The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

A book that I’ve had on my shelf for ages (clearly!). And, to be honest, had I also owned a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I would have probably started with that (which would have been a bad call, considering that I quickly came to dislike Tom Sawyer in this novel).

Am I at ease with the way in which Jim is portrayed? Not always.

Do I think Huckleberry really escapes civilization? Not fully, just see so many of his moral dilemmas regarding Jim’s future (and past).

Do I think this is a work of art? Absolutely.

Huckleberry Finn combines the sense of adventure of the best Verne, Stevenson and Conan Doyle with what is ultimately a great moral depth (sure, so many of the comments on slavery make – and well they should! – people cringe, but it’s undeniably a step in the right direction for late-19^th century white Americans).

But, to go back to my first few lines, I honestly disliked Tom Sawyer a lot – and I think that all the ordeals he made Jim go through in the last few chapters were just too mean, gratuitous and so not funny. So, despite liking Huckleberry Finn so very much I am not going to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer anytime soon…

The Gambler (and other stories) – Fyodor Dostoevsky

When it comes to buying me books I have fundamentally four categories of friends (from the largest to the smallest): those who don’t even try because they are too scared (I feel your pain, and I apologize for being a snob!), those who try to buy me books and fail miserably, those who ask me what books I want or directly give me book vouchers (always very much appreciated), and those who just buy me books and don’t fail miserably (I salute you). This collection of stories comes from a friend belonging to the last category.

Some of the short stories in the collection I found quite boring (White Nights above all, despite being one of the most well-known works in this book), but others I found absolutely brilliant: A Nasty Story and The Meek One in particular not only don’t show any sign of ageing, but they are also so incredibly touching (I feel no sympathy for the protagonist of the former, and not that much for that of the latter, but plenty of sympathy for the celebrating family and the wife and servant respectively).

The Gambler itself is a wonderful novel(la?) about human weakness – when Dostoevsky describes the main character’s “system” it appears quite clearly that his own system mustn’t have been too different. The one issue I found, however, is that after the bombshell of grandmother’s arrival and her subsequent departure the pace of the novel slowed down too much and I lost a fair bit of interest, regained only in the last few pages with the summary of everyone’s lives given by Astley. So yeah, they probably should have kept on gambling instead of leaving Roulettenburg!!

The Road – Jack London

And exactly four months after my baby’s birth, I am now fully caught up with the books I have been reading lately. This was an old book that my mom passed onto me because they had two copies and were going to donate one to our local library if I wasn’t going to pick it up.

I had never read any Jack London (unless you count children versions of White Fang and The Call of the Wild) and The Road, in particular at the start, just blew my mind. The first couple of sections beat pretty much all the other books on American economic crises that I have read (except for Grapes of Wrath – that remains at the very top, despite the fact that I am aware of the fact that it deals with another recession).

However, after one gets the general idea, the book has a tendency to repeat itself quite frequently (I’m not quite sure how many “blinds” London jumped on in those two hundred pages!). That said, it remains an excellent read, and it is surprisingly humorous for a 19^th century collection of anecdotes about hardship and deprivation!

The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides

And with this I can say I have read all of the books that Eugenides has written so far (easy – they are three). This was a Christmas gift from a close friend, and it came in the weirdest edition ever – the size of a small notebook, not quite sure why Picador felt the need for that.

It was undeniably very interesting, and with a literary weight much more considerable than The Marriage Plot, but it doesn’t really come close to Middlesex. Seeing that it was divided in five chapters, I assumed each one of those was going to relate to the suicide of one of the five Lisbon daughters, but three hundred (very short, cause after all it is the size of a notebook) pages go by between the discovery of the first and second suicide.

