“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” ““What are your requests?” – “We want to see the sun.”” There are so many things we would like to say – it is so difficult to allow ourselves to talk about such great, so unjustified suffering. However we try, because that’s what we can do. “Mulberry Leaves” comes out in 2020. We are in 2024. We would like to say that the situation has worsened but reading these pages we immediately...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “Today is my birthday. Everyone come and taste my sautéed pork liver.” When we reached page 50 we wanted to beat up whoever recommended this reading to us; by page 135 we had already cried three times; once we finished the book we were looking for the author’s complete bibliography. (Note to the reader: “The City That Doesn’t Exist” was released in recent days by Feltrinelli.) Yu Hua has mastered the ancient art of...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “In the midst of all that terror, the screams, the heavy footsteps there was something else, something strange. Kolya was laughing.” Every now and then it happens that you mention a book and the eyes of everyone who has read it light up. It is not the effect of the “essential classic” (to be read with the confidence that the quotes suggest), nor of the latest editorial case (“The book of the year” and...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “All his cravings combine endlessly.” It’s hard to think of a heart that isn’t also a battle. Some are long and devastating, others small and petty, but the heart always seems to have the space needed to accommodate even the most incomprehensible of pains. “Small body” is the crack in the door through which we can spy a heart in struggle: against absence, against loss, against fatality. It is a long story (100 pages) about how...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “…and then I held in my hand a story that was no longer true.” The “Re-Verso” Fridays are dedicated to little gems from a few years ago; this time we want to highlight a more recent one: “The shadow of the volcano” by Marco Rossari. Not a rediscovery therefore, for some, we hope, a new happy meeting. Reading this book was a summer. Not a summer of beers and fluttering flowered dresses, no, rather of...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “The footprint of a life is everywhere.” A Malaysian anthropologist, transplanted to Norway, manages to overcome her husband’s sudden bereavement thanks to an unexpected encounter with the world of mushrooms. It seems that the community of readers really liked this book: it praises its delicacy and the unusual but refined way in which two apparently very distant themes, mourning and mycology, were brought together. We’re a bit perplexed. The book flows, as they...
“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...
“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...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “What if silence one day no longer wants to be silent?” There is a language that is dying and there are only two people left to keep it alive. But these two people don’t talk to each other. It is difficult to explain the magnetic suggestion of this plot. It contains the fascination of things that are about to disappear, the enigma and the search, the power of connection and also a certain...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “I want to fly in the sudden light. I want to know what it’s like to have a reason to dance. I want all the love”. Each chapter forces you to go back a little: to those few lines mentioned at the beginning, excerpts from Milton’s Paradise Lost. He goes back to read them again and place them on the following pages, like a sheet of meaning that helps us understand. It is...
