Aspettando la recensione del libro di Katherine Mansfield...

Qualche settimana fa, per la precisione il 17 ottobre, è uscita una puntata di "Che libro fa..." particolarmente gustosa, perché riguardava un paese di cui mi sono occupata qualche anno fa per la mia tesi, cioè la Nuova Zelanda. Qui le parti più interessanti della meravigliosa rubrica di Giovanna Zucconi:

"[...] È l’occasione per fare un giretto nei giornali di quell’altra Italia remota e capovolta. Sollievo: si parla d’altro, non c’è traccia delle nostre ossessioni collettive e neppure della vigente (qui) battaglia contro il «culturame». Si parla di libri, scrittori, e anche di cinema e delle arti, con toni normali, né spocchiosi né manganellanti, e con rispetto condiviso. È considerato naturale, laggiù, che esistano libri popolari e altri che popolari non sono: e che quelli che amano Dan Brown e quelli che amano Proust possono convivere pacificamente (talvolta nella stessa persona).

Agli antipodi, agli antipodi! La polemica più accesa, beati loro, sembra essere su questo tema: perché i Kiwi (nomignolo nazionale) leggono così poco la propria letteratura? Se esista o no una letteratura neozelandese non è il legittimo dubbio di chi come noi saprebbe citare sì e no Katherine Mansfield e Jane Campion: è la questione centrale, in un piccolo Paese ai margini dell’imperium angloamericano. Guardando alle classifiche: Diana Gabaldon è americana, Dan Brown pure, e fra Marian Keyes, Stieg Larsson, Ian Rankin, Clive Cussler eccetera, non ce n’è uno nato fra Wellington e Auckland.

Guardando invece ai dati (anche qui, invidia antipodea): il 44% degli adulti dichiara di avere acquistato almeno un libro nelle ultime 4 settimane, e il 39% è andato in biblioteca. Soltanto il 5% della fiction venduta è pubblicata in Nuova Zelanda, contro il 30% della saggistica e il 12% dei libri per bambini. Ancora più interessante il confronto con gli altri consumi culturali: il 34% dei contenuti televisivi nelle sei reti principali è nazionale, e anche il 19% della musica radiotrasmessa. Che cosa significa? Scrittori, editori, giornalisti, autori di alcune delle trasmissioni di libri (ce ne sono parecchie, nell’Italia alla rovescia), ne discutono in profondità. Il dibattito ci appassiona. Se non altro perché per qualche minuto ci distrae dal nostro, di dibattito."

La Stampa, 17 ottobre 2009

31. “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” by Mario Vargas Llosa

Year of first publication: 1977
Genre: novel, satirical novel, comic novel
Country: Peru

In italiano: La Zia Julia e lo Scribacchino di Mario Vargas Llosa, edito da Einaudi ET (1994), €11,50
En español: La Tía Julia y el Escribidor de Mario Vargas Llosa

Plot: Lima, 1950s. Pedro Camacho is a Bolivian-born, eccentric writer of radio soap-operas that have a tremendous success all over the country. The story of Pedro Camacho, told through his scripts, is intertwined with that of Mario, a student and a wannabe writer who works as a news bulletin editor for Radio Panamericana and falls in love with the divorced wife of a cousin, his Aunt Julia, thirteen years his senior.