The suburban setting makes the book an instant sell for me, the curious first-person-plural narrative works really well here, and the moment when the narrators find Bonnie’s body makes your heart drop (despite the fact that it was declared from the start that all five sisters would kill themselves). It is however a shame that, despite the mystery that surrounds the household, Lux’s character is very clearly delineated while the other sisters all blur into one. Also, the fact that the narrators are invited into the house by the last four remaining sisters before they kill themselves makes them look more selfish (and potentially meaner) than what I think they really were. 

The Accidental Woman – Jonathan Coe

And this is the last of the books that I bought myself for Christmas.

Hmpf. It was alright as a read, but that’s pretty much about it. The humour in it wasn’t lacking, it was just not particularly Jonathan Coesque. And most of all, one thing is having an intrusive narrator – but this one was just a tad bit excessive.

Apparently Jonathan Coe wrote this novel while studying for his Masters – it’s nice to see that not all British authors are already great writers since their student years and that Zadie Smith remains very much a unique case!

Diary – Anne Frank

I had never read this book chiefly because I had a wonderful middle-school teacher who had us watch the great 1959 movie (in the same year she had us watch Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo, Norman Jewison’s Hurricane, Barry Levinson’s Sleepers, study in depth the Arab-Israeli conflict, and plenty of other things – easily the best teacher I’ve ever had while in Italy).

How does one actually read Anne Frank’s diary? Again a rather problematic philological issue: she wrote it thinking that she would share it with posterity herself, but everyone knows how her life ended and I’m not sure any reader can read the diary without constantly remembering that the SS will eventually breach into the Franks’ hiding place.

Regardless of that, and regardless of how heavily or not the diary/diaries might have been edited, this book remains an exceptional read. It is undeniably extremely well-written, and knowing Anna’s tragic end makes her comments about love appear even more cute (for want of a better term). I am not going to comment on her political acumen, because after all we are talking about a young girl who found herself locked in a flat for two years, but her personal observations  on the attitudes of her family and the other people around them can remain a priceless primary source for any young historian studying the Second World War. Too bad my own students probably don’t even manage to read a book a year. 

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

A book given to me for Christmas by a close friend, and one that all the fancy native English speakers in my high-school had to read for their courses.

Now, I didn’t quite know how to approach this book from a philological point of view: I am quite sure that as a rich white European I am not exactly the target audience for the novel, but at the same time I have the feeling that most of the very few readers left in the world are, like me, rich white Europeans – so who really should be reading this book?

To me the novel is very much divided in two (and not in three, as the chapters would suggest). The first part, full of Nigerian folklore, is the one that interested me the least (not because it’s Nigerian, but because it’s folklore, and I often have very little time for it – unless it’s Jewish folklore, I have a soft spot for that…) and I did not think too much of what I suspect would appear “barbarian” to many Western readers. I saw a lot of the descriptions of violence as either acts of war – which we are so much more scientific and classy at carrying forward, not sacrificing the defeated enemies but simply mistreating POWs even in the 21^st century – or plain and simple marital abuse – again,  I don’t think we are that much better than 19^th century Nigerians from this point of view.

The second part of the novel is the one that really got my interest though, when the white European settlers finally arrive. And probably the evil ones scare me less than the supposedly well-intentioned ones… Needless to say we are ultimately savages, but we all knew that didn’t we?

The Dwarves of Death – Jonathan Coe

The joys of walking into Fopp and finding that it has changed its stock of books quite considerably! This was a Christmas gift to myself (one of the very few I have ever felt entitled to) alongside Brighton Rock and Coe’s The Accidental Woman.

According to Jonathan Coe’s website this is his weakest novel, and according to a number of people on goodreads, the plot twists in the book are just implausible and the focus on music excessive. I disagree with all those accounts. Sure, The Dwarves of Death doesn’t even come remotely close to What a Carve Up! or The Rotters’ Club, but it was a great read on the plane (not to mention the fact that I am currently reading The Accidental Woman and I am finding that to be quite a bit weaker than this book). Also, sure, the plot twists are implausible, but so are the ones of Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels (to which the absurdity of the novel made me think more than once) and this is not a problem for me. Lastly, obviously there is a lot of focus on music, but this is not overpowering and it feels great to read of the inability of the protagonist’s drummer to keep a beat, much like me.

