Il Caso Malaussène – Daniel Pennac

Well, it’s a French book but I’m using the Italian title (that’s the language I read it in, and there is no English translation yet as far as I know). My mother found this on the book exchange shelves of Turin airport, which are very well designed and very rarely used (then again, on them we found this, The Body of Jonah Boyd, and some other interesting books over time).

I honestly thought I had outgrown Pennac, and that the magic of the Fairy Gunmother and The Scapegoat could not be sustained (hence why I haven’t read a number of its following books), but this one deserves quite a lot of credit. Malaussene’s life in the 21^st century still makes sense (well, as much sense as the life of a former professional scapegoat might make!) because Pennac’s prose still works.

Crucially, the book tackles a number of issues that relate closely to my experience with students and millennials, and Malaussene's thoughts on gap years and summers spent “saving” small developing countries before coming back to our protected European homes echo mine to a remarkable degree.

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Having almost run out of books at home, I am now going back to the 18^th century.  And it’s actually better than I expected. Gulliver’s Travels surprised me by not just being about Lilliput (but then again, that’s solely due to my ignorance), by being written in a remarkably understandable English, and crucially by not being boring.

Not all travels are as interesting – the third one in particular gets to be fairly dull after a while, at least for me – and some of Swift’s comments just make you cringe (the depiction of women being one, but also the continuous praise of Britain and its empire).

But the irony and criticism are still fairly current, although one thing that I found really curious is that for all the things that Swift imagined, he never seemed to envisage a different political system other than a monarchy (at least for humans).

Gulliver’s Travels was a surprisingly pleasant read, but that’s probably also because at the end of it all he comes back to “his” (and also “my”) Rotherhithe. 

The Lost Sailors – Jean-Claude Izzo

Oh, how I miss the days when colleagues would give me their old unwanted books! This was the last gift from the man who introduced me to Peter Carey and Viet Thanh Nguyen (although also the one who gave me the awfulness that was Kundera’s Immortality and the uselessness that was Tove Jansson’s Winter Book).

The Lost Sailors starts slow and stereotypical in its depiction of manly men and their everyday struggles – these stories don’t excite me particularly, as I don’t feel the need to read about epic displays of masculinity and courage in late 20^th century novels.

But then, quite literally, the music changes (and for me it was in no small part due to the multiple references to Gianmaria Testa, the former station manager in a place near my hometown and a wonderful singer) and the story shifts its focus to love and crime – which are slightly more interesting than manliness, but not excessively original – and most of all to a not-so veiled critique of the way in which seamen are forgotten by the rest of the world. And that’s the reason why in the end I quite liked this book. That, and the fact that, for obvious reasons, it kept on reminding me of The Count of Monte Cristo.