Some thoughts: This is the third novel by Vargas Llosa that I read after The Way to Paradise (El Paraíso en la Otra Esquina in Spanish) and The Feast of the Goat (La Fiesta del Chivo in Spanish, read this post) and I was not disappointed. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is actually one of Vargas Llosa’s most popular novels and it is partly autobiographical, seen that Vargas Llosa also married one of his in-laws who was thirteen years his senior. This book was written some twenty years after Vargas Llosa’s first marriage, when the couple was already divorced. In fact, Julia Urquidi Illanes, the real Aunt Julia, published a novel called Lo que Varguitas no Dijo (What Varguitas didn’t say), telling her version of the love story. Half autobiographical account and half work of fiction, La Tía Julia is a very engaging and enjoyable novel. The author used raw material from his life in Lima in the 1950s as well as much imagination in order to give shape to the funniest character of the novel, Pedro Camacho. Almost a dwarf, obsessively dedicated to his job and with a profound and exaggerated hatred for Argentinians, Pedro Camacho writes radio serials full of clichés, but the ability of Vargas Llosa makes them as captivating as the rest of the novel. There’s a clash between the epic, tragic and surreal stories written by Pedro Camacho and what Mario attempts to do with his realistic fiction. Vargas Llosa certainly intends to make fun of the clichés of soap-operas and cheap literature, for example through Pedro Camacho’s confused and entangled plots, but he also pays homage to the act of writing, detailing the way in which the two writers, Pedro and Mario, write their stories (the former writes 10-12 hours per day without stopping, whereas the latter is never satisfied of his work and throws away every single story that he writes). They are both writers, though very different, and success comes to them at different times. Whether “the truly good writer”, if such a thing exists, is more like Pedro or Mario is left to the reader to judge.
Vargas Llosa’s usual device, that is to say telling two different stories in alternating chapters, works perfectly for this novel. Every second chapter is a story written by Camacho, thus it is completely independent from the narrative of the other chapters. What is amazing is that Vargas Llosa is able to give life to a character, Pedro Camacho, almost entirely through the stories that he writes.
Comical and satirical, but never gross nor boring, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter really was a joy to read. By the way, not many people know that the novel was made into a Hollywood feature film called Tune In Tomorrow (1990) starring Peter Falk as Pedro Camacho and Keanu Reeves as Mario.

About the author: see this post

If you want to know more about this book, listen to the podcast from BBC's World Book Club.

By the way, The Guardian celebrates another great Latin American writer and one that I love, Julio Cortázar, in this article from a series on short story writers.

(turbo) traduzioni

Ancora una volta ho trovato spunti incredibilmente interessanti nella rubrica “Che libro fa…”, curata da Giovanna Zucconi per La Stampa. Ormai sono tre le puntate che vi vorrei “passare”. Prima di tutto andiamo in Germania:

In Germania il nuovo Dan Brown non è ancora uscito, eppure è già in cima alla classifica. Perché in tantissimi lo comprano in inglese, senza aspettare che Das verlorene Symbol compaia in tedesco, a metà ottobre. Poveri traduttori. Sono sei, hanno avuto dieci giorni per tradurre 780 pagine, lavorando dalle sei del mattino, senza neanche aver potuto leggere tutto il libro prima di chinarsi a picchiettare freneticamente sulle tastiere, e la loro fatica è inutile, se tutti lo leggono in inglese. In un video su Internet si vedono due di loro, abbastanza affranti, ciascuno al suo computer, intorno a un lungo tavolo che sembra tanto una catena di montaggio, mentre spiegano i segreti della «turbotraduzione», la chiamano così. Spiritosamente, nel sito di lancio del libro, con tanto di conto alla rovescia neanche fossimo a Cape Canaveral, uno dei traduttori per spiegare quant’è difficile il suo lavoro prende ad esempio la frase «The secret is how to die». Come renderla in tedesco, ma soprattutto come evitare di applicarla ai forzati della traduzione?Chissà se la qualità sarà decente, vista la fretta. E dire che la Germania investe tantissimo sulle traduzioni. Per esempio, il più importante premio di translation in lingua inglese, cioè il «Foreign Fiction Prize» del giornale The Independent, assegna 10.000 sterline ai vincitori, mentre il neonato omologo tedesco, «Internationaler Literaturpreis», ha stanziato 25.000 euro per lo scrittore vincente e 10.000 per il suo traduttore. Fra 131 titoli tradotti in tedesco da 33 lingue diverse, ha vinto il peruviano-americano Daniel Alarcón con Lost City Radio nella versione di Friederike Meltendorf. Consegna il 30 settembre, San Girolamo, patrono dei traduttori. Inclusi quelli dei turbobestseller?[…]

Sabato 3 ottobre 2009 “La Stampa”

Memole scrive:
1) I tedeschi leggono romanzi in inglese, mitici! Dovremmo imparare da loro!
2) Come si può tradurre bene un romanzo in così poco tempo e soprattutto come può essere che un équipe di traduttori lavori allo stesso romanzo? Immagino che ogni traduttore abbia il suo stile e il suo metodo, il risultato potrebbe assomigliare paurosamente a Frankenstein (avete presente l’omonimo gioco a “Per un Pugno di Libri”?).

