“I think people who only have good experiences are not very interesting.”
Chosen as the book for the second appointment of the GLOB reading group (Gruppo di Lettura Occasioni d’incontro – BooktoMi – BooktoMi), we recommend it for the same purpose to other readers, because it is capable of lighting fires of unexpected discussions.
But let’s start with the plot. James Sveck is an apparently normal life boy of the American upper middle class. Close to enrolling at university, although amidst many doubts, his existence is completely taken up by family events without any foothold. Divorced parents, a mother who thinks more about her sanity (after the failure of her third marriage), a father attentive to his career as a lawyer and to appearances and a sister in love with one of his professors, so much so as to change the world in which the his name. The events that accompany his maturation and family relationships represent the fulcrum of the text.
We were taken by surprise within GLOB the clear dichotomy between the various readers that the discussion had a precise generational borderline, a precise mirror of the times, and of how adolescent being lived in a different way from yesterday’s youth with the young people of today. A James of yesterday can in fact be a young Holden of today, with the substantial difference that the former tries to shut the world out the door and does not want to be accepted, while the latter is completely different.
The writing and timing of the dialogues are completely Anglo-Saxon, so a reader passionate about that stylistic form will certainly experience greater pleasure in scrolling through the pages. We would like to read the text in the original language, certain that many references have necessarily been left on the street, as in the reference text that we have cited above (Il Giovane Holden), which already from the title has lost much of its magic that the writer wanted to give the reader.
A merit of the text is certainly its being out of time, if there had not been some precise historical references, it could have been written in any period from the second post-war period to today. An added value, in our opinion, inestimable. As well as the precise picture that he manages to give of US society, full of hypocrisy that can make you sick, especially when viewed under the magnifying glass of a young man looking for a place in the world.
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Peter Cameron, Un giorno questo dolore ti sarà utile, Adelphi, Milano, 2007
Original edition: Someday this pain will be useful to you, Frances Foster Books, New York, 2007