“The good thing about a church is that it doesn’t really serve any purpose, except sometimes to instill fear.” A child with no name and no history knocks one night on the door of a house in an unknown town. It is immediately clear that it is not the first time he rings the door of someone he does not know, and also his need to find his father. The entire town will take charge...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “No more bones, no more muscles, no more veins: inside himself Octavio had autumn.” There are three pages, almost at the beginning of the book, three pages that introduce us to Octavio: it is practically impossible not to want to reread them at least twice. It is the painting of a destiny, nuanced and prophetic, like those paintings that the more you look at them the more hallucinatory details appear, faces hidden in...
“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...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “It was Morris Bober and he couldn’t have been a better sort.” It’s just that you read a lot of books. The further we go, the more the pages accumulate and the shadow of the stacked tomes casts itself over the days to come, gracefully indicating the readings we would like to face next. Slowly, imperceptibly, the analogies add up, the echoes reverberate, the amazement becomes numb. Of course, we always love reading but we adjust...
“My mother and father didn’t love me like they loved each other.” How much suffering can be in a family? How can it be addressed? How deep and intense must be the cohesion of the family, or the experience of its individual members, in order to be able to respond blow by blow to the challenges that life presents? The text talks about verbal and manipulative violence, which although they may seem very distant from...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “What if silence one day no longer wants to be silent?” There is a language that is dying and there are only two people left to keep it alive. But these two people don’t talk to each other. It is difficult to explain the magnetic suggestion of this plot. It contains the fascination of things that are about to disappear, the enigma and the search, the power of connection and also a certain...
“Joyce has never let herself be stopped, least of all by politics.” Daughter of Guglielmo Salvadori, professor of sociology, and of Giacinta Galletti de Cadilhac, correspondent journalist of the Manchester Guardian, Beatrice Gioconda Salvadori known as Joyce in deference to her English origins, is above all a daughter of the twentieth century, a century that lives intensely in its catastrophes and little interludes of joy. She will make of her the libertarian and progressive demands...
“The truth of the facts is useless and in any case it does not define that of people?” Flaiano, Rome, summer. Three evocative words that perfectly describe the book. Memories, walks, reflections that are able to make Ennio Flaiano known as an old friend, what he represented, indeed he represents, for the Italian cultural panorama. Ennio was none other than an Abruzzese transplanted to Rome at a young age, and which makes him the eternal...
The books chosen by Andrea Salonia This review is available only in the original language _________________________________________________________________________ Che sia poi effettivamente questo romanzo a vincere il Premio Strega 2023 ce lo racconterà la serata finale di luglio, la lavagna in nero ardesia, il gessetto bianco, i voti che salgono, e le malcelate tensioni di chi – gli Autori – stan lì in attesa (che il tutto avvenga, che il tutto finisca). Lei, l’autrice, Ada d’Adamo, non ci...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “I want to fly in the sudden light. I want to know what it’s like to have a reason to dance. I want all the love”. Each chapter forces you to go back a little: to those few lines mentioned at the beginning, excerpts from Milton’s Paradise Lost. He goes back to read them again and place them on the following pages, like a sheet of meaning that helps us understand. It is...
