memory

Every time I find a book written by Astrid Lindgren, the author of Pippi longstocking and many more titles, including the two mentioned by Violet, Mio of Mio and the Lionheart brothers ( I checked them out,yes, and now I have to get my hands on them!), as I was saying, every time I find one of her books, and it happens that I find them in several different languages and various editions, at a surprisingly frequent rate,they are pricy. They are rare and pricy. The early editions anyway. The scary stuff doesn't surprise me really if we think that the legacy she shares is made by authors like Grimm brothers, or Perrault ( bluebeard!)and all the rest of them, with
stories that all the major professors and psychologists, and pedagogists, and intellectuals analysed and came to the conclusion that they help us, children,to come to terms with the toughness of life. Then uncle Walt came around and did the opposite! Thank goodness the little marmaid doesn't feel the knives in her feet every time she walks with her brand new feet. Although in all fairness,had Disney only stuck to the original version, all the little girls,now full grown women would have faced the life-long pain that their favourite shoes inflict upon/below them, with much more endurance and knowledge.
My grand-ma carefully executed the same "operation safety" Disney did, when she used to tell me the synopsis of the major Operas and Operettas. So ,for example, when she would tell me the story of La Traviata, Verdi, taken from Dumas, La dame aux camelias, Violetta of course does not die and she certainly doesn't belong to any different social class, but happily marries the love of her life. Considering the fact that in practically 80% of the Operas, the heroine tragically dies and that almost all the Disney's happy endings camouflage a tragedy, I reached the conclusion that life is almost never what we remember it should have been!
And speaking of memory: two good books I came accross with that tackle the memory issue
The Sea, John Banville, where the memory of the past becomes another type of present that unfolds along in a parallel dimension, and A short history of tractors in ukrainian, Marina Lewycka, that helps me remember that learning about the past by reading fiction is fun and effective.
Gianduiotti: are you comfortable in that chair? Every time I go say hi to Davide, owner of the bookstore Therese, in Torino, Italy,I learn a lot. He is the prototype of the old bookseller, but in a young body, he has passion, he believes in the true meaning of community,he is kind,he knows what he sells, he reads a lot and he keeps it small and simple. And he his in your neighborhood!

more of more

Before I get lost on the web looking for more information on Mio by Mio and the Lionheart Brothers I have some more good stuff to show off here:
An artist grows up in Mexico, by Leah Brenner, with illustrations by Diego Rivera ( Frida's gigantic husband). This is a collection of stories depicting mexican atmospheres during the days immediately preceding the revolution.The life of imaginary artist Rancho Pacheco and his adventures growing up.
















And two cute kids book , finely illustrated: The Sooner hound , by Harvey Weiss, a tale from the american folklore .The hero is a shabby mutt that has a tornado for a mother and a bolt of lightning for a father and can run very fast!
The tiger's whisker, 31 stories from many far easter countriessuch as Korea, Myanmar, Japan and the Pacific Islands.










And since we are on a children illustrations theme i have to refer you to a great, fresh, superbly imaginative artist's work: Beatrice Alemagna, author and illustrator, one capable of making you look at a kid's book the way you used to when you were a child. A true gem. Check out her blog.
















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more finds at the fair

the Gosta Berling saga, by Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlof , this edition appears to be in german. She is from the upper side of Europe, almost Lappland and her imagination and the folk resources she draws from are very Scandinavian. Although I cannot say much about this saga, besides the fact that evolves around the eccentricities of the upper class, what made me familiar with her existence was another book she wrote later, The wonderful adventures of Nils Holgerssons, a kids book she wrote as a sort of geographic text book for schools. However, when I read it, I did not detect any academic tone whatsoever and it didn't help me geographically either, but I can say with confidence it is one of the most magic and evocative pieces of young adult literature that to this day I remember with fondness and gratitude.


Birds and beasts,by William Jay Smith,with woodcuts by Jacques Hnizdovsky. The poems are cute and simple, the woodcuts I wich I had gigantic posters to put up all over the house. The artist emigrated from Bohemia to America in the 1900's and his first book named Flora Exotica is another one I would decorate schools' walls with. Here some examples