3) Ma in Italia esiste un premio per la miglior traduzione così prestigioso? Ne dubito.

30. "Snow" by Orhan Pamuk

Year of first publication: 2002
Genre: novel, political novel
Country: Turkey

Nobel Prize for Literature 2006

In italiano: Neve di Orhan Pamuk, edito da Einaudi (2004), €12,80

Plot: Ka, a renowned Turkish poet who has been living in Germany for some 12 years, decides to go back to his home country. A friend suggests that he should go to Kars, a town on the border with Georgia and Armenia, and pose as a journalist there. In Kars a number of women have committed suicide because they didn’t want to take off their head scarves in the university buildings. The fact has caused a lot of debate in the country, as suicide is notoriously forbidden in Islam. In the small snowy town of Kars, Ka reunites with Ipek, a woman whom he once had feelings for, and finds himself in the middle of the tensions between political Islamists and secular nationalists. Ka becomes increasingly involved in many-sided intrigues in an incredible and absurd whirlwind of events.

Some thoughts: In the light of Turkey’s desire to join the European Union, this is a good novel to read if you wish to have an idea of some of the problems of Turkey, which is a secular country with a large Muslim majority. As a result of its position between Europe and Asia and of its troubled history, in Turkey there are both firm believers and atheists, religious extremists and secularists. Pamuk shows that even inside the same family there can be very different opinions on religion: for example Ipek and Kadife, two sisters, have opposite views of religion (one wears hijab as a flag of her religious beliefs, whereas the other doesn’t wear it and has extramarital sex). Religion and politics are the big topics of this novel, with their complexities and contradictions. The main character, though, doesn’t even know if he believes in God or not: when asked if he is an atheist he cannot answer. He doesn’t care for politics or religion and this makes him profoundly different from every one else in town. All he wants is Ipek: he childishly dreams of taking her with him to Germany where they would be happy forever after.

You can easily spot two obvious literary influences in the book: the first one is Franz Kafka (the absurdity of the farcical situations experienced by Ka, whose name is a reference to K, the main character of The Castle) and the second one is Dostoevsky (the introspection, the snow, the wanderings around town, the political commitment of the characters are all reminiscent of his works). There is also some postmodernism in the fact that the novel is largely seen from the point of view of Ka but it is written by one of his closest friends, Orhan, who may or may not be the same Orhan who is writing the actual book. Ka, like the author, comes from a bourgeois, wealthy family of Istanbul and he is a political exile in Germany, thus he’s very different from the inhabitants of Kars, who, according to Orhan, are poor, isolated and provincial. Orhan, who’s reporting Ka’s story, at a certain point apologizes if he has portrayed them in a simplistic way, assuring his readers that he has done his best to avoid this. I’m unsure if this is a small flaw in the book, or if it’s rather a very nice way of being honest about writing of a place you don’t belong to.

Snow is not an easy read, with all its politics and intrigues, but it is certainly worth a try. It is a novel in which poetry plays an important role: not only is Pamuk's style poetic, but he uses Ka's poems as an important device to keep the novel going.

About the author: Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 into a bourgeois family. He studied architecture in Istanbul, but left the career and then graduated in journalism. Popular success came in 1990, when his novel Kara Kitap (The Black Book) became one of the most controversial and popular readings in Turkish literature, due to its complexity and 1995 publication and became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history. By this time, Pamuk had also become a high-profile figure in Turkey, due to his support for Kurdish political richness. Pamuk's international reputation continued to increase when he published Benim Adım Kırmızı (My Name is Red) in 2000. My Name is Red is set in 1591, during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III. As many of Pamuk’s novels, it explores the relationships and the tensions between East and West. Pamuk's next novel was Kar in 2002 (Snow), which takes place in the border city of Kars and explores the conflict between Islamism and Westernism in modern Turkey. In 2005 he made a statement regarding the mass killings of Armenians and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire and a criminal case was opened against him for insulting Tukey and Turkishness. The charges were finally dropped in 2006. In that same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature with this motivation: "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, [Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”. His newest novel is Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence).

