“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “In the midst of all that terror, the screams, the heavy footsteps there was something else, something strange. Kolya was laughing.” Every now and then it happens that you mention a book and the eyes of everyone who has read it light up. It is not the effect of the “essential classic” (to be read with the confidence that the quotes suggest), nor of the latest editorial case (“The book of the year” and...
“In front of the fascist house he cleared his throat, picked up the saliva in his mouth and spat on the ground.” Italy post armistice of September 8th, brothers against brothers, native homeland, a land of contention by foreign feet, and raped by innocent deaths. The action takes place entirely in the Comacchio Valleys, where History – with a capital H – during the Second World War collides and overwhelms the history – with a...
“Times have changed and so have men.” Ancient text, first published in France in 1931, of atmospheres and settings now uninhabited for almost a hundred years of dust and cobwebs. The protagonist of the long story is the elderly nurse Tatjana Ivanovna, completely devoted to the Karin family, where she has seen entire generations of boys grow up who quickly became men. Almost as an elderly member of the family, in fact, she will accompany...
“We have already been halfway around the world: so why do we feel like we have never traveled before?” Paolo Rumiz confirms himself to be, also in this book, the pen of the wandering traveler that we would all like to be. A fluid prose that at times borders on poetry, due to the pool of words in which it invites the reader to immerse themselves. The text is a reportage of six stories that report...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “All his cravings combine endlessly.” It’s hard to think of a heart that isn’t also a battle. Some are long and devastating, others small and petty, but the heart always seems to have the space needed to accommodate even the most incomprehensible of pains. “Small body” is the crack in the door through which we can spy a heart in struggle: against absence, against loss, against fatality. It is a long story (100 pages) about how...
“She has entered a part of herself where she is absolute, she has a sword between her teeth.” Loss. Confusion. Fear. Courage. And: hope. You are opening a book that is a flow of lava, dense, incendiary, inexorable. Starting from the writing: no quotation marks, compact paragraphs, syncopated scene changes. All downhill, dragged down the mountain, we would call it “crescendo” if it didn’t resemble a precipice. It’s as if we’re waiting for a turning point that...
“Breathe. You are alive.” For those who know the author, and have also read her previous works, this book can be defined as what in television jargon is called a spin off, that is, where the protagonists previously appeared in other stories as secondary characters. Be careful though, because the ideal link between the books stops here, the rest of the story is a separate story, with its own beginning and end. The two protagonists...
“The brother-in-law thought sadly about the life that awaited him: his dying wife, his children, his work.” Collection of short stories that date back to the dawn of Cassola’s literary production, when in his early twenties he began to give shape to the soul of the writer that dwelt within him. Published in some literary magazines between 1937 and 1942, they were revived in complete form in 1942, only to be revived in 1962 with...
“I was a fagot that my mother had left him as punishment, he said. That’s why he hit me hard.” Chile, September 1986. A country in fibrillation for the anniversary of General Pinochet’s coup d’état. On the one hand we have dissidents who, with demonstrations and attacks, try not to bow their heads to one of the harshest Latin American dictatorships; on the other, the military who bloodily represses any expression of dissent, without making...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “…and then I held in my hand a story that was no longer true.” The “Re-Verso” Fridays are dedicated to little gems from a few years ago; this time we want to highlight a more recent one: “The shadow of the volcano” by Marco Rossari. Not a rediscovery therefore, for some, we hope, a new happy meeting. Reading this book was a summer. Not a summer of beers and fluttering flowered dresses, no, rather of...
