Riparare i Torti - Pino Cacucci

 

I hadn't read a book by Cacucci in ages. And it's lovely to see that he's still mildly obsessed with Mexico, and that he remains an excellent storyteller. 

As usual, he tells a (fictional) story of forgotten characters based on real events: the Italian sailors left stranded and uncertain in Mexico as a result of their country's entry into WWII. The story is compelling, and while most of the characters and rather dogmatically sketched (there is often little room for nuances) I found it quite easy to grow fond of a lot of them. 

Through the life of the "proper Fascist" whose identity gets stolen Cacucci shows some very justifiable sympathy for those poor idiots who were taken (or allowed themselves to be taken) for a ride by a regime based on hollow promises and misconceptions. Yet, I wish he wouldn't err so much towards the conspirational at times, because he has enough factual history on his hands to make for a really good novel without resorting to too many mysteries and subterfuges. 

Dimmi di Te - Chiara Gamberale

 

A book that I picked only because I liked its cover (again) and because I had vaguely heard of its author because of a radio program of hers. 

While I don't dispute the personal sufferings of the author, and the complexity of raising a child as an old(er) semi-single mother, I really didn't enjoy this romanced autobiography of hers. 

At best, this book's purpose is chiefly a therapeutic exercise for Gamberale. Good for her, but it doesn't make for a great for me, and her attachment to many more or less significant figures from her high-school decades before left me quite untouched. 

At worst, this book capitalizes on the sufferings of her high-school best friend, and on the life of her young daughter. Which just doesn't sit right with me. 

Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney

 

And the last of the Sally Rooney novels that I've read lately (and, actually, the last Sally Rooney novel I hadn't read). In my very own rankings, it sits as a comfortable second, but the gap between this and Intermezzo is significant. 

I greatly enjoyed the e-mail exchanges between Alice and Eileen that alternate with the narrative chapters, but I found it odd that, while the written communication between the two of them felt so real, the dialogues in the other chapters (and the overall dynamics of the four main characters) felt somewhat unnatural. Or maybe my experience of dysfunctional relationships is too limited for me to understand these people's interactions. 

Also, I somehow kept on picturing Felix as the bold "heavy" from Anora. 

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. 

Normal People - Sally Rooney

And this is the third book of Sally Rooney that I've read, and probably the one that I liked the least (though in all honesty I was most likely put off by the mention of the "Netflix series inspired by this book" on the cover). 

Problem 1: the decision to only look at particular episodes in the characters' lives and jump ahead in time feels overdone (I find it cheap in general, though at least Rooney does it better than Michael Cunningham in his latest book)

Problem 2: the 50 Shades of Grey turn left me indifferent to say the least

Problem 3: Marianne comes across as a bit too desperate and devoid of agency by the end of the novel, which I found a bit too much of a downer

Patria - Fernando Aramburu

In my desperate search for something to read over the last couple of months, I decided to read this widely acclaimed novel. Winner of all sorts of awards and, for me, very much in the mould of A Little Life - something so bad that it made me question the sanity of thousands of supposed intellectuals around the world. 

While I do understand that ETA caused a lot of problems to people in the Basque countries and all over Spain, the vision of the book feels excessively Manichean. Miren feels little more than a caricature from a 1950s B-movie. And while on critic wrote that this is War and Peace for our times, I think it's more like a very low calibre feuilleton (then again, I have never actually read War and Peace!). 

I unfortunately read this in translation, and the translator did a monumentally pathetic job: some  Spanish expression were translated literally, others more freely, the verbal tenses (already confusing in the original, I've been informed) were all over the place, and the whole prose was so incredibly stilted. 

The Door - Magda Szabó

 

I was really grasping at straws as most of my e-libraries didn't seem to have anything particularly appealing on offer. Then my daughter's Hungarian BFF came over for a playdate and that made me realize that, other than The Paul Street Boys, I had never never a single Hungarian book, so I chanced upon this novel. 

The start was a bit of a slog, with the focus on female companionship and bickering not being something I found engaging, but then I got into the novel ("getting into a novel" - what an awful turn of phrase...) and I was left in awe of what I think can be considered a small masterpiece. 

Szabó's book is one of small secrets that are justifiably oh-so-important to her characters. It is one of love between people who at first glance have very little in common. And crucially is one in which the reader (or at least, that was the case for me) finds him/herself justifying most of the narrator's decisions and actions, while eventually accepting also Emerenc's viewpoint and, at the end of the day, wishing s/he was more like the cantankerous cleaning lady who appears to singlehandedly hold a small community together. 