habemus papam

There are three books by the newly elected king of literature on the shelf,
Mario Vargas Llosa, whom I'm never sure where to file under: V? L? , like Garcia Marquez, G? M?,
I wonder how long they are going to sit there for. Doris Lessing, last year's elected queen, hasn't moved once I must say, so, either people don't really follow Nobel Prizing stuff, or it is a not so popular title in the literature field as it sounds:"I won the nobel prize last year" " oh that? phiuh good luck with that".
Mrs Lessing 's reaction to the announcement of the prize by the journalist is memorable, she was coming back home from her rounds and they were waiting for her on her doorsteps and found her completely oblivious to the news.I recommend a search on youtube for it, she is pure class. I wonder how did Mr Llosa and Mr Varga respond. We'll see, maybe he shook his own hands.
In the meantime, some other kind of race happened again...do you remember the gold digging adventures of book hunting in the jungle of the donated books set by the Seattle library?
yep, that one. I had to submit myself to the torture of looking for books without having fun again. This time around I managed to have a little fun,though cause I was in good company and left all my expectations outside the door.And this is what I found:

this is a first translated edition, 1934, by M.D. Herter Norton (what is with all these double names!) and when I found it, I made a little shrill that sounded more as if somebody had stepped on my toe rather than happiness. It was happiness, especially cause it reminded me of an exhibition I witnessed in Bologna ,Italy, during my college years, entirely dedicated to Rilke's love correspondence with Lou Andreas Salome, a Russian psychoanalyst of increadible charisma and who broke few hearts and was a very close friend of people like Freud and Nietzsche. The exchange of written words that those two,both of them married to other people, entertained is the most passionate thing I've ever read.

This little green book jumped at me because of its beautiful cover. The Mabinogion-Everyman's library- 11 Welsh stories drawn from the Celtic tradition of Medieval European literature, stories written between 1300 and 1400.

















Ivan Goncharov -Oblomov , also a everyman's library edition #878, translated by Natalie Duddington,was another happy discovery that tossed me back in time again, when I went to see the theatrical representation of the book that notoriously starts the first 150 pages with the guy not getting out of his bed, and I remember wishing having a pillow there with me. I will read this classic of Russian literature, one day, without even skipping the first few pages ,because I think our times have a lot in common with the times the writer is describing: the aristocratic inertia of a decadent social class, the aristocracy, surrounded and completely oblivious of it, by the daily struggle of the rest of the world.

naughty summer

I admit it: i neither finished the terrible enfants nor approached cortazar.
instead, I dived into a guilt -free summer read , Little Bee by Chris Cleave, and I picked it up solely for the cover.I fell for it like a fly for a neon light or a wasp for sugary water in a plastic bottle( it really works, I've seen it this summer).
Bright orange background cradling a beautifully drawn profile of a woman,cartoon style, black pencil, twirls and curls everywhere.
The guilt wasn't there because, first of all it was a summer vacation and you are supposed to read caught-by-the-cover books, secondly because the story is about a young girl from Nigeria who is a refugee in England and has to deal with the fact that her status is not recognized nor legalized. The plot is not about her finding true love so that she can stay, nor that she has to solve a crime becoming a cool Nigerian detective in London, although that would make it a good one too. The other reason why I read it, is because once I turned the book to the back to read the synopsis, I only found this explanation: we won't tell you what the book is about, you have to find out for yourself. Intriguing enough for me.
The author is English, he also writes for the Guardian, and he really took his time to research the condition of the immigration centers around London. The subject is very hot over here right now,it seems, and maybe that is why the American editors felt compelled to change its original title, The other hand, into Little Bee ( the name of the main character)?
the other interesting thing is that a male writer chose not one but two female voices as the carriers of the narration, so he put himself not only into the head of a British woman, which could be considered a realistic ambition, but also into the mind of a young Nigerian girl, and as an Italian young woman I can say he did an excellent work.
good book.
after consuming that happy discovery on an airplane crossing over a continent and an ocean, I landed in Italy and felt compelled to go back to my origins and pick up a native of my home town: Baricco. You can find him translated and published here too. I read one of his earlier books entitled City, and what I find amusing is that the characters bear funny and tacky english names and the places described recognizably belong to the American landscape; at one point one of the characters, the unforgettable Miss Shatzy , writes a western that to an unwestern mind like mine seemed incomparably beautiful. This writer too did an excellent work placing his mind into foreign lands.
Crazy idea on a last note: shouldn't big,significant,classic literature be considered human heritage that belongs to the entire population of the world,like water, like health,like natural resources, nullifying therefore the petty efforts of little financial gurus to profit from it? And of course, we the people, would be more than glad to take it upon ourselves to share the costs of production?

