Mr Vertigo – Paul Auster

When I met Paul Auster at the literary festival where I was working, I only asked him to autograph one book – after all I was there in some sort of official capacity as an interpreter, and I didn’t want to run the risk of upsetting him by being your standard hysterical fan (but do writers actually have hysterical fans?!?). The book I asked him to autograph was a Turkish copy of Mr Vertigo, a wedding present for a friend of mine who was divorced within a year. Moral of the story: I should have just got an autograph for myself.

But I digress. Mr Vertigo is, together with Sunset Park, my favourite novel by Paul Auster. Master Yeuhdi is right up there in terms of mentoring figures with Melquiades, Ephraim Gursky. The rest of Master Yeuhdi’s family is also a great inspiration, both for Walt and for the reader, with the highly educated Aesop and the loving Mother Sioux.

The book’s back cover simply presented it as a story of a levitating kid, but it’s so much more than that: there is the already mentioned mentorship, but also friendship, race and racism, and the circle of life that closes itself wonderfully with the old Mrs Whiterspoon.

The Great Gatsby – Francis Scott Fitzgerald

I read this book at 17, an old paperback that my grandma had bought with a cheesy magazine (disclaimer: she bought the magazine to get the book as my grandma was, in her way, a good reader – and being on a budget she was the queen of discounted first issues and random promotional offers in the town’s newsagent).

And that’s where the poetry ends. Because, again, I wonder why I should care about Gatsby, Daisy, or even Nick. In all honesty, I wasn’t this critical when I first read the book, but just because I was still moving my first tentative steps in the world of the greats of the twentieth century and i thought that I should like – or pretend to like – everything that had been labelled a masterpiece. And call me naive, but I’d like to think that I would have stopped being star-struck by these rich New Yorkers way before Nick.

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?

Il Giorno della Civetta – Leonardo Sciascia

I have already talked about three books by Sciascia, but I just wanted to add a couple of words about this one. I took it with me when I moved to Canada, because in our little international high-school we were often asked to discuss what was good and bad in our countries, and I felt that Il Giorno della Civetta was a perfect picture of both.

In the novel Sciascia paints the Sicilian mafia for what it is, without romanticising it and without indirectly praising its principles (and its violence). I was also fascinated by the fact that Sciascia wrote from the viewpoint of a policeman from Northern Italy, a decision that I found extremely bold for someone as Sicilian as Sciascia. Had this book been published ten years ago, I would like to think that it would have enjoyed more success than Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra, but it probably wouldn’t have been the case.

One could easily teach Italian history through Sciascia’s books, but again that’s a risk we’re not going to run anytime soon...

Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno – Italo Calvino

A few years ago I bought for just a couple of Euros the complete works of Calvino. I got excited and thought I was going to read them all, then quickly got bored. Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno, however, is special. Not so much because it’s about the Resistance against Italian Fascism, but mostly because it’s an entirely different Calvino from the one I was used to – not fully realist (despite the fact that the novel has been considered neorealist by some), but not even completely fantastical.

The novel is touching and deep. It offers an allegoric portrayal of the internal divisions of Italian partisans that is both sad and accurate at the same time. The character of Cugino (Cousin) is the kind of rock we all wish we could have in our lives.

Yet, in spite of all this, Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno – probably because is focuses on the story of what is, at the end of the day, just a kid – lacks the elements of violence that to me are so essential to Resistance novels. After all even Calvino himself admitted that the book his entire generation would have dreamt of writing was actually Fenoglio’s Una Questione Privata.