The latest addition to my website is Francesco Piccolo‘s Il desiderio di essere come tutti. This is a very political novel, telling the story of a man who is now fifty, born in Caserta, who joined the Italian Communist Party, as a result of Jürgen Sparwasser, scoring the winning goal for East Germany against West … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Francesco Pecoraro‘s La vita in tempo di pace [Life in Peacetime]. Though somewhat long-winded, this a worthwhile novel about Ivo Brandani, an Italian civil engineer. At the time of writing – May 2015 – he is sixty-nine and working for a company that is installing fake coral in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marco Mancassola‘s Gli amici del deserto [The Friends of the Desert]. This tells the story of two best friends who venture out into the Arizona desert to find a shaman/healer to help them with their problems. The unnamed narrator has lost his job, in the Italian economic crisis, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marco Mancassola‘s La vita erotica dei superuomini (Erotic Lives of the Superheroes). Don’t be put off, as I nearly was, by the title. This is not a silly, pastiche of superheroes. It is a serious book, where the main characters just happen to be superheroes. We follow the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sebastiano Vassalli‘s La notte della cometa (The Night of the Comet), surprisingly translated into English and, though out of print, readily available. This is a novelised biography of the Italian poet Dino Campana, a poète maudit. Vassalli has chosen to use the novel form rather than write a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Grazia Deledda‘s Elias Portolu (Elias Portolu). Deledda was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and she is still the only Italian woman to do so. This book, published in 1903, was set in Sardinia where Deledda was from and tells the story of Elias. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Luigi Malerba‘s Il fuoco Greco [Greek Fire]. This is somewhat different from Malerba’s usual somewhat zany distorted reality and unreliable narrator. It is a historical novel set in Constantinople at the end of the tenth century, under the Byzantines. As the title says, it involves Greek fire, something … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Luigi Malerba‘s Il protagonista [The Protagonist]. This is a novel narrated by a penis. It is not the first novel featuring a penis by a major twentieth century Italian novelist. Alberto Moravia wrote a novel called Io e Lui, published in the US as Two: A Phallic Novel … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Luigi Malerba‘s Il pianeta azzurro [The Blue Planet]. One of the joys of reading novels, particularly those from other countries, is getting different perspectives on the world. With Malerba, you certainly always get a different perspective – sometimes absurd, often fantasy, often paranoid, and always the view of … Read more
Having just done Sicilian literature, I thought that this might be a good time to turn to Italian literature as whole, not least because it is cold, wet and miserable and outside and this will remind me of sunny Italian skies. I learned Italian for one major reason – to read Dante in the original. … Read more