The Paul Street Boys - Ferenc Molnár

The beauty, and the simplicity of this book... I read it when I was 15 (4 years too old, sadly) and was fascinated by pretty much anyone named Ernest, Ernesto, or Ernő (be it Shackleton, Hemingway, Guevara, or Nemecsek).

I loved the novel because my generation, at least in a small town in the Italian North-West, could still play like The Paul Street Boys. The code of honour of their gang very much applied to that silently established between me and my friends at the time. And, years later, I really wish we had the maturity and wisdom to protect smaller kids like János Boka does.

And probably the fact that, years later, I finally went to Budapest and found it possibly the most charming city I have ever visited, surely added to my love for the novel.

Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne

When I was a kid, I didn’t really read. Which meant that by the time I was 14 or so I had to catch up on the books that a good reader is meant to have read in middle-school. I read this novel while on my bizarre first holiday, in Venice and with a friend of mine who was somehow not interested in visiting every single church and museum in the city (I was really boring when I was 14, probably more so than I am now...). Surprisingly, our friendship has never been the same since...

This book surpassed my expectations. By a lot. For a few days I wished I was Passepartout and had a side-kick as nice as Phileas Phogg (sorry, that’s the pecking order for me...). And the end of the novel, with the incomprehension regarding time zones, is still absolutely priceless.

I really wish I could go back in time and force 11-year old me to read this book then. However, if I had to pick only one book to force-feed to my younger self, it would probably be the one above...

A Ciascuno il Suo – Leonardo Sciascia

Copying and pasting the first line I used for my post on La Scomparsa di Majorana: Another great little book by Sciascia. In this novel Sciascia paints, with his usual realism, an accurate picture of the intrigues of a small town in Southern Italy, with its thirst for vengeance and the oppressive Catholic values (more oppressive than the Church itself).

As a reader, I felt proud of Laurana’s discoveries and intuition. Yet, since the character is an intellectual, I imagined that his aloofness would have been enough to ensure his safety. Clearly, being Italy and being a novel about an informal investigation on a mysterious murder, his safety might shouldn’t have exactly been taken for granted.

Guido Guerrieri – Gianrico Carofiglio

Like I’ve done with Simenon’s Maigret, I’ll group all of Carofiglio’s novels about lawyer Guido Guerrieri into one post. The books are well written and sufficiently interesting, but little more, and their success is a sad reflection of the staleness of the current Italian literary landscape.

Guerrieri is simply too nice, good, and politically correct. I’m not saying you need to have the personal flaws of Philip Marlowe to be an interesting character in a mystery novel, but at least show some personal defects like Montalbano, Carvalho, Maigret etc. One thing is being on the side of the poor and emarginated, another thing is doing it with this sort of holiness.

Not to mention the thing that bothered me the most about these books: all their supposedly cultural references were of offensive banality. I love it when a book introduces me to a new musician or an obscure film director I had never heard of before. I don’t need books to tell me that Clarence Clemons’s solo in Jungleland was probably the greatest sax solo in the history of rock music.

Il Buio e il Miele – Giovanni Arpino

Disclaimer, big, huge disclaimer: Scent of a Woman is an average remake of a great Italian movie (Profumo di Donna) taken from a wonderful novel by Giovanni Arpino, an often overlooked writer from my little town in Northern Italy.

The book is an incredibly touching portrayal of the loneliness of its blind protagonist. At first I struggled to feel sympathy for him, probably because he is a soldier, and that is something that is really prominent in the first half of the novel. Yet, with every stop of the train that he is taking from Turin to Naples, I grew to like him more and more. By the end of the book, Fausto is just a normal man, with his huge insecurities and his understandable unhappiness.

Why more people don’t read Arpino is beyond me. But then again, why more people don’t read is, in the first place, beyond me...