Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood

Frankly, I would have never believed that a contemporary revision of Shakespeare's Tempest (with all its meta aspects) would have been such a hit with me. 

Instead, man did I enjoy this book. Theatre in prisons is something that has fascinated me since Caesars Must Die by the Taviani brothers. Plus, the wider setting reminded me of Bob Smith's The Boy Who Loved Shakespeare, just in a fictionalized way. 

And I do love, in this case, a revenge against petty career-advancing characters. Add to this the fact that, for once, I was able to see Margaret Atwood in all her quirky humour, and you end up with a book that I enjoyed well beyond my expectations. 

Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo

  

I'm definitely glad I've read this book. I most definitely enjoyed it. I also definitely didn't love it. 

I feel that there were many sections in which the theme of intersectionality was pushed in too academic a way. From that point of view, a number of other authors (academic and not strictly speaking so) would have been more appealing to me. 

On the other hand, when the characters are presented and interact in what feels - to me - like a more free-flowing way, then the book turns into the equivalent of a good (if not as humourous) Zadie Smith novel, and I'm definitely more captivated. 

Or at least I think so (a line that at the end of the day should precede every single post on this blog).

Hamlet's Dresser - Bob Smith

An extremely random book – a memoir rather than a novel really – that my parents bought for my wife ages ago (maybe when she moved to London and started to accompany me to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, first at the Novello Theatre, than at the fairly awful New London Theatre, and then finally at the Barbican?).

To me the book is fundamentally divided in three intertwined plots/narrative lines – the narrator’s troubled family past and his complex relationship with his sister and her mental illness, his personal experiences as a dresser/stagehand, and lastly his Shakespeare classes for elderly people in New York City.

The first narrative line is soft and touching, and Smith is actually remarkably good at portraying the situation for what it actually is/was (or at least, that’s the impression the reader gets) without any need to sweeten it, or to portray himself as better or worse than how he genuinely appears to be.

The second narrative line is intriguing – reading about Katherine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy, and all the other great actors who crossed the stage in Stratford CT is like watching a very good documentary with random comments and anecdotes by people who happen to have crossed paths with some of the greats of the 20^th century.

The last narrative line is clearly the one that touches me the least, probably because I am one of those awful people who tend not to find too much poetry in the elderly and the remarkably problematic challenges they have to face on a daily basis – to me those are just painful and very possibly insurmountable. 

An Awfully Big Adventure – Beryl Bainbridge

I’ve never bought a book on a whim, without having ever heard of its title and without knowing anything about it except that it has a cool cover page. Luckily my mom has (although not often) and this is the fruit of a trip to a dingy remainder bookshop and the smirking face of Hugh Grant on a front cover.

Being about theatre, the book has a clear British air about it – magnified by the fact that everything is set in the years immediately following the Second World War and the (rightfully) glorified victory in the Battle of Britain.

An Awfully Big Adventure is an awfully heavy book masked (at least in its Italian edition) as a light-hearted journey of self-discovery. It took me quite a few pages before I started to understand the depth of the novel I was reading, but when I started to realize what I was dealing with I was completely wrong-footed.

I still can’t listen to a speaking clock without thinking about this book. And, for much that I don’t like Chinatown-like twists (something I already mentioned) this one totally shocked me.

Novecento – Alessandro Baricco

Either at some point in his career Baricco could really write, or maybe this book was actually written by his neighbour, his brother-in-law, or a random dude he bumped into one day.

Novecento is a delightful theatrical monologue. The implausible story of its main character is an endearing depiction of everyone’s desire for security and the fear of the unknown (ironic for a protagonist who has spent his entire life at sea). The piano duel with Jelly Roll Morton is a work of art, as is the idea of naming the main character Danny Boodman T.D. Lemon Novecento. Unlike the book, Tornatore’s movie – despite remaining very faithful to Baricco’s work – is just a bit too much (not the first time for the director, in my opinion).

It’s just a big shame that something so well-written wasn’t followed by anything of a remotely similar calibre.

Theatre – William Somerset Maugham

This was the first book by Somerset Maugham that I read. I’m not exactly rushing to read another one. Many would say that I should have picked one of his more seminal books, but this was the only one I had handy, and there are plenty of cases in which I loved minor novel(la)s of great writers. This just wasn’t one of those.

Having seen Eve Against Eve I think I had enough of the whims of glorious (or glorified?) actresses before even starting to read this. The book is undeniably well-written, nobody can say otherwise, and I understand why many people might find it a good read. I like theatre a fair bit, although not having been raised in Britain I’m not as crazy about it as many of the people around me are, and this is probably the reason why I ultimately saw very little point in this book.

Mephisto – Klaus Mann

For years, I thought that Mephisto was just a critically acclaimed movie (which I owned and never watched, clearly) – then a friend gave me this as a birthday present, because it was his father’s favourite book, and the rise of Nazism and all that. In one go I found out that the movie was taken from a book, and that Thomas Mann had a son who could also write, although not as well as him.

The book is a great and fairly quick read. It is fascinating, in particular when one thinks that it was published in 1936, at a time in which the rest of Europe hadn’t yet understood the full depravity of the Nazi regime. It’s a metaphor of the entire German society in the 20’s and 30’s, but I’m not excessively fond of ground-sweeping generalizations, so I prefer to read this book as a demonstration of the fickleness of over-ambitious people, ready to compromise on all their principles (which, probably, they often don’t have in the first place).

The Understudy – David Nicholls

Having lived in the UK for the last 9 years, I figured I should read more of one of the most successful young British authors. After all, before the start of my BA, Starter for 10 did get me incredibly excited about the prospect of going to university.

Like with all of Nicholls’s books The Understudy is nice enough. It touches the right notes and is gracefully funny. Hardly a masterpiece, you nonetheless grow fond of the book’s protagonist, and wish that things work out for him, or at the very least that he doesn’t mess up miserably.