Due - Enrico Brizzi

 

It must be hard to have written one hugely successful book, and follow it up with a list of very uninspiring novels, and Brizzi was just trying to milk (again) the one thing that gave him fame. 

I was expecting/hoping this book would be a sequel covering Aidi and Alex's lives 30 years after their high-school years - that kind of nostalgic operation (kind of like in Trainspotting 2) I could have got behind. 

Instead, this is an immediate sequel of Jack Frusciante E' Uscito dal Gruppo and it just doesn't work for me - Aidi is boring, on a high-school exchange that I look down upon because I am a snob, in a place that I find uninspiring, and the charm of interrail travelling and backpacking like Alex has long lost its appeal for me. 

Still, I'm reasonably happy to have read this because, while this is not a good book by any measure, I liked the original one enough to bring myself to care a bit about its sequel and it was obviously an easy way to pass a day or two during the Christmas holiday. Still, Enrico Brizzi, please, move on...

I Fratelli Michelangelo - Vanni Santoni

 

 

Apparently there are still authors in Italy who a) know how to write, b) have something to say, c) don't spend every other page congratulating themselves for being "oh so very good and look how elaborate are my metaphors" (more on that, and on Nicola Lagioia, later). Seriosuly, the overlap between a) b) and c) is really rather minimal.

This is a book that my wise mother suggested, and it was - as often happens - a really good piece of advice. At the time I hadn't read such an enjoyable Italian book since Piperno's Il Fuoco Amico dei Ricordi, and I Fratelli Michelangelo might be partially responsible for my decision to have a road trip of sorts around Tuscany with my family in a few weeks.

I loved it because of the depth of the characters and the breadth of interests that Santoni quite clearly has, but it's also a book written by an author who is still a bit raw, or at least someone who quite clearly didn't know how to end an ohterwise remarkable novel. 

Then again, when I was young an Italian rap band used to sing "who cares about being Zucchero [Italian singer with raspy voice, btw] when Joe Cocker is already around?", and one can definitely ask the same in this case: is there a point to a novel like this, when Franzen wrote The Corrections way before? I'd say there is, but plenty of people would probably disagree.

Flights - Olga Tokarczuk

  

 

I try to use my Italian library subscription to read books originally written either in Italian or in a language that I don't speak. Having read dozens of Italian novels throughout 2022, I decided to start 2023 with something else, and opted for the 2018 Nobel Prize winner.

And I spent a few hundred pages wondering why she won a Nobel Prize.

Or why this book got published really.

I found a number of her pseudo-reflections on her approach to life and travels to be pretentiously and unoriginally new-agey.

I also repetedly found my mind wandering off as I read a 10-line "short story" and managed to retain a little less than zero of it by the following page.

To give credit where credit is due, I rather liked the story of Chopin's funeral, but that's about it.

At the end of the day though, it's probably a good thing I don't get to decide who wins the Nobel Prize, otherwise American authors would be even more over-represented...

 

Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow

Behold, a book by Saul Bellow that I didn't fully and thoroughly adore! And my last acquisition from the £1 Halcyon Books store in Greenwich before its closure.

What I liked were Henderson's back-story, his sheer size, and a number of his inner thoughts and dialogues with himself. Then again, all of these things - except the size! - are the things I normally love in Bellow's books.

What I was far from being comfortable with was him going to Africa and playing (an arguably well-intentioned) god. When he does get things epically wrong and blows up the village's cistern, I wasn't happy that he was being put in his place. I could only think about the lives destroyed by his act and about the (very) rich white man who would then move to the next village (with all the guilt in the world, obviously, but also with his millions).

Had I read this book when it was first published I would have probably reacted differently. But it would have been quite hard, because, well, that was 28 years before I was born...

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Having almost run out of books at home, I am now going back to the 18^th century.  And it’s actually better than I expected. Gulliver’s Travels surprised me by not just being about Lilliput (but then again, that’s solely due to my ignorance), by being written in a remarkably understandable English, and crucially by not being boring.

Not all travels are as interesting – the third one in particular gets to be fairly dull after a while, at least for me – and some of Swift’s comments just make you cringe (the depiction of women being one, but also the continuous praise of Britain and its empire).

But the irony and criticism are still fairly current, although one thing that I found really curious is that for all the things that Swift imagined, he never seemed to envisage a different political system other than a monarchy (at least for humans).

Gulliver’s Travels was a surprisingly pleasant read, but that’s probably also because at the end of it all he comes back to “his” (and also “my”) Rotherhithe. 

