Sono Mancato all'Affetto dei Miei Cari -Andrea Vitali

File this under "Italian book read because the title was appealing" (in this case the loose translation is "I died and left my loved ones"). Also file this under "very low expectation, and just read for harmless entertainment". 

If anything, the book did give me something more than I was expecting (which really wasn't much). It is quite well-written, and ultimately does a good job of explaining the position of everyone in this clashing family and how everyone is both in the right and in the wrong most of the time. 

Bonus points for not pretending that the narrator's death at the end was a surprise (it was in the title!) malus points for having a dead man narrating the story (for me it didn't work in Sunset Boulevard, it was unlikely that it would work here...). 
 

Le Madri Non Dormono Mai - Lorenzo Marone

 

A book that I read on my phone as I couldn't really carry anything bigger with me as I jogged for 800 km along the Camino de Santiago this summer. 

And despite being dog-tired, I did manage to finish this and a couple of other novels, but none really impressed me that much. 

Crucially, with this book, I kept on wondering whether it is better for a man to tell the story of those Italian mothers who have to raise their children in jail, or whether we should wait for - dare I say it - a woman to do that. On top of that, the depiction of poverty and crime in Naples really feels gimmicky (here, as in so many other depictions). 

Fame d'Aria - Daniele Mencarelli

 

Another book that I borrowed from my hometown's e-library chiefly because of its appealing title (loosely translatable as "hunger for air"). 

Because of the themes it deals with (a desolate father running away with a disabled child who is growing into a man, the poverty of those who have a job and because of that are not supported by the state, the drama of the daily challenges that families on the brink have to face) one can't not like the book. 

Yet, it also reads as excessively melodramatic (or perhaps excessively influenced by the well-meaning values of the Italian petit-bourgeoisie) to really leave a mark on me, or go beyond being the kind of book that one has to read every now and again. 

The Twenty-Seventh City - Jonathan Franzen

 

I read this book because, well, it's Franzen and I've read every other Franzen novel (I believe - I know I could check on Wikipedia, but I can't be bothered at the moment). 

Despite the low expectations, I enjoyed this book "enough". That said, I was a bit at odds with the scheming police officer's background. Indian people have got a little less than zero visibility in North-American literature as as I know, and in here Jammu essentially comes across as the Palpatine of St Louis. On the other hand, Franzen does look at one individual and the influence she has on "her people" (both in terms of those around her in general, and the Indian community in the city) and does not seem to make (too many) harsh generalizations. 

The book packs in a lot. As is the case at times with Franzen, it probably packs in too much. And by the time the final pages come, the novel and its author definitely jump the shark. 

Silverview - John le Carrè

 

Only picked up this book because of the dearth of remotely readable titles in the Southwark e-library, but I really didn't feel the need for a half-finished le Carrè novel that had been left behind until after his death. 

I do understand that le Carrè had four children and they might have to find a way to live off their father's royalties, but I was assuming they would have enough of the money coming in from his 454078 bestsellers and respective movie rights. 

Besides questioning the decision to publish (and edit on behalf of a deceased author) this novel, I must admit that the book is actually OK, and I do enjoy the late le Carrè's faith in the - often excessively idealistic - younger generations. Yet, I felt that Agent Running in the Field or A Legacy of Spies would have been much more fitting final novels for one of Britain's greatest authors of the last century or so. 

I Titoli di Coda di una Vita Insieme - Diego De Silva

 

A book that I only got because I was out of ideas, it was on the landing page of my library's e-library, the title was catchy (it roughly translates as "the closing credits of a life together") and the picture on the cover was nice. 

All very valid reasons when picking an unchallenging read, and unchallenging it was. Too unchallenging actually. 

Noah Baumbach couldn't make separations fully interesting in A Marriage Story, and so it's rather unsurprising that a minor Italian author didn't manage either. Yet, I really could have done without the male protagonist's return to his only summer home with all its sappy poetry. And I do realize this is a male author, but damn this separation feels oh so very one-sided, and it really looks as if De Silva went out of his way to make the reader side with the husband. 