On Snow you can also read

“Anatolian Arabesques”, John Updike’s review in The New Yorker. And here’s a link to a short story by Orhan Pamuk if want to “taste” him (also from The New Yorker).

Guarda le interviste a Orhan Pamuk a Che Tempo Che Fa del 16 maggio e del 10 ottobre 2009 (due volte da Fazio!).

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

I am currently reading The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Needless to say, I'm enjoying it very much. Everything that this young Ningerian novelist writes is a blessing.

As a quick snack, I would like to share this video with you. Adichie speaks about the danger of falling into stereotypes if you have only one story as reference.

By the way, Half of a Yellow Sun by Adichie has been chosen for this month's Guardian book club and there is a beautiful article by John Mullan, the man behind this book club, about the crossing of Igbo and English in the novel. Make sure you click on the links provided!

Herta Müller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature

As I did last year, when French author Le Clézio won the Prize, I scratched my head and said: “Uh?”. While all the world is congratulating the President of the United States of America for being awarded, quite unexpectedly, the Nobel Prize for Peace, yet another time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been won by a not-exactly-well-known author, Herta Müller.

So I read something about her life and works and surfed the web for some reactions to the prize. Here’s what I found out:

Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, only the 12th woman to win the prize in 108 years. Some people have ironically noticed that she fits into the criteria chosen by the Nobel Prize judges: she comes from a bicultural/ethnic minority background and she often writes about hard life in a totalitarian regime. Many think that recently the Nobel Prize for Literature seems to put political considerations ahead of literary merit. The criticism comes from the observation that many recent laureates are from ethnic or linguistic minorities (Le Clézio, Jelinek, Kertész, Gao and Szymborska) and therefore write about the political or social oppression that comes from this condition.

Herta Müller was born in the once Austro-Hungarian province of Banat, now part of Romania, and is therefore a part of the German minority of Romania. She writes, of course, about Ceauşescu’s communist regime: Herta Müller was in fact dismissed from her job because she didn’t want to cooperate with the Romanian secret police, moving to Germany in 1987 as a result of threats by the communists. The traumas of being in exile in her own country, Romania, and of being a minority in an oppressive communist regime have great influence on her works.

Unfortunately, only five of her works are translated into English and even in Germany she is not well known. Her masterpiece is considered to be Herztier, published in English as The Land of Green Plums: in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign, several young people leave the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects, but they must face betrayal, suicide, and the reality that even the strongest must bend to the oppressors or resist and die. Other important works are The Appointment, about a young woman working in a clothes factory during Ceausescu's regime and The Passport (here’s a link with an extract), the story of a village miller in a German-speaking village in Romania, who applies for permission to emigrate to West Germany.

Reading the reactions to this award, I gather that everybody who has read her books agree that she is an exceptional writer, but the point of debate is more the meaning of this prize for the literary world, as if the commettee was trying to send a message. Similar polemics and observations arouse last year when JMG Le Clézio, also little known outside of France, won the prize (here’s a link to my post on the topic).

The Guardian reports that “Pete Ayrton, who has published Müller in translation at Serpent's Tail, said he was ‘absolutely thrilled’ at the news. "It's terrific and I think it shows the Nobel prize are doing their job to bring the writings of wonderful, neglected writers, who are underappreciated in the Anglo Saxon world, to our attention" he said.”

Two book bloggers, also of The Guardian, reflect on the award. Marting Chalmers in “Why Herta Müller Matters” writes: “It is once again challenging the self-satisfied Anglo-centrism of the English-language publishing business, with its rather narrow definitions of what constitutes good writing, and it is widening our ideas of Europe. And it is perhaps in its failure to engage with European literatures that the English culture, for all the advantages of the global reach of the English language, shows itself at its most provincial.”

It is very selfish and imperialistic to think that the judges were thinking of sending a message only to the Anglo Saxon book business, rather than to the whole literary world. Richard Lea is less "anglocentric" and, even admitting that he’s not an expert on Ngugi Wa Thiong’o or any other non-European writer, he thinks that the Swedish Committee is “running a European Club” and actually, if you read the list of recent winners, you only find writers who are not that far away from Sweden: JMG Le Clézio (France), Harold Pinter (England), Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, almost Europe), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria), Imre Kertész (Hungary) and Günter Grass (Germany).

