Io Non Ho Paura – Niccolò Ammaniti

Probably the most successful book by Ammaniti, also owing to a movie by Gabriele Salvatores that was good but lacked the magic of some of his earlier works (Mediterraneo and Turné above all for me). I remember being utterly surprised by the fact that a translated copy of the novel had somehow made its way to the tiny Italian section in the tiny college library of our Canadian high-school, and I forced my then-girlfriend now-wife to read it when I found it.

The book tells the story of a kid and his discovery of a hideaway where a kidnapped boy is held prisoner. The contrast between the simple world of the local boys and that of the troubled adults is evident throughout the book,  but Ammaniti deserves credit for not idolizing and over-romanticizing youth. The book is a great, quick read – not something that will re-write (or has re-written) the history of literature as we know it, but something that can make the reader think about the turbulent 1970s and 1980s in Italy from a different perspective.

And with this I’m all caught up, having written something about all the books that I’ve loved, liked, or that I was meant to have loved and liked over the past few years. Or at least the ones that I can remember. From now on, updates will be a lot more sporadic (like a blog should be), particularly now that the new academic year is starting and that I am supposed to teach a course I have never taught before.

Mr Vertigo – Paul Auster

When I met Paul Auster at the literary festival where I was working, I only asked him to autograph one book – after all I was there in some sort of official capacity as an interpreter, and I didn’t want to run the risk of upsetting him by being your standard hysterical fan (but do writers actually have hysterical fans?!?). The book I asked him to autograph was a Turkish copy of Mr Vertigo, a wedding present for a friend of mine who was divorced within a year. Moral of the story: I should have just got an autograph for myself.

But I digress. Mr Vertigo is, together with Sunset Park, my favourite novel by Paul Auster. Master Yeuhdi is right up there in terms of mentoring figures with Melquiades, Ephraim Gursky. The rest of Master Yeuhdi’s family is also a great inspiration, both for Walt and for the reader, with the highly educated Aesop and the loving Mother Sioux.

The book’s back cover simply presented it as a story of a levitating kid, but it’s so much more than that: there is the already mentioned mentorship, but also friendship, race and racism, and the circle of life that closes itself wonderfully with the old Mrs Whiterspoon.

The Great Gatsby – Francis Scott Fitzgerald

I read this book at 17, an old paperback that my grandma had bought with a cheesy magazine (disclaimer: she bought the magazine to get the book as my grandma was, in her way, a good reader – and being on a budget she was the queen of discounted first issues and random promotional offers in the town’s newsagent).

And that’s where the poetry ends. Because, again, I wonder why I should care about Gatsby, Daisy, or even Nick. In all honesty, I wasn’t this critical when I first read the book, but just because I was still moving my first tentative steps in the world of the greats of the twentieth century and i thought that I should like – or pretend to like – everything that had been labelled a masterpiece. And call me naive, but I’d like to think that I would have stopped being star-struck by these rich New Yorkers way before Nick.

Puerto Escondido – Pino Cacucci

I read this book after watching a travel program on Mexico in which Cacucci was gallivanting around the country with a couple of Italian comedians. Now that I think about it, there isn’t much to say about the novel: it’s just a series of wacky adventures that lead the main character to end up in the Mexican village of Puerto Escondido.

It’s just that – not a masterpiece, not a work of great literature – but it’s absolutely lovely, and isn’t this what reading (at times, not always!) should be about?

Il Giorno della Civetta – Leonardo Sciascia

I have already talked about three books by Sciascia, but I just wanted to add a couple of words about this one. I took it with me when I moved to Canada, because in our little international high-school we were often asked to discuss what was good and bad in our countries, and I felt that Il Giorno della Civetta was a perfect picture of both.

In the novel Sciascia paints the Sicilian mafia for what it is, without romanticising it and without indirectly praising its principles (and its violence). I was also fascinated by the fact that Sciascia wrote from the viewpoint of a policeman from Northern Italy, a decision that I found extremely bold for someone as Sicilian as Sciascia. Had this book been published ten years ago, I would like to think that it would have enjoyed more success than Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra, but it probably wouldn’t have been the case.

One could easily teach Italian history through Sciascia’s books, but again that’s a risk we’re not going to run anytime soon...