"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë

Year of first publication: 1847
Genre: novel, Gothic novel, romantic novel
Country: UK

At a certain point in "Wuthering Heights", when Heathcliff learns of Isabella's infatuation for him, Emily Brontë writes: 'And he stared hard at the object of discourse, as one might do at a strange repulsive animal: a centipede from the Indies, for instance, which curiosity leads one to examine in spite of the aversion it raises.’ (p.115). I think this is how we look at the characters of this novel, morbidly, like we look at an eerie animal. Emily Brontë is often called the sphinx of English literature, because how the daughter of a clergyman who lived a secluded life in rural Yorkshire came to write this tale of human wickedness and revenge is one of the main concerns of critics of 19th-century Gothic and romantic literature.

This book was among my favourite during my teenage years, but I had not reread it since. What I saw at the time, of course, was the dark, strong, inexplicable love story between Heathcliff and Catherine. I could not care for the second generation: Cathy seemed to me a dull version of her mother and I was fascinated only by the (in)possibility of ghosts wandering the windy moors of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. I did not see all the implications and possible readings that the novel could have: an exposure of the unfair laws that regulated inheritance, the puzzle of Heathcliff's ethnic origins or the "nature versus culture" topos.

"Wuthering Heights" is the story of Heathcliff and his revenge, above all. The story is told by Ellen Dean, the housekeeper of Thrushcross Grange, to a certain Mr Lockwood, the new tenant there. After an iconic scene where Mr Lockwood dreams of the ghost of a woman knocking at his window, but then wakes up and finds out that it was just the branch of a tree pulling against the window, Ellen Dean starts to tell the story of the two families who inhabited Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. She recalls that Heathcliff was first brought home as a child by Mr Earnshaw after a trip to Liverpool, but his origins were unknown. He lookes like a gypsy, with dark, unruly hair and black eyes and she likes to speculate, even suggesting that he might have Chinese or Indian origins (pp.64-65). He is treated like a son by Mr Earnshaw, but he is not considered as such by everyone else (here's again another topos, see Austen's "Mansfield Park" for instance). His only friend in the world is Catherine Earnshaw: together, they run and have adventures in the open air, like brother and sister. One day, they run away from Wuthering Heights, like children do when they play. They reach Thrushcross Grange, which appears like a nice cottage owned by the Lintons. Here Heathcliff is discarded as a gypsy, while Catherine is treated like a princess. In the following weeks at Thrushcross Grange, she is taught good manners and is given nice clothes. The interactions between the Earnshaws and the Lintons result in two marriages. Catherine marries Edgar Linton, despite she loves Heathcliff. 'I am Heathcliff' (p.90) she says, in one of the most famous monologues of English literature. The reasons why she loves him remain obscure, even after 150 years of the book's first publication. Is it the kind of love that twins have or is it a more carnal passion? What we know is what the text says: Heatchliff leaves after hearing who Catherine is going to marry and in the next few years nothing is known about his whereabouts. When he comes back, he is a gentleman, rich and good-mannered. He gambles with Hindley, Catherine's brother, in order to inherit Wuthering Heights, and teaches Hindley's son Hareton bad manners. Heathcliff – an outcast, dark-skinned and lacking lineage – manages to become the master of the house and to destroy the two families. Catherine dies in childbirth, but not after having hold Heathcliff in her arms for the last time, and Heatchliff elopes with Isabella, Edgar's sister (oh, God, this novel is getting so difficult to summarize!). The story goes on with the second generation: Catherine and Edgar's daughter Cathy, Heathcliff and Isabella's sickly son Linton and Hindley's son Hareton, whom Heathcliff has not taught how to read and whom he treates as a peasant. Hindley being dead, maybe murdered by Heathcliff, and Hareton not representing a menace, Heathcliff has almost accomplished his revenge. His next evil plan is to make sure that Cathy Linton falls in love with poor Linton, his son, so he will inherit Thrushcross Grange as well. He manages to do that, at his son's expenses. Linton, already ill, in fact dies soon after marrying Cathy. The epilogue takes place when Mr Lockwood goes back to the region after a few months of absence and finds Ellen Dean living at Wuthering Heights with Cathy and Hareton, who have become friends, Heathcliff having died in the attempt of seeing Catherine's ghost through fasts and long wanderings in the night.

