Il Coraggio del Pettirosso - Maurizio Maggiani

  

A book that I had tried to read as a teenager but that I had originally failed to get into. I had another go this summer, and I really enjoyed about half of it, the other half was too allegorical for me. 

The half that I loved was the main character's story in the present time, in a melting pot of anarcho-misfits, with an illegal journey to retrace his Italian roots and a meeting with the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the (literal) deep dives in the port of Alexandria, and the erratic research into his past and his identity agains the backdrop of the Six-Day War. 

The half that I didn't like was the dreamlike section drawing parallels with medieval love and persecution, community and ideals. I'm just not built for stuff like that I'm afraid...

The Autograph Man - Zadie Smith

  

This is not White Teeth. This is not even NW. It's a pretty average and innocuous novel, but its distinct lack of ambition made me like it more than On Beauty, and way, way more than Swing Time. 

At times I went so far as to find it endearing as it actually shed a light on a very unique community (like Whitehead's John Henry Days), and I actually do find kind of touching the quests for former celebrities - major or minor - that you see here, or in Auster's The Book of Illusions and also in the movie Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, which I was one of the seven people in the country to see in the cinema...

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

  

I don't think this novels would still be in print if it wasn't for its turbulent publication process and the ultimate tragedy of its author's death. 

It's funny, to an extent. But funny by itself doesn't make a book. It makes a vignette. Or a series of vignettes. And at more tha 400 pages you get a lot of vignettes. 

Ignatius is also one of the most predictable misfits you'll ever get. Once the reader has read about him for a couple of pages, s/he knows how he is going to react to anything that the mean streets of New Orleans will throw at him. There's very little general surprise, and as a result, for me at least, there was very little interest.

Parrot and Olivier in America - Peter Carey

  

I thought that Peter Carey could make the life of 19th century French aristocrats interesting to me. I was wrong. In fact, he didn't even make it readable, as the book was an overlong slog. 

The best thing in the novel was the artwork on the cover page, but I doubt that it was down to Carey himself...

Or maybe the best thing in the novel was the fact that I only spent a couple of pounds on it in one of my last Fopp sprees?

Native Son - Richard Wright

  

I do understand, or at least I think I do understand, that so many aspects of this book and of the characterization of Bigger Thomas are problematic. 

Baldwin considered the main character as stereotypical, and that's sadly an undisputable fact. He also wrote about him being unsympathetic. Again, I agree, but could he have been otherwise?

He also wrote about Bigger Thomas as being unrealistic. And here I disagree. I know nothing about the lives of a black youth in Chicago at the time, but I did not doubt the verisimilitude of Bigger's living conditions with his family, his uneasiness being transported into the reality of a wealthy white family, his dubiousness of their intentions, a crime committed out of panic, and the selfish fight to save his own life, arguably the only thing he was ever in possession of. And if someone like me still finds an account like this realistic, there's probably still a lot of work to do.

Caffe' Amaro - Simonetta Agnello Hornby

  

Pathetic. Since Agnello Hornby is considered to be a major Italian author, I figured I had to read something by her at one point or another, but this book was, you guess it, pathetic. 

Set in an overtly romanticized Sicily, at a time when life was better because it was simpler (if you were rich, duh), this love triangle is predictable and vapid. It also reads as the author, and not her characters, is bitter because at the (real or supposed) exploitation of Southern Italy by the North (when her aristocratic family did the exploiting though, things were fine?). 

And, in spite of thanking Christoper Duggan for his historical advice, there are enough historical inaccuracies to rub the reader (or at the very least me!) the wrong way. This is not a 21st century Il Gattopardo. This is a waste of time.

Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut

  

I have to be honest: I generally wouldn't pick a Vonnegut novel if I had a vast choice. I find his wackiness growing stale over the course of novels with a minimal (or at times a highly convoluted) plot. 

But the plot in Mother Night is actually clear and linear, and the wackiness grows gradually, like in so many books that I love from Jonathan Coe to Zadie Smith, or like in the best Coen brothers movies. And I read this book more or less at the same time as I read The Porcupine by Jonathan Barnes, so I was probably positively inclined towards a book about the Cold War and the legacy of the Second World War. 

In short: I really liked Mother Night, but in spite of that I still won't rush to read my next Vonnegut book.

Ignorance - Milan Kundera

  

A book that I've read on a plane to Portugal. And a book that really should only be read on a plane. 

I feel like Kundera has made a living out of being the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and even the value of that book seems to be diminishing with every other Kundera novel that I read. I do realize that I'm nobody to comment on the life of people in (self) exile and their problematic relations wit their native countries, but his characters feel remarkably flat and stereotyped. 

If I'm ever in need for a fictional bridge between Eastern Europe and France, even to this day, I'd go with Kieslowski...

