Embers - Sándor Márai

 

After reading The Door I felt that I should read another Hungarian book in the hope of striking gold again. 

What I struck, ultimately, wasn't gold, at least not for me. Yet, it was a pleasant read about friendship and love in front of a dying fire (and/or in front of a dying empire, despite the fact that by the book's publication Austria-Hungary had been dissolved for more than 20 years). 

It is one of those books whose plot I can't remember, but I do remember the sensations it evoked. Still, as far as authors covering (and celebrating) the decadence of a former glorious central European empire go, Joseph Roth wins, hands down. 

Thus Bad Begins - Javier Marías

 

Marías came to do a talk at LSE shortly after Thus Bad Begins some seven years ago. I didn't feel the desperate urge to buy the book and get it signed at the end (instead opting for A Heart So White) and I'm happy to report that my hunch was correct. 

Perfectly flowing prose can only take you so far when the mysteries and secrets surrounding the characters are not particularly interesting (and the final revelations not excessively surprising). The fact that I read this book right after reading another underwhelming one with a much anticipated suicide at the centre (A Little Life) also didn't help. 

Or maybe I just prefer my own kind of Mediterranean fascists, as I often find Italian books discussing the prolonged influence of our regime on our current society much more interesting. 

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

With my wife and baby daughter gone for six weeks (!!) I decided this period was my best chance to read the thickest book I had on my shelves.

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most gripping books I’ve ever read – parts of it reminded me of Stevenson, others of Verne, and I suspect quite a few would have reminded me of Hugo (this remains only a suspicion because, erm, I’ve never actually read any Hugo). The vendetta is at times a bit too prolonged, and I would honestly differentiate between the degree of guilt of Fernando, Danglars, Villefort and Caderousse, but I don’t really hold Dantès responsible for the death of young Edourad de Villefort (much like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dantès plays no role in the outcome of this subplot).

However, for spellbinding that the book is, I really don’t think this is great literature. It’s honestly just a bit too easy to read and to follow (the only intimidating thing being the thickness of it in the end), I never got even remotely confused by the plot or by the characters in it. As one of my colleagues rightfully said, it’s probably just a book that used to be low-brow and that is now considered to be high-brow because of the passage of time and historical setting.  

The Great Gatsby – Francis Scott Fitzgerald

I read this book at 17, an old paperback that my grandma had bought with a cheesy magazine (disclaimer: she bought the magazine to get the book as my grandma was, in her way, a good reader – and being on a budget she was the queen of discounted first issues and random promotional offers in the town’s newsagent).

And that’s where the poetry ends. Because, again, I wonder why I should care about Gatsby, Daisy, or even Nick. In all honesty, I wasn’t this critical when I first read the book, but just because I was still moving my first tentative steps in the world of the greats of the twentieth century and i thought that I should like – or pretend to like – everything that had been labelled a masterpiece. And call me naive, but I’d like to think that I would have stopped being star-struck by these rich New Yorkers way before Nick.

A Ciascuno il Suo – Leonardo Sciascia

Copying and pasting the first line I used for my post on La Scomparsa di Majorana: Another great little book by Sciascia. In this novel Sciascia paints, with his usual realism, an accurate picture of the intrigues of a small town in Southern Italy, with its thirst for vengeance and the oppressive Catholic values (more oppressive than the Church itself).

As a reader, I felt proud of Laurana’s discoveries and intuition. Yet, since the character is an intellectual, I imagined that his aloofness would have been enough to ensure his safety. Clearly, being Italy and being a novel about an informal investigation on a mysterious murder, his safety might shouldn’t have exactly been taken for granted.

Uomini e No – Elio Vittorini

Italian youth is extremely politicized. Even in the early 2000s most of our weekends were spent yelling “Fascista”, or “Comunista”, with the suffix “di merda” to kids across the street (I was on the yelling end of the earlier, and, quite proudly, on the receiving end of the latter). When interviewed about the great merits of Fascism, kids dressed in tight black jackets and wearing knee-high boots would point out that “when he was around” trains were leaving on time, swamps were being reclaimed, and the Pope came to recognize the Italian state (yay!).

Nobody ever pointed out that, had it not been for Fascism, we would have never had Resistance literature, Beppe Fenoglio, and Elio Vittorini. Yes, their style was crude, the pages that described the lull between battles often more interesting than the ones about their fights, and the number of cigarettes their main characters would smoke was simply staggering. Yet, these books are possibly the best Italian novels of the 20^th century, and Uomini e No is amongst the finest of them all.

The book was written before the end of the war, and the fact that its main character – of whom we only know the battle-name “Enne 2” – dies but makes a new recruit minutes before being killed by the Fascists is a message of hope that was probably much needed at that point in time. Then again, for much that I love them, I would trade Fenoglio and Vittorini for an extra 20 years of democracy and, possibly, one fewer ill-conceived entry into a World War.