Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak

Zhivago’s wife, Tonya, might be the most interesting character in this lengthy novel. Too bad she is barely present. What is the difference between this masterwork of 20^th century literature and Rosamund Pilcher’s books? As far as I know, the only ones are that Pasternak’s book is set in Soviet Russia and that it criticizes the Soviet system. This is praiseworthy, surely, but is it enough to justify the book’s popularity? I’m not quite sure, although it definitely should be enough to justify the view of Pasternak as a hero of the fight against totalitarianism.

I simply didn’t need those many pages of Zhivago’s pointless principles. An autobiography of Pasternak would have been a lot more interesting...

Una Donna – Sibilla Aleramo

 

I have already mentioned my great limits when it comes to the appreciation of much feminine literature, but early feminist literature is just beyond me. I understand that this book was groundbreaking and a key step in the process of emancipation of women, in particular in Italy, but I simply found it unreadable.

It’s a short book, a very short one, yet one that I struggled so very much with. I found the prose incredibly heavy and convoluted and, while the plot is clearly interesting and touching, I would have probably preferred it coming from an omniscient third person objective narrator and, I’m afraid, a male one. Sympathetic and empathetic to the feminist cause, but a male one. There. I said. Does that make me an awful human being? Maybe...

Il Sistema Periodico – Primo Levi

 

One of the books I’ve read to distract myself as I was writing my Ph.D. thesis on Italian Fascism while still feeling like I was doing some academic work (I might have even thrown a couple of cheeky references to this collection of short stories for good measure).

Having only read works by Levi that had been marked by the Holocaust, it was rather refreshing to read stories about Levi’s life before WWII, finding even a trace of humour every now and then – something so sadly absent in most of his books.

I am not a fan of short stories, I never have enough time to be drawn into them, and I am by no means a scientist (like Levi was, and he titled every short story in this collection with the name of an element on the periodic table) so I think I missed a number of the book’s subtleties. Still, I liked it nonetheless.

The Lover – Abraham B. Yehoshua

  

With age, Yehoshua might have become a bit senile, saying things about the Arab-Israeli dynamics that his younger self would not have said, but The Lover is one of his best works, and one that offers a deep and balanced portrayal of the Yom Kippur war – at least for an absolute outsider like me.

Once the reader grasps the unique family situation depicted in the book, he is bound to be perplexed to say the least – or sceptical at the idea that an agreement like the one between the married protagonists might actually work in real life. Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter if the agreement works or not: the book, somehow, does.

Like with some of McEwan’s novels it’s written with such a delicate touch that it almost seems feminine, something I found quite surprising. And the fact that a young Palestinian knows Israeli poems by heart is not surprising, it’s sad, but the fact that he tries to conquer the heart of an Israeli girl with those is incredibly endearing, and maybe – just maybe – gives some hope.

La Donna della Domenica – Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini

I’m not quite sure what someone who’s not from Turin would think of this book. Probably that it’s good, but it’s too long for a detective story, probably that it’s funny, but the idea of a lethal granite dildo may be a bit too stupid.

Coming from Turin, though, this book is absolutely awesome. It paints a perfect picture of the place, a “town” of a million people where the rich all know each other and live side by side on the hills, physically looking down on the lives of the rest of the city and its workers.

I always get a massive kick out of being absolutely familiar with a book’s (or a movie’s) locations, and this  book is obviously no exception – with the added benefit that these locations aren’t ones I’ve discovered as a tourist or as a grown-up, they are the streets and squares where I used to spend my weekends as a teenager, or where I would have gone had I actually ever had the guts to skip school.

I just wish I could realize which parts were written by Fruttero and which ones by Lucentini...