Memole says: I don't know what to think. It's good that they are encouraging European literatures and that they don't stick to British/American authors, but it's also true that they could open their minds and give the award to an Asian or African writer, there are so many. On the other hand, I'm afraid that in 20 years' time we will be musing over the fact that Philip Roth or Amos Oz didn't receive the prize (the writer must be alive to be eligible), as we do now with Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. It seems to me that the judges decided to award the prize to a writer who's from an ethnic or linguistic minority, who suffered the injusticies of Nazism or Communism or any other dictatorship, fought against it and wrote about it, who's European but not British, better if from the new members of the European Union, who's a woman, who's not translated enought into English... and only after that agreed that the only writer who answers these characteristics is Herta Müller.

Here's a link to an article of the New York Times with more excerpts from Herta Müller's works.

L’unico suo libro disponibile in italiano è Il Paese delle Prugne Verdi. Sono stati pubblicati altri due dei suoi libri: Bassure, nel 1987, e In Viaggio Su Una Gamba Sola, nel 1992, entrambi ora fuori catalogo. Lei era anche presente al Festivaletteratura di Mantova (qui un link ad un articolo tratto da Il Corriere della Sera).

Hilary Mantel wins Man Booker Prize 2009

The winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize has been announced: it’s Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
No surprise, it was this year’s favourite. She has beaten excellent writers such as A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee (the favourite in my poll!).
I have never read a novel by Hilary Mantel and I didn’t know her name before reading about her nomination, but apparently she has written ten novels before this one. It’s sad when an author is awarded such an important prize and you had never heard of her/him or read one of his/her books. Wait for the next post on the Nobel Prize for Literature and you'll have the same reaction you had last year: uh?

Wolf Hall is a piece of historical fiction (most books in the shortlist were) concerning Thomas Cromwell, an adviser of King Henry VIII. It’s not exactly a quick read, the hard back being exactly 672 pages long, but most people who have read it think it’s really worth it.

James Naughtie, chair of judges said :

Hilary Mantel has given us a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century. Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail. ... It probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII's court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women. ... In the words of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is, "the fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes."

Read a review by a blogger friend, Asylum.

Other posts on this year's Man Booker Prize: longlist and comment (here) and shortlist and comment (here). On last year's Booker Prize, won by Araving Adiga's The White Tiger, here and here.

By the way, Not the Booker Prize, the competition created by Sam Jordison of The Guardian has been won by Rana Dasgupta’s Solo. I don’t know if he’s a good fiction writer (yes, it’s a man!) but I’ve read some of his articles published in English newspapers and he seems to be pretty good at writing.

29. "A Map of Home" by Randa Jarrar

In italiano: La Collezionista di Storie di Randa Jarrar, edito da Piemme (2009), € 17,50
Leggi la mia recensione in italiano nella rivista on-line Paper Street (qui link)

Year of first publication: 2008
Genre: novel, bildungsroman
Country: USA / Egypt / Palestine / Kuwait

About the author: Randa Jarra was born in 1978 in Chicago from a Palestinian father and a Greek-Egyptian mother. Randa and her family moved to Kuwait when she was only two months old and in 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, they escaped to Egypt and then to the USA. She got a degree in Middle Eastern Studies from an American university and she is a translator from Arabic, but also a blogger and a short-story writer. She lives in Michigan with her partner and son. Her website is http://www.randajarrar.com/ .

The review of this book has been published in Italian on the on-line review Paper Street (link).

However, I'd like to add a part of an interview with Randa Jarrar appeared on Zocalo Public Square (link). The main character of the novel is called Nidali. Here's what the author says about her:

"Nidali is very bossy, loud, profane, funny, and she’s obsessed with her family’s history and her identity, and with how her new, sort of post-postcolonial self fits into the larger world she inhabits. She spends a lot of the novel trying to figure out who she is and where she belongs in the grand scheme, not just with her family, but with her international self, and who she want to be as opposed to who she is expected to be. Her family is full of failed artists, her dad is a failed poet and her mom is a failed concert pianist, and their main identity is rooted in their failure as artists. Their secondary identity is given to them by their own families, their places of origin—her mom’s as an Egyptian, and her father’s as a Palestinian. Nidali comes out of that, being a sort of mixed child in a somewhat homogenous culture. Even though they’re Arabs, her parents are from two different countries and it’s still seen as somewhat bizarre and out of the norm. From the very beginning, she has this feeling of being out of place, or being strange, or being a mix of things. Throughout the novel, she explores this mix, and tries to figure out a way for herself to be whole in the face of all this mixing."