Seta – Alessandro Baricco

A book that my wife received from one of my relatives some ten years or so – probably given to her because back then her Italian wasn’t yet absolutely faultless like it is now and/or because she had liked Novecento.

And I actually kind of liked it, which came to me as a rather big surprise. Not so much because I don’t normally like Baricco, but mostly because I’m often not too fond of the people who cite him as one of their favourite authors (unless they are 16 or less, in that case all, or at least some, is forgotten). Yes, I am an awful snob. I honestly have to admit that spending an hour reading this story (defining it a novella would be too much) was quite enjoyable. Yet, I don’t have that much to say – yes, the book was nice enough, but has the literary weight of its silkworms. 

Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck

A book that I read for my office’s book club – a clear step in the right direction, but still not a particularly good read (and the fact that I am labeling a book by Steinbeck in this way makes me want to hit myself!).

The problem for me is probably that there are so many works of fiction and non-fiction about travelling around the US that it’s so easy to make comparisons, and these don’t really favour Travels with Charley. If one sees this book as a fictionalized travel account, then it doesn’t come close to comparing to On the Road. If one sees it as a non-fiction description of Steinbeck’s travels as a self-styled bum (and I really don’t think you can consider yourself one when you are that successful and popular a writer!) then Jack London’s The Road is miles above.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m not that fond of dogs. Or that being married to a Latin American woman I’m bothered by the sub-header “In Search of America” for something that is only limited to the USA. Or even that I often found myself thinking how many of the manly men that he encountered on his journey would have voted Trump. 

The Road – Jack London

And exactly four months after my baby’s birth, I am now fully caught up with the books I have been reading lately. This was an old book that my mom passed onto me because they had two copies and were going to donate one to our local library if I wasn’t going to pick it up.

I had never read any Jack London (unless you count children versions of White Fang and The Call of the Wild) and The Road, in particular at the start, just blew my mind. The first couple of sections beat pretty much all the other books on American economic crises that I have read (except for Grapes of Wrath – that remains at the very top, despite the fact that I am aware of the fact that it deals with another recession).

However, after one gets the general idea, the book has a tendency to repeat itself quite frequently (I’m not quite sure how many “blinds” London jumped on in those two hundred pages!). That said, it remains an excellent read, and it is surprisingly humorous for a 19^th century collection of anecdotes about hardship and deprivation!

Chocolat – Joanne Harris

I found this old best-seller in a phone box turned book exchange in Lewisham and I’ve only really picked it up because once upon a time my mom won a literary award that was presented to her by Joanne Harris (I was more interested in the 10kg of chocolate that came with it though).

Unfortunately, the book is way more The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul (minus its underlying racism and a little less shallow) than Babette’s Feast. The characters are overall so dreadfully predictable, the attacks on the Catholic Church and on life in small villages not inventive, and the plot, well, borderline pathetic. The only remotely interesting part was the children story-esque ending, with the evil priest gorging on chocolate before fleeing.

Really not a wonder then that this book sold so many copies. 

The Page Turner – David Leavitt

The random books one ends up reading when one (or one’s wife) picks up a large pile of novels primarily because they are free. My parents had been talking for years about While England Sleeps, so I figured I should give Leavitt a try.

It was an enjoyable and remarkably light read. The one issue, though, is that I really didn’t find much in the book that I could relate to: as an Italian expat with very little intention of ever going back to the country I didn’t really find anything too magic in the – rather standard – poetic and idyllic descriptions of Rome; as the stereotypical manly heterosexual man, I found little interest in the heady journey of sexual discovery of the main character; and as a spoiled only child who always got along rather well with his mother, I had very little interest in the relatively problematic relationship between the titular Page Turner and his mom.

So yeah, a good book to read on a Sunday afternoon while one is trying not to think of the state of his legs after running 18 miles (damn marathon training…), but that’s about it for me…

The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

Had I read this book when my mum suggested it to me a dozen years ago, I would have probably understood my classmates from Newfoundland a lot better… I always thought this was going to be a nice read but little more. Man was I wrong…

There are new layers to Quoyle’s personality and new hidden aspects of his family history in every chapter (and I do realize that this sounds like a trite comment given by a mediocre reader to an average book, but I swear it isn’t the case – at least for the latter part of the statement). The blatant disrespect for the English grammar of most of the novel’s characters (even the journalists) makes their dialogues realistic and, for want of a better term, absolutely sea-worthy (although the “yarrs” made me think of The Simpsons a bit too much…). And the anecdotes disseminated throughout the book are of the kind that can only be told in the wildest parts of Canada.

