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. 

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. 

Resto Qui - Marco Balzano

 

For me, this book was too ambitious. It had plenty of poignant ideas and events to cover: the rise of Fascism and its impact in a German-speaking part of Italy, a pleasant enough love story between people with different approaches to life and levels of education, the decision to submerge a village before WWII to make room for a damn, a hydroelectric power plant, and an artificial lake, and the final completion of the project well after the end of the war and the collapse of the regime. 

Yet, by trying to do all of it in a short novel, the author doesn't really do justice to any of those things: the condemnation of Fascism and its linguistic policies feels little more than a mild tirade, I didn't really care about the individual characters, and I was quite willing to chalk the creation of the artificial lake to "ah, that's progress, it had to happen"...

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.