Divorare il Cielo - Paolo Giordano

 

I got this book as I had (surprisingly) loved Tasmania last year and, after all, Paolo Giordano had written one of the biggest Italian editorial successes of the 21st century. 

Instead, with Divorare il Cielo we have a very early, but very serious, contender for "worst book I've read in 2025". 

The plot is poor and jumps the shark about 25 times. The characters are either unbearable, unbelievable, or underdeveloped (in particular every woman other than the narrator), but preferably all three. Somehow, the book also made me sincerely uninterested in Apulia, which is now widely considered one of the coolest regions of Italy. 

It really felt like Giordano was trying to present himself as the Italian Franzen here, but fell way short in all things that make Franzen great, and just went way more wrong in all the things that at times make me question Franzen's actual greatness...

Telex from Cuba - Rachel Kushner

 

Having discovered that Rachel Kushner's Italian translator is a lady I met, I decided to read another one of her books (and didn't have too many reservations about reading it in translation). 

While I greatly enjoyed the writing, I felt that the book spent too much time setting the scene and providing historical background - probably because I'm reasonably familiar with the history of the Cuban revolution, partly because I teach about it, partly because I have watched The Godfather Part 2...

Still, once the plot "gets to the point" the book shares a number of similarities with many of my beloved suburban middle-class American novels, and that's a huge selling point. Also, it ultimately does a really good job of explaining how monoculture in general (and United Fruit in particular) messed up a country and its people.