And here's what Jarrar says about literary expectations on Arab and Arab American writers:

"I think readers tend to like stories by Muslim and Arab American women that detail sort of women’s oppression. Instead of a rags-to-riches story, it’s more of a hijab-to-freedom story. It doesn’t occur, I think, to most Americans, or not just Americans but the general population, that a woman can wear a hijab and can be the mistress of her own household and her own life and all that. I think there is a preoccupation with that kind of story.
There is also I think an expectation that an Arab American writer is going to tell sort of whimsical, magical stories, that Arabian Nights, genie-in-a-bottle sort of stereotype that an Arab American is an adept storyteller. That is what people expect, fantastical stories about ridiculous stuff, just bullshit. I think the oppressed woman, the ornate magic story, and maybe a third strain would be the hyper-political novel, or if not hyper-political, the somewhat didactic novel, not even set in America, or set in America featuring new immigrants, and showing the politically charged aspect of being Arab American or Arab post-9/11. Readers expect these books to be testaments of on-the-edge fundamentalists, not quite someone who is a fundamentalist, but how they might become one, how they might be understood. I think those are the preferred stories that are expected. There are more, but those are a few that seem the most pronounced, the ones that I’ve seen."

Not the Booker Prize

NOT THE BOOKER PRIZE (see this post), an alternative to the Booker Prize, created by Sam Jordison, a blogger of The Guardian. Since the process of finding the six books for the shortlist was simply by leaving a comment on the blog with the title of the book, some books arrived on the shortlist by strange means. The winner will be announced in a few days, together with the Booker Prize. The shortlisted titles are:

Rana Dasgupta – Solo (review and extract)
Solo recounts the life and daydreams of a reclusive one hundred year-old man from Bulgaria.

James Palumbo – Tomas (review and extract)
Tomas tears apart the world of the rich on his crusade against everything that's wrong with the 21st Century, including fat bankers and reality TV.

Eleanor Thom – The Tin Kin (review and extract)
When her aunt Shirley dies, Dawn finds herself back in her claustrophobic home town in Northern Scotland for the first time in years. She spends her days caring for her small daughter, listening to tapes of old country songs and cleaning Shirley s flat, until one day she comes across the key to a cupboard that she was forbidden to open as a child. Inside she finds an album of photographs, curling with age.

Simon Crump – Neverland: the unreal Michael Jackson story (review and extract)
This is a collection of interlinked short stories, interwoven against the constant presence of a certain Mr Michael Jackson. Is it the Jackson that you automatically think of? That's clearly for you to decide.

MJ Hyland – This is how (review and extract)
When his fiancé breaks off their engagement, Patrick Oxtoby leaves home and moves into a boarding house in a remote seaside town. But in spite of his hopes and determination to build a better life, nothing goes to plan and Patrick is soon driven to take a desperate and chilling course of action.

Jenn Ashworth – A Kind of Intimacy (review and extract)
Annie is morbidly obese, lonely and hopeful. She narrates her own increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with her new neighbours, learn from past mistakes and achieve a "certain kind of intimacy" with the boy next door.

By the way...

Recently I learned from the comments that I'm not the only person who hardly buys any hardback novel. Read this article from The Times Online, about the 50 paperbacks of 2009. What is most interesting is not the list of paperbacks, but the history of this format (by Nicholas Clee).

Here's an interesting article on the similarities between Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly (main character of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, become famous for the interpretation by Audrey Hepburn, read my review) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby (unforgettable protagonist of The Great Gatsby, read my review): Is Holly Golightly The Great Gatsby in Drag? In fact, in my mind the two novels are somehow interweaved, maybe because I read them at a short distance of time one from the other.

For lovers of India, the new book by William Dalrymple: Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India (read here).

in the picture: La Lecture (Woman Reading) by Pablo Picasso