Trust - Hernan Diaz

I probably should stop reading novels just because they won a prize, though in this case Trust had won the Pulitzer, not a random local award handed out in the courtyard of a primary school!

What the novel doesn't lack is ambition, as it tackles the Great Depression from the perspective of four people deeply connected to the events and - each in their own way - rather influential in shaping the experiences and perceptions of their fictional contemporaries. 

What it lacks, however, is something truly gripping. The conflicts - open or tacit - between the various forces and characters often feel petty, and the final chapter, with tokenistic surprise element, is rather uninspiring and doesn't leave the reader (or at least it didn't leave me!) with any particular desire to find an answer to the last unanswered questions of the novel. 

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks

I must admit I had heard of the book, and assumed it was a semi-humorous novel (in my defence, I suspect I wasn't the only one) and not a series of case-studies, narrated with remarkable tact, covering the stories of a number of psychiatric patients. 

This book ended up being a very "informative" read, if one can label it as such, despite really not being what I had initially envisaged. The loss - of control, of inhibitions, and often of self - of the people described in the chapters is absolutely terrifying and has remained with me for quite some time. 

Yet, like a lot of other people, I suspect. This book (un)covers aspects of human life and illnesses that I find so disturbing that I would almost prefer not to think about them (not something that I am proud of, but something that I still need to acknowledge). 

My Family and Other Animals - Gerald Durrell

Not really a book I would have ever picked, but hey, we went to a wedding in Corfu and the reception was held in the location that had been used to film the TV series about the Durrells, so why not...

I do understand that lazy days on the Mediterranean and expat family life can be very appealing to certain readers, but this really isn't for me. I just didn't have much time for the explorations of local mountains and bushes, or for the poetically stereotypical Greek characters on the island. And the lives of very wealthy and entitled Brits hasn't been interestingly dissected since E.M. Forster. 

Also, for a book of this length and levity, it took me a surprisingly long time to finish it, which really can't be a good sign. 

Day - Michael Cunningham

It had been years since I had read anything by Cunningham and I was very excited to read this book. Too excited, as it turned out. 

I am now honestly wondering if The Hours and A Home at the End of the World were really so ground-breaking, or whether I had simply read them at a time in which gay American literature was a complete unknown to me. 

I found this book to be of a borderline astounding banality (hey, most likely I didn't get its meaning!), but I felt that the pandemic was just used a useful literary tool, the characters were not just unlikeable (which I can live with, we don't always need to love a novel's characters) but also unremarkable. And seriously, when the great idea is interrupting the narrative and only looking at one day in a number of consecutive year, there must be something wrong with your work (I mean, if David Nicholls, with his mass-appeal and lack of pretence, had done it better, you must really go back to the drawing board!). 

Expo 58 - Jonathan Coe

Yet again a novel that was suggested to be by my mother, and one that I didn't find particularly exciting at the time (and, oddly, one that I thought was surprisingly non-comical despite being by Jonathan Coe).

I read it a few months ago, and I already remember very little of its plot (a main character who is torn between his routine British life and the excitement of the Brussels Expo, some relatively low-level spying over ill-thought-out projects, and a fairly predictable love triangle). 

What has stuck with me, though, is the general hopeful mood of the era, at least in Western Europe, and that is really something we could do with these days. 

 

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace

 

OK, I felt like at some point I had to read something by David Foster Wallace to understand what the fuss is about. I couldn't start with Infinite Jest because, you know, it's 4 trillion pages. And I couldn't start with The Pale King because it felt wrong to start "from the end". 

Instead what I picked is a book that I had heard about and assumed was going to be a light read. And what a light read it was. Just a series of anecdotes stating the absolute obvious about the world of cruise ships, something that has a little less than zero appeal for me. 

I do understand that most of the material was initial written for Harper's, but I'm quite positive I'd find it all rather underwhelming, trite and, crucially, supposedly funny but really rather banale. Sitting in the dentist's waiting room, I'd pick up an old copy of Grazia over this every day of the week.