Uno, Nessuno e Centomila – Luigi Pirandello

How dreadfully boring! Seriously, I understand this book is meant to be one of the greatest Italian 20^th century novels, but can we all just agree that it’s a 150-page yawn in the 21^st century?

So, Vitangelo Moscarda (even his name is dreadful) is a loan shark and is having second thoughts about his life and his identity. So what? 90 years after the book’s publication all its brilliant points are just so utterly trite. I got really happy when towards the end he got mortally wounded – knowing that there were still a few pages to go I was hoping that the first-person narrator would then start telling some bizarre after-life tale that could add a bit of flair to this novel. Sadly, Pirandello just seemed to use the term “mortally wounded” rather inappropriately, as Vitangelo survives…

Or maybe I’m just being harsh because Pirandello was fundamentally a Fascist?!?

It’s a Battlefield – Graham Greene

What a bizarre Graham Greene novel, and surely one that, had it not been for the wonderful place that was Books for Free in Stratford, I would have never picked up…

Out of all the books by Greene that I have read, this is the first one to be set in England (yes, I know he wrote plenty of other novels set here, I just haven’t read them…). Despite being familiar with so many (almost all?) of the corners of London that he describes, I found these to be so far away from me because of their perceivable bleakness and eeriness.

It’s a Battlefield is an extremely interesting book, despite the fact that all the important characters are not just unlikable, but fundamentally plain awful (and rather miserable). However, it’s quite a shame that Greene never gives Drover a chance to speak ( after all the prisoner is by far the most enigmatic and interesting character in the novel, with his attempted suicide after avoiding a death sentence being one of the best plot-twists I’ve ever come across)