Io Khaled Vendo Uomini e Sono Innocente

 

Even months after having read this, I'm not quite sure how I feel about this book. 

On the one hand, it's obviously important to talk about the people behind the trafficking of migrants across the Mediterranean, and show their place in "the system". 

On the other hand, at times this book made me feel as if the author was herself exploiting the suffering of migrants in her book (and surprisingly, the most gruelling scenes left me relatively unmoved - perhaps because we are all getting tragically used and routinely exposed to them?) while being a bit too supportive of the narrator's own attempts to deny his own agency and importance within the people smuggling network. 

The First Forty-Nine Stories – Ernest Hemingway

It is officially time to go back to blogging, at least a little bit, after almost two months. There are a number of reasons behind my disappearing acts: changing jobs, my daughter starting nursery (and me taking care of pick-ups and drop-offs in an attempt not to feel completely useless) and also the fact that I have been genuinely reading less, with most of my last month spent reading The Brothers Karamazov at a time that wasn’t ideal.

The First Forty-Nine Stories is a book that I actually read months ago, after it was given to my wife as a gift more than a decade ago. Much like other Hemingway books that I’ve read after my teenage years, some passages left me quite untouched, others made me positively shudder at their “manly man-ness”, and some just kind of blew my mind.

My two favourites were easily “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” – because in it I saw more than the standard Hemingway macho hunting story (for once I thought there was more than a hint of self-criticism and dark irony in the finale) – and “My Old Man” – a story that is often neglected but that I truly loved, possibly because that’s the way an only child is bound to feel about his father if he is perceived as being mistreated. 

The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje

A book that I had on my “maybe” list for years, chiefly because I thought it would have been very faithful to the movie. Turns out, the plot is way more intricate (as is often the case) as is the development of the narration.

But did I like the book better than the movie? Not really – while the character of Kip, the Indian sapper, is so much more interesting and developed than in the film, everyone else seems to talk simply too poetically for me (or maybe I’m just heartless). I had probably read In the Skin of a Lion at a much different point in my life, but I found that novel to be much more interesting of its successor (possibly also because it dealt with a Canadian past I was extremely fascinated by). 

It is clearly a good and interesting book, but, even in the confusion of an Italian villa half-destroyed by the Second World War, it’s all a bit too idyllic.Less poetry, more crude prose, and the book would have been worthy of a 9-Oscar movie. 

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?

Forest of the Pygmies – Isabel Allende

Having read and loved Paula I thought I would give an absolutely different kind of Allende novel a chance. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

It probably has to do with how old and boring I already am, but novels for young adults “these days” usually can’t match the quality and intensity of the old ones (Salgari beats Allende, Molnar beats Grossman, etc.). The three-headed monster is hopefully more a reference to Cerberus than to the Trinity, but its mystery is surely not particularly imaginative (anyone who has ever wondered why Clark Kent is never in the same room as Superman is bound to figure out the riddle quite soon).

Sure, Allende is commendable in her constant desire to point out that all cultures have to be not just respected but also appreciated, but in this book she says that crocodiles are amphibians and I just can’t take that! 

The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith

Every now and again one should allow him/herself to read something light. Well, maybe this book was a bit too light, but hey…

Unlike his Sunday Philosophy Club – so pretentious (yet with some banal and trite philosophical quotes for anyone who has taken a few classes), snob, and with a protagonist that is always so right you want to pull your arm off, just so you can have something to throw at her (cit. Joey Trebbiani, Friends) - The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency is delicate and sweet, or maybe it just feels that way because I am a lot further from the reality of Botswana than that of Edinburgh.

But can you consider a book that you read with this ease an actual work of literature, or is it just semi-pointless entertainment?