At the point where I am, I can neither be what I always am nor transform myself into what I could be.” A summer is an indefinable time—expanded yet dense, charged with meaning yet fleeting, it ends just as you think you’re beginning to understand it. Claire Keegan has inhabited this time with an elegance, clarity, and precision that border on perfection. Perhaps it’s the short form that conveys this impression; as we...
“On a scale of one to ten, how much did your parents love you?” Jack and Elizabeth are the two human beings we’ll be dealing with for exactly 720 pages; two protagonists we’ll have to explore and discover, and at a certain point we’ll have to side with, or worse yet: confront. Wait, don’t let the page count intimidate you, because more than a mountain to climb, the text is a sea to navigate. It’s...
Written by Ernesto Florio This review is available only in the original language _______________________________ Lettura impegnativa, ma addolcita, come sempre, dalla magia coinvolgente di Murakami. Anche questa volta gli ingredienti del realismo magico orientale ci sono tutti: personaggi strani che compiono azioni inspiegabili, avvenimenti curiosi e privi di una qualsiasi spiegazione logica, i velati riferimenti alla società giapponese, i gatti e la musica jazz, l’amore adolescenziale, la nostalgia e il destino come motori essenziali dell’esistenza...
“Only that the doors often remain open when they should remain closed.” The story tells of Elisa, a very young girl who, after the death of her elderly aunt, her guardian, accepts the brief hospitality of her last surviving relative, her cousin Filippo. At Filippo’s home, she is welcomed by her sister-in-law Malvina, and a host of characters crowd their home during long evenings, where they discuss art, politics, society, and any topic on which...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “Things happen, they don’t need us.” It’s truly difficult to separate the author’s biographical details from the powerful sadness that permeates these pages—the same sadness that drives us to greedily absorb every single word, to reach the end without missing a single detail, a single vibration, a single gesture. Rio de Janeiro, 1970s. “The temperature of this novel is always above 31ºC.” Little Camilo, a pale bourgeois in a dusty, impoverished neighborhood, witnesses...
“If they had loved me, maybe I would have been beautiful too.” We weren’t ready to read such a beautiful book. We weren’t physically or emotionally ready. A full-throttle dive into melancholy, with no desire to climb back up. Some passages moved us like we hadn’t in a long time; but this shouldn’t make you think it’s a sad book. It’s a text capable of opening the heart like a child, letting in all the...
“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...
“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...
Valley of Flowers by Niviaq Korneliussen is undoubtedly the novel I loved the most last year, a book capable of getting under your skin, uncomfortable and powerful just like its author. A writer who had already established herself in Greenland in 2014, when with her debut she had spoken, for the first time in her country, of queer issues. Issues so current that they return in this novel too. The story is that of an...
“They had chased and waited for each other, only to meet again and again.” Let’s go back in time. Catania in the late 1930s, with fascism in power, winds of war ready to become a storm, cowardice and meanness tacitly disguised as nobility of soul and rectitude. Here two boys in their early twenties, Salvatore (known as Sasà) and Michele, meet one night on a beach and fall in love. A difficult love because the...
