The Comfort of Strangers - Ian McEwan

  

I often find myself surprised by how prolific a writer is Ian McEwan. And the more I read of his recent works, the more I am attracted to his more macabre past.

The Comfort of Strangers is bold, as it is ultimately a short novel about a death in Venice, but I believe Thomas Mann might have previously written something along those lines. 

Yet this Venice somehow appears even more plagued and insalubrious than Mann's, and despite knowing from the start that it's going to end badly, the reader is left caring for the main characters hoping that they make it out of their twisted predicament (though, as per the spoiler in the previous sentence, that doesn't quite happen).

Cartongesso – Francesco Maino

A book that I’ve read over the weekend as I found myself in the Italian north-east (where the novel is set) for a wedding.

Maino’s first novel has been fairly widely acclaimed (I mean, as widely acclaimed as an Italian novel can be…) and with this the author won the Italo Calvino Award. To me, that’s definite proof of the desperate scarcity of young Italian literary talent.

The novel is interesting for about 30 pages, then the stream of consciousness grows predictably stagnant (seriously, isn’t it outdated as a literary device/style at this point?!?) and the reader realizes that the book doesn’t even have a hint of a storyline (and as a rant against the system it gets to be fairly boring fairly quickly).

That said, I have to give credit where credit is due, and I have to admit that I really enjoyed Maino’s cultural references (Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees, Thelonious Monk, Giorgio Morandi – an artist who has to be “respected” if not necessarily “loved” – and, most of all, Drazen Petrovic). Yet, this is not enough to make me say that I liked the book.

Plenty of Italian readers will disagree and tell me that I don’t understand the subtlety and the actuality of this novel. Maybe that’s true, but I also think that most of them read about 3 books a year. 

L’Amante Senza Fissa Dimora – Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini

This was a very thoughtful gift by my best-friend’s mother, after I had taken her daughter to Venice (she was actually keen on visiting every church, unlike the girl I had previously taken) and right before I left for Canada (again, with her daughter seeing me off at the airport with my parents).

Fruttero & Lucentini were not the greatest Italian writers of the 20^th century, but for anyone who loves Turin and/or Venice their books are endearing to say the least. In addition to that, L’Amante Senza Fissa Dimora borrows heavily from the Jewish milieu and tradition, making it a sure sell with me. The love story is sweet, the switching viewpoints kind of neat (and again made me wonder whether Fruttero was writing one and Lucentini the other) and most of all the fact that I knew who Fugger was made me feel incredibly smug (more so than the usual, if at all possible).

Across the River and into the Trees – Ernest Hemingway

The philosophy teacher in my Italian high-school used to frequently ask us about our readings. Between Paulo Coelhos, Dan Browns, Khaled Hosseinis etc. I like to think that he often turned to me in the hope of talking about something that could pass as literature of some sort. I am also pretty sure I impressed him when I told him that I thought that The Old Man and the Sea was a very average book and that Hemingway’s real masterpiece was Across the River and into the Trees.

Probably that had a lot to do with the desire of a 17-year old to go against the established order (disclaimer: I still think The Old Man and the Sea is really mediocre, but probably A Farwell to Arms is Hemingway’s best work). And it surely had a relation to my love for Venice and to the fact that I pictured Renata to look like my love at the time.

This is the most sentimental of the Hemingway books that I’ve read (i.e. most of them, with the exception of – ironically given the title of this blog – A Moveable Feast and a couple of others) and also one that inspired me, at age 17, to go to Harry’s Bar in Venice for a coffee (alcohol would have been illegal) – standing at the bar, clearly, in order not to get ripped off. Funny thing is: I actually don’t really drink coffee, except before races, when I have a cup half an hour before the start and I gulp it almost like a medicine.