A Place I’ve Never Been – David Leavitt

After months of inactivity, let’s start a recap of the books that I’ve read in the last weeks of 2017 – and let’s make a solemn promise that I’ll update the blog more frequently. Or at least that I’ll try.

A Place I’ve Never Been is a typical book from the surprising second-hand book shelves of my loyal local farm – I’m not quite sure how many people read Leavitt in the first place, but I’m surprised that the few who do decide to part from one of his good books (then again, considering it’s the second Penguin edition of a Leavitt book that I find at the farm, maybe someone local is trying to educate the masses and instead, sadly for him/her, ends up educating me).

This collection of short stories doesn’t have the same literary weight of The Secret Language of Cranes, but it’s clearly enjoyable nonetheless. The problem is that short stories are probably not Leavitt’s forte – their characters aren’t as nicely nuanced as the ones from his novels, and the stories don’t seem as deep (a fairly obvious comment for short stories, but then again writers like Alice Munro manage to really make the most out of 20 pages).

Maybe, though, I’m just a bit annoyed at the romantic portrayal of the Italian countryside and the Italian language – I outgrew it all some 15 years ago. Or maybe it just drives me mad to see the number of misspelled Italian words thrown in there – although I suspect that in the early 1990s it really was a big deal to know what a machiato (sic) was.