La Malora – Beppe Fenoglio

A rare work of art by Fenoglio that is not about Italian Fascism. It’s still about “my” hills though, so I’m obviously still biased. My heart clearly considers this (like pretty much anything else by Fenoglio) to be one of the best books of the Italian 20^th century. However, I do fully realize that most readers will (fairly rightfully) agree to disagree with me.

Because at the end of the day this book is about something so local, from the landscape of the area to the actual challenges faced by Agostino and his family, that it is probably really hard to understand for outsiders. I’ve grown up walking, hiking, and cycling on those hills, looking at the farms and fields that Fenoglio talks about. For anyone that hasn’t done this, the book is bound to be extremely dry, probably too grim, and the small accomplishments and huge hurdles in Agostino’s way are probably going to be almost incomprehensible.

Yet, for someone who has grown up on those hills and whose granddad was a “countryside serf”, as they called themselves, much like the novel’s protagonist, this is a work of incomparable beauty. And it seems hard to believe that those harsh hills are now on everybody’s mouths because of their wines.

Se Una Notte d’Inverno un Viaggiatore – Italo Calvino

Another book by Calvino that is typically Calvinoesque: a cute love story, absurd situations, and the constant feeling that the author is just playing around with the reader, worried more about style and form than anything else.

Like often happens with Calvino, I got lost in his Pindaric flights. I assume that, to a very large extent, that’s exactly what the author wanted. That, however, is not exactly what I want in a book. I’m just too grounded in reality and I want a plot that, for intricate that it might be, is still logic and plausible.

Granted, realizing that he was playing around with the titles of the various chapters/short stories was actually quite fun, even for me. Yet, I wish Calvino spent a little less time patting himself on his own shoulders and congratulating himself on being such a gifted writer. Don’t get me wrong: he was undoubtedly incredibly gifted, I would just like to see a more immediate deep plot rather than an absolute perfect form (and, in this case, a perfect frame from the book).

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

My students, like all students, have a tendency to ramble. Entire paragraphs without punctuation, sentences that are pretty much paragraphs, subordinate clauses with no mains, etc. After their first essays (usually unreadable, usually on the First World War) I tell them to read Hemingway, in particular A Farwell to Arms, and see if they can learn by imitation. Nobody ever reads the book, but it’s a nice ritual I’ve grown accustomed to.

When I first read the book I was 15 and really struggled to understand why Fredric would ever volunteer to fight in World War One. I still ask myself that very same question, but hey. I also don’t quite know whether I was simply immature and focusing only on the main character, or whether Hemingway just didn’t really care about Catherine and the baby, but I barely remember that she dies and he is stillborn, although I clearly remember Frederic’s sad final stroll through Lausanne.

And yet, in spite of the perplexities I had and still have about this book, I consider it one of the greatest works ever written. 

Dona Flor and her Two Husbands – Jorge Amado

Probably the book that, more than any other, has made me reconsider my relation with magical realism. I read this after coming back from our honeymoon in Brazil, and my huge expectations were simply not met.  For the first hundred pages or so, the descriptions of the surreal daily life in the Pelourinho (Salvador’s historic centre) are funny and entertaining – but after more than four hundred pages this definitely grows old.

Vadinho is an interesting character, probably more so than the titular Dona Flor, but that’s simply not enough to carry a book of this size, and even his phantasmagorical apparitions become stale quite quickly. And it’s such a shame that I can’t appreciate the author of the books that were the first gift from my dad to my mom (and also, according to the former, the main reason why she agreed to go out with him in the first place). 

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago

I have the feeling I should have read some of Pessoa’s work before actually starting this book. Then again, my mother tried and found him utterly unreadable, and I kind of trust her blindly when it comes to literature (and, sort of, life in general I guess). The book is as beautifully written as it gets. Yet, my problems with anything remotely magical-realistic very much remain. Again, I probably should have read this book ten years ago.

Ricardo Reis is an endearing character much like Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira is (or is it just the Portuguese atmosphere that surrounds the characters that makes me put the two together?), but if you have to patiently accept your death in a dream-like passage, I would suggest going through the corn in a field in Iowa with Shoeless Joe Jackson, rather than walking with Fernando Pessoa to his graveyard.