“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...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “From my house to his house we are separated by 574 km. Too many”. A little advice. A small book. A small voice: that of Tiromancino, soundtrack for hearts in transit. Browsing through these microscopic journeys leaves a bit of the feeling of when we hear Stitch say, “This is my family. I found it on my own. It’s small and broken, but beautiful.” Why write a book to tell about emotional places? Why...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “My life is a predictable accident, rapist. It does not ontologically define my existence but occupies it like a handful of soldiers”. On January 25, the last piece of Eva Baltasar’s triptych was released for Nottetempo, a triad that began in 2019 with “Permafrost” and continued with “Boulder” in 2021 (Italian release dates). The frost, the boulder, the immense animal. Go retro, candid souls. So in short, before holding our breath and throwing ourselves...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “I am who I am and that’s all I am. Popeye always says so”. It must be said that we don’t know if this Nori would like a review so much. Because writing about him knows so much about the need to give an understandable form to the things that happen, little about “I want to know what you think”. Yet in publishing a book there is a bit of this risk, that everyone...
