Il Fu Mattia Pascal – Luigi Pirandello

One of those books that Italian students are forced to read (and hate) in their final year of high-school. Luckily I had left for Canada by then, and only read Il Fu Mattia Pascal well after the end of my Ph.D. I wouldn’t say that I loved it (nobody in his/her same mind could love this book), but I did definitely enjoy it more than what I expected.

Much of the book is set in the towns on the Italian Riviera where I used to go to when I was a kid, and I loved that. Despite the fact that, like pretty much every other Italian, I already knew the plot and at least a number of its twists, the book was still a nice read.

And call me romantic (something which I’m really not), but I like the fact that book goes full circle, and that the main character ends up feeling the call of his own hometown.

Nausea – Jean Paul Sartre

It took me years to read my first novel by Sartre. I blame it on the (mutual) dislike for my high-school philosophy teacher and his classes on existentialism (disclaimer: he was a great teacher, but wasn’t particularly nice to me and my then girlfriend – the same girl I ended up marrying).

Despite its title, Nausea is a really enjoyable book. Much to my surprise, its apathy doesn’t rub onto the reader, and I actually managed to appreciate its deep and reflective passages a lot more than I would have expected.

And I was a big fan of the Autodidact (probably because I like to think of myself as having a similar approach to my cultural growth), but I really wish he would keep his hands in their place...

The Blue Flowers – Raymond Queneau

As every good (continental) European middle school student, I’ve spent long weeks reading Queneau’s Exercises in Style – pages and pages of the same 15-20 lines repeated using different adjectives, or a different tone, or different punctuation, whatever. Probably that’s the reason why I hated him to begin with.

The Blue Flowers is not a bad book, but when you have Calvino (and you already don’t particularly like his dreamlike knightly stories) it just seems kind of silly. Yes, the story is formally perfectly framed, but to me that’s just not enough to make it a seminal work in the French literature of the 20^th century. The book, just like the life of CIdrolin, is really quite cute. And there is a problem when the best thing you can say about a book is that it’s “really cute”.