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...). 
 

Companion Piece - Ali Smith

  

Yet another distinctively Ali Smith-esque book, and yet another very pleasant read. 

But that got me wondering: has Ali Smith reached her plateau as "amazing author, but maybe not the best of her generation"? It feels like a pretty good plateau to be completely fair, but the fact that the style, the pace and the prose in her novels is always so easily identifiable after a while to me is suggestive of someone who experiments, but mostly within his/her comfort zone. 

Still, I'll pick up an Ali Smith novel pretty much any time I see one, in particular as she pretty much covers and analyzes contemporary events as they happen, but I'm not going to be looking forward to the next one in the same way I was when I had just started to discover her.

Unterleuten - Juli Zhe

 

The joy of having a) a well-stocked e-library, and b) a former student helper with a cultural profile that very few undergraduates can match. I don't think I've ever read a German book besides the canonical 20th century classics, because I liked them, and Young Werther, because why not...

I was surprised by how easy I found it to get into the rhythm of the book, despite what is for me an unusual setting. Possibly, if I knew something more about German literature or the reality of the former DDR I could have found more to criticize, but instead, with my limited knowledge, I found this book to be the equivalent of a good Franzen novel in old Europe, with generational clashes, contemporary issues and historical animosities that are grippling and relatable. 

Il Caso Malaussène – Daniel Pennac

Well, it’s a French book but I’m using the Italian title (that’s the language I read it in, and there is no English translation yet as far as I know). My mother found this on the book exchange shelves of Turin airport, which are very well designed and very rarely used (then again, on them we found this, The Body of Jonah Boyd, and some other interesting books over time).

I honestly thought I had outgrown Pennac, and that the magic of the Fairy Gunmother and The Scapegoat could not be sustained (hence why I haven’t read a number of its following books), but this one deserves quite a lot of credit. Malaussene’s life in the 21^st century still makes sense (well, as much sense as the life of a former professional scapegoat might make!) because Pennac’s prose still works.

Crucially, the book tackles a number of issues that relate closely to my experience with students and millennials, and Malaussene's thoughts on gap years and summers spent “saving” small developing countries before coming back to our protected European homes echo mine to a remarkable degree.

An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo, don’t let me down (you have found her, now go and get her)! Seriously, I picked this book from the Blackheath book sale because it was meant to be one of his best novels, and I was really quite disappointed.

While it is interesting reading about an artist who was “on the wrong side” during WWII and his justification for his actions, I find the prose and its tones to be, quite frankly, way too bland and pastel-like. On top of that, I’ve always found artists who don’t engage in politics because they are preoccupied with the “floating world” (or at least they are telling themselves that) to be the antinomy of a true artist.

Maybe, had I not had high expectations from this book, I would have enjoyed it more – but I hold Ishiguro to a (much) higher standard than this…

The Refugees – Viet Thanh Nguyen

The very last of the books one of my well-read colleagues gave me before changing jobs. Honestly, I hadn’t heard of Nguyen until then (and he’s a Pulitzer winner, which goes to show how much I know about literature probably!) – my bad…

I’m still not the biggest fan of short stories, but this book is one of the exceptions. What I particularly liked is that it mostly talks about South Vietnamese who were never happy with the actions of Ho Chi Minh, Giap and the Viet Cong.

Obviously, some of the stories are better than others. The meeting of the two half-sisters separated by Oceans, continents and culture is a bit bland, but the story of the old demented professor who confuses his wife and his past lover is pure gold, as is the opening one about the refugee and the gay couple in San Francisco.

At this point, too bad I missed Nguyen’s talk at Shakespeare and Co when I was in Paris last week!

The Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt

After reading The Page Turner and quickly sending it to the charity shop, I was delighted to find this book and read something of literary significance written by Leavitt.

The Lost Language of Cranes is, without a doubt, one of the best books I read in 2016. What I liked so much about it is that it can be read as a gay novel just as easily as it can be read as a novel on generational divides, family crises, and so many other things. As a pretty straight-forward heterosexual white reader, I found that I could empathize and sympathize with all the Benjamins, while I suspect that a gay audience would be – understandably – more critical of Rose.

The book allows non-gay readers to reach a better (although by no means full, clearly!) understanding of the AIDS scare of the 1980s, of the problems homosexuals face when growing up and coming out, and also of the practical and physical aspects of gay sex – my mom told me Leavitt openly declared that he wanted to educate people in his books, and The Lost Language of Cranes clearly proves this.

Also, the story made me long for New York – a city that I am afraid I won’t get to visit again for a little while, with the baby and all…

A Late Divorce – Abraham B. Yehoshua

Ah, the joy of Israeli literature! Well, actually it’s not as if I loved all Israeli writers, but I do have a soft spot for Yehoshua and Oz (not to mention the fact that this was another book that I got from my grandma’s “collection”…).

Much like most of Yehoshua’s works, this book is magisterially written. The clash between the expat patriarch and pretty much all his family members is both intriguing and ironic, and the confused (and at times confusing) sexuality of one of his sons is so well and carefully presented. I must say I was happy the book wasn’t just a 250-page long stream of consciousness from a young boy, as it looked like at the beginning – I felt like I had read one The Sound and the Fury too many already. And it’s just wonderful to read about fairly normal but fairly unlikable people constantly bickering and gossiping about each other.

The ending is very much clear from the start of the last chapter – I was really hoping that the imposing presence of the man who reminded me so much of Big Chief from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was just a red herring, but it wasn’t…