However, knowing that Julianne Moore portrayed Wavey in the movie taken from the book (which I haven’t seen yet, and probably will not in all honesty) I had her incredible freckled face in my mind all the time, and I just couldn’t understand why Quoyle wouldn’t fall in love with her sooner…

Us – David Nicholls

And with this I have now officially read all the books by David Nicholls. Hardly an accomplishment, considering he has written four and that reading them is so effortless. A bit too effortless to be honest…

Us is a great read when you are bored during a long journey between a Northern Italy warm enough to still swim in the Mediterranean in November and a windy and rainy South-East England, but little more than that. Just as One Day and The Understudy, Us is about the dynamics of a mismatched couple – something whose novelty wears off after a (short?) while. And, much like One Day, the book is saved from being excessively trite and banal by a plot twist in the end (in One Day this came with Emma’s bike-ride, in Us with an added piece of information on the life of the couple’s son). I also have the feeling that Nicholls just had a lot of travel notes that he felt like cramming in a book (although at times this are quite interesting – like comparing the glorious Champs-Élysées to the much-less glorious Oxford Street).

While Starter for Ten was at times hilarious, and The Understudy was ultimately quite funny, both Us and One Day appear more ambitious and seem to attempt to tackle deeper issues and problems. To me, however, they fail and end up being fairly entertaining, but not as much as their two predecessors. 

Puerto Escondido – Pino Cacucci

I read this book after watching a travel program on Mexico in which Cacucci was gallivanting around the country with a couple of Italian comedians. Now that I think about it, there isn’t much to say about the novel: it’s just a series of wacky adventures that lead the main character to end up in the Mexican village of Puerto Escondido.

It’s just that – not a masterpiece, not a work of great literature – but it’s absolutely lovely, and isn’t this what reading (at times, not always!) should be about?

The Impressionist – Hari Kunzru

Another 30p surplus copy that my wife bought at the Barbican library, and a novel that I later took on a research trip to Rome, where I would hit the archives in the early morning, hit the city in the late afternoon, and hit the bed of a centrally located convent (yes, I wasn’t swimming in money as a Ph.D. student!) with a book or a movie in the (very) early evening.

I’m not quite sure if I was upset with myself for not liking a book by Kunzru, or kind of upset with him for writing a book that I couldn’t like. I had very high expectations from the book right after reading of Pran’s conception (in its biological rather than literary meaning) and getting ideas about the kinds of reactions that his complexion could cause.

But, sadly, the novel was a bit vacuous (like Pran himself) and never really won me over with its description of idealized and glorified places (which, to me, remain very much idealized and glorified even when they are deprecated in the novel). I just felt like Woody Allen’s Zelig was a much more interesting (and likeable) chameleonic character...

On the Road – Jack Kerouack

"Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there."
"Where we going, man?"
"I don't know but we gotta go."

I had this quote written on a post-it note and placed on my wardrobe in Italy ever since I was a teenager. It took me a dozen years, and countless hopeless tries that usually stopped at around page 14, before I was actually able (mature?) to read the book.

Much to my surprise, by the time I was 27 I was actually able to read On the Road and, even more surprisingly, I didn’t find it dated at all. The story is made even more interesting by the fact that so many of its characters are actually disguised real-life artists (including Burroughs – and the fact that I really didn’t like Naked Lunch doesn’t mean I didn’t find his life fascinating).

Some of Sal’s trips are more exciting than others, but I had the feeling that, ever since crossing into Mexico for the first time in the fourth part, the quality of the books rises to new heights. And the final scene is a coming-of-age and end-of-an-era realization of epic proportions.

A Cidadela Inventada – Pihba Cavalcanti

And for my 150^th post, a book by, erm, my father in law (and with this second one, I promise, I am done with books by family, friends, etc.). Jokes aside, a couple of years ago every bookstore in Brazil had a few copies of the novel, so it actually deserves to be here in its own right.

The book is a clear declaration of love from its author to his city (Recife, in Pernambuco – Brazil) and the amount of research that has gone into its more historic pages is really impressive. All the characters are funny, if a bit goofy, and the reader is naturally drawn to them.

As I predicted, I enjoyed the sections of the novel that deal with the development of the city during the Dutch period much more than the dream-like science-fiction (it’s not a coincidence that one of the author’s favourite books is Calvino’s Cosmicomiche). Also, I read the book in Portuguese, a language I can read only reasonably well and can’t speak at all, so a number of the subtleties of the novel probably escaped me (that said, I discovered some amusing assonances between Portuguese and the Piedmontese dialect – something that I found utterly random...).