The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

 

It took me about a month to read this book. In part because of its fairly imposing size, but mostly because the book is full of snakes. Literally to the brim. And if my phobic self had realized that before the start, I wouldn't have even started this novel...

Yet, I enjoyed it more than The Goldfinch. It's a bit of a 21st century Stand By Me with a hint of To Kill a Mockingbird, detailing the stories that children tell themselves to explain events around them, the risks that they obliviously run and their first experiences of love or something resembling that. 

Needless to say, though, it's not exactly the kind of novel that makes me want to visit rural Mississippi anytime soon, and not just (though mostly) because of the snakes. 

Scheletri - Zerocalcare

 

I've read a few books by Zerocalcare, but somehow never wrote about them here (stigma against comic books, even for someone who has read a lot of them?). 

Of all the ones that I've read, this was probably the one I found most interesting (not necessarily the best, but the most interesting). It does have - as usual - its fair share of deep moments (in particular reflections in terms of what we know and what we do not know about the people around us) and light-hearted ones. 

More than anything, though, I would have liked to see something more of Secco and understand better why he is at times critical of Zerocalcare and his success (and, implicitly, his inability to deal with children, like most childless 30-something men). 

La Malnata - Beatrice Salvioni

And - finally! - a recent Italian book that I actually enjoyed. 

Maybe (actually, surely) not a work of art that is going to land its young author the Nobel prize, but hey at least it's a ray of light in the rather dark landscape of Italian literature. 

La Malnata is the story of two young girls in Fascist Italy. Written in a dry style that at times reminds one of Fenoglio, it features a plethora of secondary characters that are more or less developed (and more or less monolithic), but the two protagonists are neatly thought-out and brought to life. 

It is all a bit predictable, but I can live with that as Salvioni, unlike many of her contemporaries who know how to write (and just don't have any interesting ideas), doesn't seem to be madly in love with herself and allows her prose to roll quite freely. 

Recitatif - Toni Morrison

Is this just a short story, or does it count as a book if you consider Zadie Smith's intro? 

Either way, this is not something that left a permanent mark on me, probably because I didn't spend most of the book wondering which character was black and which was white, as Toni Morrison intended. And that's a huge limitation of mine, obviously, but very often - no matter what an author tells me to imagine! - characters in my head have extremely vague features (so much so, that at times for me Twyla is white, and other times Roberta is the white one, at times they are both white, and at times neither one of them is). 

Also, I most likely can't get into something that can be read over the span of an hour or two (short stories, novellas, etc.) as by the time I begin to find my stride is time to close the book. 

A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

An almost great American novel. Which is both high praise and highly frustrating. 

What makes it great is the eponymous protagonist, his relationship with the family of the narrator, and the chapters set in school and the New England backdrop. 

What doesn't make it great is the dull narrator (and the decision to dedicate so many pages to his contemporary life), the allegorical/metaphorical/mystical parts (just not my thing), and the fact that the ominous presence of the Vietnam War in the background has worked better for other authors (Auster, for instance). 

And from what my mom was telling me of John Irving I was expecting more fireworks in the plot, but this is probably one of his (relatively) sober novels. 

Leviathan - Paul Auster

 

With my most sincere apologies to 4 3 2 1 , I think this is the Paul Auster novel to end all Paul Auster novels. 

It is the first Auster's novel I had heard of (possibly the first that my parents read?), but, not being as ubiquitous in all second-hand bookshops as The New York Trilogy, also one that I hadn't touched until the Westminster library kindly gave me access to the e-book. 

Besides the traditional Auster trademarks (chance, mystery, fortuitous crossings of metaphorical paths) what particularly struck me of this novel is how relevant to today's world it still feels. Perhaps, after all, America and its identity (crisis) hasn't changed that much since the end of the Cold War...

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

I've read this novel from cover to cover. And I consider this an accomplishment. 

I found it pretentious, gratuitous, and self-absorbed. 

And whenever its author was short of ideas, guess what, she was ready to throw in some more violence. After a while, I was so inoculated to this escamotage that the only reaction it could elicit from me was a shrug. 

Also, priests and social care workers who abuse children. Now that's thinking outside the box, and not the oldest (and cheapest) trick in the book at all...

