Jack Frusciante E’ Uscito dal Gruppo – Enrico Brizzi

The book every Italian kid born in the 1980s has read in his/her early teens. Single-handedly responsible for my decision to call my mother “Mutter” for the past 15 years and for giving me false hopes about shy girls (in the book they turn out to be loving and sensible, in my teenage years they were just – with the benefit of insight – not really worth my time). It is also partially responsible for my love for cycling around my hometown on my vintage bike (although credit here goes first and foremost to my parents).

The novel is “rock” but it’s not of the calibre of, say, The Buddha of Suburbia – it is “rock” in a provincial and low-profile sort of way. The plot is offensively simple – just a high-school love story – but its appeal for Italian teenagers is absolutely undeniable.

My parents also really enjoyed the book, immediately stating that something was rotten in the state of Denmark (somehow, one of us quotes this line from Hamlet, or “to die, to sleep. To sleep perchance to dream” at least once a week – at times I mockingly tell my wife that “frailty, thy name is woman” but that usually results in a not-so-frail slap on the back of my head). And something was undeniably rotten somewhere, because different generations are not meant to both enjoy a “generation-defining” book, and because Enrico Brizzi never again wrote anything remotely readable.

Siddahrta – Hermann Hesse

Dare I say it, but I have the feeling that oriental mysticism transposed into Western culture often serves to hide the (spiritual) emptiness of our society. And Siddahrta, to me, is to a large extent a reflection of a readership that turns Eastwards to find a meaning to an otherwise fairly hollow existence.

I am being dreadfully harsh, I know, but I’d rather leave traditions where they are, without indiscriminately borrowing from them and watering down their unquestionable meaningfulness.

I am probably questioning the people who love Siddahrta more than the book itself, but I have the feeling that, in 1922, the novel might have actually had much more literary weight than it does now.

Man in the Dark – Paul Auster

An Auster book that encountered mixed reviews (at best) from critics and was quickly forgotten by readers, and one which I actually really liked.

Dystopia is boring, dystopia is overdone, dystopia is so very often the same old story. But Auster writes it differently: Auster is supremely talented, Auster is (nearly) always interesting, Auster is cynically critical of everyone (including himself, I believe).

And Man in the Dark is not just about a supposed dystopian future, it is about a man facing his own fears, the pain of fixing a shattered family, the dynamics between a father and grandfather and his daughter and granddaughter, the long – and possibly impossible to complete – process of recreating a life after a massive loss.

This might not be Auster’s best book, yet it is still better (or, if not better, at least way more interesting) than 96.7 % of the books published over the last 10 years.

Io e Te – Niccolò Ammaniti

As an engagement present I got my wife an autographed copy of the book (I had met the author at the same literary festival already mentioned a bunch of times). Then I also got her a ring, otherwise she would have been upset.

The book (little more than a short story) much like Calvino’s Il Barone Rampante starts from an improbable premise that is, however, the dream of many children (Lorenzo doesn’t do what his parents think/want him to do, and hides in the basement for a week instead of going skiing with supposed friends). The novel is sweet, surely because Ammaniti refrains from being gory for once, and the treatment of the detox process of the other – unexpected – guest in the basement as seen from the eyes of a child is character-building without being patronizing like in Grossman’s Someone to Run With.

A great novel for a (short) train ride. Not much more than that, but still quite an enjoyable read.