those enfants terribles taking final exams

now that nobody is commenting on these posts anymore, i am positive no one is in the room of this literary salon that is proceeding as slow as a snail in its development.
I can comfortably let a little fart out without feeling deadly ashamed and embarassed and I can talk to myself out loud without seeming crazy.
Therefore, out loud, I will remind myself that right now I'm reading Les enfants terribles by Jean Cocteau, beautiful, one of those reads you know it is going to stick with you, underneath your skin, forever even if,for some obscure reason, you decided that you wanted to forget about it. It is a book I wish I have read ten years ago, at least. Brother and sister share a private world from which the outer world is excluded, a world ruled by the rules of the Game.
Where did I find it? in front of my door-step, delivered by the postman right to my house all the way from Ireland, wrapped in an envelope without the sender's name nor address for a possible return in case it got lost.It could have really gotten lost badly. However I got it and I not only got the book in the envelope. The book was wrapped inside a HAND-WRITTEN letter that started with my name. How often does that happen?
Days go by at the bookstore selling books,buying books,finding and losing books, missing books, forgetting books, pricing books, cleaning books and also discovering books.
So the other day one of those books that speak to you straight from the cover, fell into my hands as randomly as a snow flake on your tongue: Final exam, by Julio Cortazar. By now I have developed the sixth sense of a bookseller which is being able to recognize the smell of a good book and so I approached reading pieces and bits here and there to see what kind of goodness I stumbled on.
Its edition is an advance uncorrected proof of New Directions Books, with an introduction by its translator,Alfred Mac Adam. Towards the end of this very informative intro, the translator tells us that,quote: the book could be considered a summary of the author's readings during the 1940s, from the forgotten detective novels of Nigel Balchin to the almost forgotten existentialist novels of Andre' Malraux. It is tempting, the translator continues, to read the novel as Cortazar's autobiography, but that is inaccurate , even though he infuses many of his literary and esthetic believes into the male characters.For example Andres ,like Cortazar himself, is dazzled by Jean Cocteau's Opium,which opens the door to surrealism.End of quote.
That day my cinese fortune cookie said: today you will believe in magic, books are like invisible bridges over infinite rivers of infinite possibilities. (cheesy as usual!)
Another read I'm going to look forward to.

las uvas y el viento

I was reminded that I needed to read Neruda ( thank you Joe!) and what I have sitting on my shelf at home is the collection the poet wrote during his exile in Italy, early 1950's, Las uvas y el viento, and since I like games I decided to open the book with my eyes shut and read whatever poem I would blindly choose.
And this is how I came to read, La Policia:
we are
la policia
-and you? Who are you?
where do you come from, where
do you want to go?
your father? your brother in law?
whom did you sleep with in the last seven nights?
-I have slept with my love, I belong perhaps,
perhaps,perhaps,
I belong to Poetry.
And it is so that a gondola
blacker than the others
behind me brought them to Venezia
to Bologna at night,
on the train: i am a wondering shadow
followed by shadows.
I saw in Venezia, the church tower standing
elevating among the pigeons of San Marco
its police-like triple horn.
And Paolina, naked, in the museum,
when I kissed her beautiful cold mouth
asked me: are your legal papers in order?
in Dante's house
under the ancient florentine roofs
interrogations are happening, and David
with his marble eyes,without eye-balls
forgot his father,Buonarroti,
because every day they force him to say
what he saw with his blind eyes.
however that day
when they were taking me to the Swiss border
la policia suddenly encountered,
coming toward them,
the militant poetry.
I won't forget the roman moltitude
that at the station,during the night,
seized me away from the hands
of the persecuting police.

How could I forget Guttuso's fighting gesture
and Giuliano's face
The wave of rage, the hounds' hit on the nose
how to forget Mario,
from whom, exiled, I learned how to love Italy' freedom,
and then outraged the white head
I saw confused
in the rough sea
of my friends and enemies?
I won't forget Elsa Morante's little umbrella
falling on a police's chest
like the heavy petal of blooming strenght.
And so in Italy
by the people's will
with poetry's weight,
solidarity's firmness,
the action of tenderness,
an halt was put to my destiny.
and so it happened
that this book was being born
surrounded by the sea and lemon trees,
listening in silence,
behind the police wall,
how the valorous people
fought and is fighting,
sang and is singing
winning the battle so that I could
rest in the island that was waiting for me
with a blooming jasmine branch in its mouth
and in its small hands the source of my song.

Pablo Neruda


Forgive the rough and poor translation, but I could not find one anywhere on line, so I had to do it myself.
My question is: would we still be capable of defending Poetry with such conviction these days?