Luckily, when you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel, you can always kill off half of the characters in a road crash. On the plus side, they were all rather unlikeable in the first place, so I didn't really mourn their loss. 

Il Coraggio del Pettirosso - Maurizio Maggiani

  

A book that I had tried to read as a teenager but that I had originally failed to get into. I had another go this summer, and I really enjoyed about half of it, the other half was too allegorical for me. 

The half that I loved was the main character's story in the present time, in a melting pot of anarcho-misfits, with an illegal journey to retrace his Italian roots and a meeting with the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the (literal) deep dives in the port of Alexandria, and the erratic research into his past and his identity agains the backdrop of the Six-Day War. 

The half that I didn't like was the dreamlike section drawing parallels with medieval love and persecution, community and ideals. I'm just not built for stuff like that I'm afraid...

Gli Interessi in Comune - Vanni Santoni

  

I normally don't even smile at books whose covers promise to make you "laugh out loud". Gli Interessi in Comune didn't make such promises, but it was without a doubt the funniest book I've read in years. 

The title already encapsulates what the book is about; vignettes from a group of friends who share common interests: Magic: the Gathering (because they are nerds after all), loitering at the local bar and, most of all, an almost academic research into all possible drugs - legal or not. 

My wife was surprised to hear me laugh by myself every 5 minutes as I was reading this book, and so was I. Yet, this is not just a funny book, it's surprisingly deep and it offers and insight into the "normal" lives of the characters outside of their psychedelic loops. And much like in Trainspotting, a lot of these druggies turn up alright in the end, though a fair few of them don't. And I still struggle to believe that someone could pull a book like this out of the Tuscan province.

Gli Ospiti - Marco Magini

  

Marco Magini studied at LSE at the same time as me, though I never met him. It clearly was my mum the one who found out about his existence, his publications, and the fact that he was doing a book presentation at the Italian Cultural Institute in London during one of her visits. 

Of his two books, Gli Ospiti was the one that attracted me the most in principle, but ended up being a fairly average read. The plot is not exactly full of surprises, there are some fairly banal interactions between the main characters, and the whole thing feels (more than) a bit, well, orientalistic. 

Yet, he seems to have the intellectual integrity not to consider himself an actual writer, and in that case, as far as amateur authors are concerned, he is quite clearly among the talented ones who have valuable ideas to share. Also, he seems to admit that nobody really cared about ecology during the Gezi Park protests, which I find quite sad (that's not to say that I like Erdogan! I would have just liked the protesters to genuinely care about both their country and the environment...).

Due Vite - Emanuele Trevi

  

Yet another case in which I disagreed deeply with the jury of Italy's biggest literary award. 

I guess nothing but good should be said of dead people, so I won't speculate on the lives and merits of Trevi's departed friends. However, it felt as if this book was more about Trevi himself than a tribute to his lost friends. It's about the deep dissatisfactions of intellectual life and the small circles in which these people move, but at the end of the day it left me with very little besides the echo of the cries of an author who wants the world to validate his importance and that of his friends.

Spatriati - Mario Desiati

 

Another book that I read while trying to regain confidence with (and faith in) Italian literature. I honestly thought that starting with recent winners of the Premio Strega would have been a good move. After all, it's the biggest award one can win, and I'm not necessarily opposed to reading what the big publishing companies are deeming worthy of praise these days. In hindsight, it might not have been a great decision.

Spatriati is a little story of friendship (not particularly exciting), life in the province (been there, done that) and sexual transgression (which, for me, leaves a lot to be desired). To be frank, I would have probably been happy enough to read it if it was a book I had stumbled upon by chance in a second-hand bookshop, but to think that this is could be considered the high point of contemporary Italian queer literature leaves me somewhat perplexed.

The Thursday Murder Club - Richard Osman

  

Yes, I occasionally read contemporary best-sellers. They have their positives in general, chief among them they are so very easy to read. And this one has a positive in particular: I find its authors really extremely funny. 

As for the book, it was entertaining enough and funny enough, but nothing more. I guess I've been around - or heard my mom tell stories of - enough old-people homes and communities to be largely inocluated against these "endearing elderly". Even if they were belieavable, I surely wouldn't find them likeable. 

The one character I honestly do find endearing is Bogdan. Who would have thought: hard-working European builder who moved to the country ages ago and still feels like an outsider, and I liked him eh...