The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy

  

McCarthy is 4895 years old (actually 89) and it doesn't show from this book. Either he's still extremely sharp, or he has a heck of a ghost-writer...

The Passenger is a beautiful story that makes the American South fascinating (unlike, well, Faulkner, as per my previous post). Bobby Western is the kind of troubled anti-hero that should be played by McConaughey, just like in Mud. And its pages on nuclear research are rather interesting for a non-scientist (in particular as I had casually read this and Giordano's Tasmania back-to-back). 

Oddly enough, at the time of reading I had also just finished advising a student on an essay about Thalidomide, so seeing Western's sister being pursued by "Thalidomide Kid" was bizarelly alienating.

Companion Piece - Ali Smith

  

Yet another distinctively Ali Smith-esque book, and yet another very pleasant read. 

But that got me wondering: has Ali Smith reached her plateau as "amazing author, but maybe not the best of her generation"? It feels like a pretty good plateau to be completely fair, but the fact that the style, the pace and the prose in her novels is always so easily identifiable after a while to me is suggestive of someone who experiments, but mostly within his/her comfort zone. 

Still, I'll pick up an Ali Smith novel pretty much any time I see one, in particular as she pretty much covers and analyzes contemporary events as they happen, but I'm not going to be looking forward to the next one in the same way I was when I had just started to discover her.

I Diavoli - Guido Maria Brera

  

My dad hit the jackpot by suggesting I read 54. He didn't manage to pull it off twice with this finance thriller. 

Brera gets London wrong, its topography and architecture are just wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And that upsets me. 

I understand that the finance world is dominated by men, but the female characters in this book are rather pathetic. And it's not like the male ones are that much more developed, otherwise the author wouldn't have to keep on labelling them "the French", "the German", "the Indian" etc. because their nationality is the only thing that differentiates them.

And the number of ideas that he steals (from Bryan Singer to Christopher Nolan) is just infuriating.

Cronache del Mal d'Amore - Elena Ferrante

  

At some point I had to read something by the mysterious Elena Ferrante, and I opted for her oginial trilogy. 

These are three books coated in mystery, lies and journeys of self-discovery. Books that made me feel the brackishness of the water that some of the characters swim into and that initially left me wondering what would happen to the characters after the novels ended. 

Unfortunately, though, they are also books that gave me long-lasting feelings but whose plots weren't memorable. I just had to look them up on Wikipedia again, and this is surely not a good sign.

Gli Interessi in Comune - Vanni Santoni

  

I normally don't even smile at books whose covers promise to make you "laugh out loud". Gli Interessi in Comune didn't make such promises, but it was without a doubt the funniest book I've read in years. 

The title already encapsulates what the book is about; vignettes from a group of friends who share common interests: Magic: the Gathering (because they are nerds after all), loitering at the local bar and, most of all, an almost academic research into all possible drugs - legal or not. 

My wife was surprised to hear me laugh by myself every 5 minutes as I was reading this book, and so was I. Yet, this is not just a funny book, it's surprisingly deep and it offers and insight into the "normal" lives of the characters outside of their psychedelic loops. And much like in Trainspotting, a lot of these druggies turn up alright in the end, though a fair few of them don't. And I still struggle to believe that someone could pull a book like this out of the Tuscan province.

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

  

Until a few weeks ago I had never even heard of Jennifer Egan (bad me, she's a Pulitzer winner after all!). Then I met a colleague who is writing a PhD thesis on DeLillo, Auster, Whitehead and... Jennifer Egan, so, given the other three names, I figured I might as well read something by her before talking about literature around the office again. 

It's a pleasant read and a nice series of interwoven short stories, full of (not so) veiled criticism aimed at the music industry and our general society and humorous moments. At the same time, though, I can't quite bring myself to consider "pop-rock" literature as something of particular literary significance, probably because I read (and watched) a fair bit of similar things growing up. 

Entertaining, yes. Thought-provoking, relatively. Pulitzer-worthy, maybe not...

Tasmania - Paolo Giordano

  

I was more than skeptical at the start. I had read Giordano's La Solitudine dei Numeri Primi and found it rather bland, so when I borrowed this (e)book my expectations were rather low, but hey I was proven wrong! 

Tasmania was such an unexpectantly pleasant read that it actually took me a while to fully admit to myself its many qualities: the prose is that of a very talented writer, and the scientific knowledge that of a great disseminator (how good a physicist Giordano actually is, I have no idea). And while the couple dynamics between the narrator and the love of his life at times leave a little to be desired, those between him and his main academic point of reference are absolutely fasciating (and it's great to see Giordano showing how - looking at the same dataset - academics can often come to diametrically opposite conclusion and decide to completely overlook some variables). 

And maybe, after all, we should all just consider moving to Tasmania. Just in case...