The Regeneration Trilogy - Pat Barker

 

What an absolute work of art! And to think that Pat Barker studied history (what I teach...) at the university where I work, and I actually had to discover her because my auntie told my mom about her. In my defence, she did graduate a few decades before my arrival at least...

The Regeneration Trilogy is possibly the best WWI book(s) I have ever read. Barker has a truly unique way of describing, through her characters, the ugly beauty of war, how it plays with the minds of soldiers who can never leave war behind and are often attracted to it for various reasons even when given a chance to leave. 

Her ability to weave real history and fiction together in an inextricable mix is also remarkable, and the last few chapters of The Ghost Road are an agony to read, as the reader clearly knows how things are going to end for Billy Prior, the beautifully troubled and scarred main fictional character of the trilogy. 

The Postman – Antonio Skármeta

A novel that I bought with my dad as a Christmas gift for my mom (the only book I ever recall buying in a supermarket and not in a bookshop). I still remember my dad explaining to me that Massimo Troisi, the actor who played the titular postman in the movie taken from the novel, was a wonderful artist who died right after finishing the film.

When I read it as a teenager the book made want to get into poetry. I obviously tried with Neruda first, then followed it with the Poètes maudits, Pessoa, Lorca, Kavafis and many others, but to no avail. I was probably too shallow for poetry back then. I should try again, but I’m afraid I’m not much deeper than I was back then.

Skármeta’s novel is about Chile, about its most illustrious poet (Neruda, clearly), and about the poetry of the everyday life of the Chileans. There are plenty of novels in which important historical figures mentor some young and uneducated locals, and they often run the risk of becoming trivial. This novel avoids that. Mario, Neruda’s postman, does not evolve into a luminary of the literary world, and probably this is the reason why the novel isn’t banal, just touchingly beautiful. If at first his inability to express his feelings and the need to recur to Neruda’s poems is a bit too Cyranoesque, some of Mario’s simple thoughts are actually reflections of very serious issues, both political and literary (after all, does poetry belong to those who write it or to those who use it?).