“And God promised a good year, or at least he made all the almond and peach trees in the valley cover themselves in flowers.” We found a beautiful, dated version of this novel in a bookstore, and we decided it was there just for us, those of us who always love reading a story with a touch of something far removed from contemporary life. From the first pages, we realized we were giving ourselves a...
Many don’t know it, but Luigi Pirandello’s L’esclusa (The Excluded) represents the Agrigento-born author’s first true novel. My advice is to approach this book without thinking about the existentialism of Adriano Meis or the identity crisis of Vitangelo Moscarda, and to expect nothing. Because the truth is that this title stands out from all of Pirandello’s fiction for one very simple reason: its protagonist. A completely unconventional female protagonist, stronger than any other figure portrayed...
Catalan writer and artist Irene Solà’s debut novel, The embankment, despite its age—the Catalan original dates back to 2017—arrives in Italy with a surprisingly intact and original charm. Nothing in this novel is linear: the story unfolds through small, intimate episodes, a mosaic of intertwined narratives and tales, in which writing itself becomes the thread that ties together characters, old loves, eccentric families, places, and memories. At the center of the novel is Ada, who...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “We are equal, finally, equal, alien, alone.” Ursula Kroeber Le Guin—a woman who, to quote Whitman, contains multitudes. Not only because of her immense literary output, but also because of her exuberant, exuberant wealth of thought, capable of developing as many insights in a single book as an entire library. Each word is the seed of a concept that will be free to germinate in the soil of our minds: the imagery Le...
“My family can be said to have never existed as such.” A collection of short stories published posthumously, in which Piero Chiara’s lovers find all the contents of his narrative style: Lake Maggiore, the gossips of the village, the fixed time of provincial life, the lost memory, the cynicism of the human being. Starting from the twenties of the last century, the events reported arrive up to the very early eighties, to ideally identify with...
“Democracy is exercised not only at the time of elections, but also through continuous confrontation between the majority and the opposition.” This is a book with a clear vision, written by one of the most well-known economists on the Italian landscape, and appreciated internationally. The text is divided into two parts, the first one in which Cottarelli describes his eight-month experience as senator of the republic, and the second one in which he tells the...
“I wonder how many of us live with unfounded fears that perhaps we have unconsciously grown fond of.” If the title of the book is true, then it is equally true that it is books like this that transform prisons into peninsulas. Land languages that come to light at low tide and facilitate communication between islanders and mainland inhabitants. The more texts like these are written and read, the more the strip of land will...
“Breathe. You are alive.” For those who know the author, and have also read her previous works, this book can be defined as what in television jargon is called a spin off, that is, where the protagonists previously appeared in other stories as secondary characters. Be careful though, because the ideal link between the books stops here, the rest of the story is a separate story, with its own beginning and end. The two protagonists...
“Maybe, I thought, it’s not the first love that counts, but the last, the one that accompanies a man to death, that helps him to die.” Piero Chiara’s most complete book, written on the writer’s usual and solid narrative structure, with a strong autobiographical component. The places in which the story is set are those of the province, between Trieste, Udine and the lands across the border in Slovenia that belonged to Italy until the...
“There is no Italian who manages to completely escape the mistletoe of opportunism.” Book son of the time in which it was written (1995), and of a different, higher, morality and political conscience of the Italian intelligentsia. Reading it today, one greatly appreciates the analysis of the past, and the one that is in some parts incorrect on the future, but not due to the demerit of the author, but rather to the demerit of...
