“They only think about living in peace; they have everything they need to be happy: work and youth.” Reading a book by Irène Némirovsky means taking care of yourself, loving yourself. For every topic she addresses, she is capable of capturing hidden nuances, shamefully suppressed perspectives, and the most appropriate words. Whether we find ourselves in a wealthy, bourgeois family in the city or at a provincial landowner’s court, Némirovsky is capable of penetrating to...
“She is so surprised to see her mother leaning over her that she forgets to cry.” We are certainly witnessing a narrative experiment. A successful idea, but one that we weren’t ready for at the beginning of the novel, and in fact, we read the first five pages twice. Written almost entirely in the second person singular, the book immediately conveys a sense of alienation, as if the narrator wanted to simultaneously care for the...
“Love, my dear, is a feeling of luxury.” The story is about a love that shouldn’t have happened, just as it shouldn’t have died. On one side, we have Yves Harteloup, a wealthy man who has lost much of his wealth and is forced to live like a common clerk in early 1900s Paris, and Denise Jessaint, the young wife of a wealthy businessman, Yves’s comrade in arms during the Great War. The two meet...
“Some people think about it, some don’t. I’ve been thinking about it for thirty years. I try to prepare myself.” After reading, we found ourselves emotionally exhausted, perhaps still partly so. A book that sooner or later, in a form we cannot imagine, we will find ourselves writing. Each in their own way, each with the right amount of blank pages and unfinished sentences. How much do we really know our mother? Beyond her social...
“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...
Published in 1849, Little Fadette is a short country tale combining fairytale elements with a surprisingly precise modern psychological analysis, perfectly capturing the turmoil and contradictions of the human soul. Here, the simplicity of rural life becomes the backdrop for still-timely reflections on individual freedom, Pirandello’s reflection of ourselves and others, and the vindication of feminine virtue. At the heart of the work, set in a remote 19th-century French valley, is the story of two...
“VENERDÌ RE-VERSO” “Imagination does not mean lying.” This is a book for children; this is a book for adults; it’s a book for teachers; it’s a book for dreamers: this is Daniel Pennac, ladies and gentlemen. Not all of the French author’s works reach such heights, yet this book should be read and reread at all ages, laughing (sometimes bitterly) and reflecting on many small, important themes, without seeking “easy solutions.” As always, Pennac...
“Ideas don’t die, sometimes they sleep and then wake up stronger than before.” A well-known book, its fame is directly proportional to the number of people who have actually read it from cover to cover. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that prompted us to re-read this classic. The protagonist is Edmond Dantès, a very young sailor who is unjustly imprisoned on the eve of his promotion to captain of a ship and his...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “Today I’m going to be tough (and I’m crying while writing these lines).” Wandering through the shelves of bookstores these days you will find the latest reprint of the literary debut of Édouard Louis. A student of Didier Eribon, to whom the work is dedicated, he follows in his footsteps with the impulsive unscrupulousness that comes from being a few years younger than his master. Being able to do so, we read this...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “No more bones, no more muscles, no more veins: inside himself Octavio had autumn.” There are three pages, almost at the beginning of the book, three pages that introduce us to Octavio: it is practically impossible not to want to reread them at least twice. It is the painting of a destiny, nuanced and prophetic, like those paintings that the more you look at them the more hallucinatory details appear, faces hidden in...
