“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “What ever gave me the patience to persist until I learned to read the words of a book?” We wonder how this book isn’t required reading in every school. It deserves a place on children’s bookshelves between To Kill a Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451; if you haven’t already, read it now, before they all burn them. Categorising Mime as science fiction seems risky, to say the least: reading this book today means...
What an experience it was to read this book in my twenties! To experience all over again the excitement and curiosity of first love, to feel the characters’ hearts pound with the unprecedented pain that comes when you lose, for the first time, the person you fell in love with. To find yourself, unfiltered, in the intricate dialectic of someone who is experiencing the same complex choices as you, discovering that you, too, live in...
I liked the idea of starting the story of Lucy by the Sea with a rather bizarre image: ping-pong balls crashing into each other. In one passage of the novel, the protagonist recalls a film she saw at school as a girl, focusing in particular on the opening scene: many ping-pong balls bouncing against a blue background, colliding with each other, then separating and returning to their original positions, until they reach a moment of...
“If he knew how much I love him, he would be scared.” Take an afternoon and immerse yourself in this story. A gift to yourself, like a long-deserved treat, but never received. The book begins with the same flavor as Donna Tarrt’s “God of Illusions”: university life, young students passionate about literature, a special gathering where they can live out their passion. Young students with a whole life to invent, who mean business. A hint...
“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...
“At certain times in life we are more or less close to who we really are.” Let’s start by saying that there’s something extremely essential about this book: everything revolves around a funeral, and—with the exception of the church where it takes place—we move from one house to another, almost without ever changing characters. Now, having said that, I challenge anyone to choose this book, but the author’s power lies precisely here, in our opinion:...
“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...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “Now everything was different. Nothing was pre-established anymore, everything had to be redone.” Many people these days may have read “Confini di classe” (Feltrinelli, 2025), the small collection of essays by Lea Ypi, in which the author technically but passionately addresses the double knot that links the class question to that of citizenship. Reading “Libera”, her autobiographical novel published a few years ago, perhaps helps to understand how one can arrive at...
“She had married late, had become a mother late and was now aging prematurely.” Total light in the style and in the story told. A book that enlightens the reader for the narrative delicacy of the author, and for the desire to bring out of the shadows one of the least virtuous pages of American history. Total surprise for us, who guiltily did not know the author and the book, but for which we must...
“I would like you to become passionate about something that you can do for your whole life.” An Indian family living in the United Kingdom is preparing to experience a pain that is impossible to describe, that no one in the world would want to experience. The death of their mother leaves three little sisters without the most important figure in their lives. The vortex into which they are sucked will also involve their father,...