But surely I am biased, as the book is set in the same area of London where I live, although man it has changed over the last 30 years!

The Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt

After reading The Page Turner and quickly sending it to the charity shop, I was delighted to find this book and read something of literary significance written by Leavitt.

The Lost Language of Cranes is, without a doubt, one of the best books I read in 2016. What I liked so much about it is that it can be read as a gay novel just as easily as it can be read as a novel on generational divides, family crises, and so many other things. As a pretty straight-forward heterosexual white reader, I found that I could empathize and sympathize with all the Benjamins, while I suspect that a gay audience would be – understandably – more critical of Rose.

The book allows non-gay readers to reach a better (although by no means full, clearly!) understanding of the AIDS scare of the 1980s, of the problems homosexuals face when growing up and coming out, and also of the practical and physical aspects of gay sex – my mom told me Leavitt openly declared that he wanted to educate people in his books, and The Lost Language of Cranes clearly proves this.

Also, the story made me long for New York – a city that I am afraid I won’t get to visit again for a little while, with the baby and all…

Under the Greenwood Tree – Thomas Hardy

Just because, having lived in England for more than ten years, I figured I should have read some Hardy at some point (and this book came to me free of charge, courtesy of someone who moved out of our building). One day I’ll probably tackle Far From the Madding Crowd, but for now this is enough.

After struggling with Hardy’s prose for (and not really finding a meaning to) the first 50 pages or so, the pastoral atmosphere actually surprisingly started to grow on me. This is not a novel that I would consider as one of my favourites by any stretch of imagination, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. And sure, Fancy is a bit fickle, but I do hope her marriage to Dick is a long and happy one.

To be honest, though, I would probably have a much more elaborate view of pastoral literature had I ever read anything else by Hardy (or by George Eliot for that matter!)

Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

Probably the last Graham Greene book that I still wanted to read (I’ve read plenty of others, it’s time to move on). And, as it’s often the case, this one was a good buy at Fopp.

I actually think it was the Greene book that I enjoyed the least, and that’s chiefly because Pinkie is so purely nasty that it made me actually quite uncomfortable. It’s bizarre, I have no issues with violence (I love McCarthy!), or with evil characters, but nastiness is just a bit much for me. Ida is a great counterpart, but her desire to do good was just not enough to make up for the goosebumps that Pinkie gave me.

Had it not been written so well, I think this book would have ended up at the charity shop with American Psycho.

And I also could have done without all the comments on Catholicism – I’m Italian, I have a feeling I know quite well the moral contradictions of Catholic guilt and repentance.  

Il Caso Bramard – Davide Longo

I hadn’t read anything by Davide Longo – one of the most celebrated writers from my region – since my teenage years, and actually didn’t even know he was translated into English until I found this book of his at an Amnesty International book sale. Needless to say I made it mine.

Longo writes extremely well (too well, according to my mom, in order to be appreciated by the general public) and in this case the translator does quite a good job of preserving his beautiful prose. The book itself is a very dark crime story set between Turin and the Piedmontese Alps (it reminded me of Furttero&Lucentini’s La Donna della Domenica, but considerably gorier). I’ve read some reviews that criticized the author’s bleakness, but this worked just fine with me.

However, after saying that “the translator does quite a good job of preserving his beautiful prose”, I must also point out that in one case he took a sentence absolutely out of context and made me wanted to cry a bit: Bramard’s dad belonged to the Decima Mas, probably the most bloodthirsty faction of the Fascist military corps, but the translator calls them partisans (auch!) and translated the name using the roman numeral “X” – making it the X Mas, which is accurate in Italian, but sounds just way too festive in English.

Ah, and one of the Fascist thugs has got my surname, which stings a bit…