“They had chased and waited for each other, only to meet again and again.” Let’s go back in time. Catania in the late 1930s, with fascism in power, winds of war ready to become a storm, cowardice and meanness tacitly disguised as nobility of soul and rectitude. Here two boys in their early twenties, Salvatore (known as Sasà) and Michele, meet one night on a beach and fall in love. A difficult love because the...
“She had married late, had become a mother late and was now aging prematurely.” Total light in the style and in the story told. A book that enlightens the reader for the narrative delicacy of the author, and for the desire to bring out of the shadows one of the least virtuous pages of American history. Total surprise for us, who guiltily did not know the author and the book, but for which we must...
“I’m working on a new problem: finding the value of n such that n plus everything else in life makes you feel happy.” Reading Cameron is an experience that everyone should have at least once in their life. In his writings he manages to describe the void that accumulates inside man, like the rings of a tree. A void that cannot be filled in any way, a solitude for which we are always alone in...
“The province still has the colors of the past.” Getting out of prison and trying to find your place in the world again. Finding any way to avoid being judged by looks as heavy as sentences, after you have already served a sentence. Getting out of the quicksand of invisibility in which you have been locked up, and when you are sure you have gotten out, that you have found freedom, find yourself inside again....
“…the euphoric state reveals itself for what it is, a manifestation of fragility…” When was Milan born? Pay attention to the question because it is not understood in the sense of the first agglomeration of people who reside continuously in a specific territory, but how was Milan as we know it today born? Capital of no one knows what. Once of fashion, once of industry, once of culture, once of finance. A continuous addition of...
“I would like you to become passionate about something that you can do for your whole life.” An Indian family living in the United Kingdom is preparing to experience a pain that is impossible to describe, that no one in the world would want to experience. The death of their mother leaves three little sisters without the most important figure in their lives. The vortex into which they are sucked will also involve their father,...
“Everyone is afraid and feels alone, and life is everyone’s prison.” Elba is a young teenager forced to live inside a psychiatric facility in the early eighties. Her only fault is that of being the daughter of a woman hosted in the facility, and when she passes away, rather than being sent to an orphanage, she remains living in the asylum, although she has no diagnosis of insanity. Doctors, nurses, supervisors and patients, each committed...
“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...
“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...