All the characters in the novel are loathsome: even Catherine, the heroine of the story, is whimsical, sometimes cruel and above all, impertinent and bossy. Her daughter Cathy is perhaps less unpleasant, but she is altogether spoiled and superficial. Linton is one of the most annoying characters in literature and Heathcliff is just too cruel and evil to be plausible. This is why I suggest that readers look at "Wuthering Heights" as if it were a strange animal. We ask ourselves what could Emily Brontë possibly mean with this novel and we wonder why we are so attracted to it. I browsed the web to learn what critics wrote and came out with a lot of different readings, but none of them satisfies. Lord David Cecil in 1935 wrote that the principle of calm and storm pervades the novel, suggesting that "Wuthering Heights" should be read in that sense. He certainly had a good point, but I don't think that "Wuthering Heights" can be restricted to a single reading. Emily Brontë certainly tackles and subverts the question of power relations, for instance, with the Other (Heathcliff) taking the role of master. Heathcliff is, nonetheless, essentially the villain of the story, albeit forced to become so by circumstances. His is an usurpation of power by the Other, the undefinied colonial subject (gypsy, Lascar or Irish, the origin doesn't really matter). Race as a metaphor for gender works only partially here: while at the end of the story Cathy is reintroduced in the inheritance line (Hareton will formally inherit, I think, but it is Cathy who's managing the house), Heathcliff or his potentially benevolent descendants are wiped out. The only son he had was a sickly, hideous boy whose horrible fate the reader is encouraged to soon forget. Those whose lineage are unknown remain therefore exluded. In other words, gender is preferred over race. The novel questions and then reaffirms imperial ideology (as Susan Meyer says of "Jane Eyre"). I think that the problem of inheritance and power structures is integral to the story, but there are so many things in this book that one does not feel at ease by endorsing a particular interpretation over the others.

In my opinion, "Wuthering Heights" is, first of all, a tale of revenge, of what rage, hatred and isolation can do to human beings. It is a story that still exerts its quirky fascination over the readers: Heatchliff digging up Catherine's body or the isolation of Yorkshire moorlands roughening the character of people stay forever in readers' minds. It is a novel of extreme violence, sometimes unmotivated and prompted by frustration, with oppositions and strange haunting images (what about the dead rabbits or the hounds at the beginning of the novel?), and this is why it is a story that lingers in the mind of readers long after having finished the book.     

About the author: Emily Brontë (1818-1848), was born in the moorlands of Yorkshire, the daughter of a clergyman. She had a stern education and never left Yorkshire. She had a close relationship with her two sisters, Charlotte and Anne, who were also writers. She left only one novel ("Wuthering Heights") and some poems. She died of tubercolosis at thrirty years of age. She was unmarried and, it is said, never knew love.

Wallace Stevens, 'Mozart, 1935'

It is National Poetry Month in the USA. To celebrate this I have decided to post a poem by an American author, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). I came across this poem late at night. It was one of the first nights of the Lybian war and I could hear the planes flying above my head, leaving from an American military base nearby. They were heavy and I knew that, in spite of all the talks of peacekeeping missions, they were taking war to that country, so close to Italy geographically. I understood the poem as an invitation to keep writing poetry, keep producing art even in a violent world. Ignoring what is happening around him, a corpse being carried down the stairs, stones thrown upon the roof, I perceived that Wallace Stevens was asking artists to keep working even in a time of great upheavals and horrors. Just read the poem and then something more after it...    

Mozart, 1935

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.
That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.
Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.
Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.
We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.

The poem is actually quite connected to the moment in which it was written, as I learned browsing the internet for information. Many critics accused Wallace Stevens of paying too much attention to sounds and rhythm, without putting ideas into his poetry. He was considered 'out of tune' in a time when the Great Depression was what people should think about and consequently what poets should be writing about. The poet answers with this poem, quite beautifully. 'Be seated at the piano' he says, play arpeggios, even when people throw stones at your roof. Is it critics, criticizing the poet? Is it the terrible things happening in the world? I don't know. The poet-pianist is playing the present (hoo-hoo-hoo, shoo-shoo-shoo, ric-a-nic, whatever the tune of the moment is) and must remain seated at the piano. In the end, history passes, art remains. Mozart is still relevant today, he's still young, because with his music 'sorrow is released / dismissed, absolved'). This is what art is for. It cannot always change things in the world, but it is important in order to give our minds a relief from the bleakness of everyday life and maybe in order to placate our conflicts. That comma in the title, critics write, is essential: Mozart seems anachronistic in 1935, but is it really? By the end of the poem it doesn't seem so. 'The streets are full of cries', the last line says, and yet it is placidly snowing, Mozart is playing. Poet, be seated at the piano! The poet is 'interested not in writing about the street, but in writing about the problem of writing about the street' Mark Halliday wrote.
I so regret that Wallace Stevens was not in my syllabus, because I love this poem.

"The Skin Between Us. A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging" by Kym Ragusa

Year of first publication: 2006
Genre: memoir
Country: USA

Kym Ragusa's memoir begins on the Strait of Messina, dividing Sicily from Calabria and representing the crossroad between Europe and Africa. This place is significative for the author, because her paternal ancestors migrated from Southern Italy to America and her maternal ancestors were African slaves brought to North America via a forced migration. Standing there on the ferryboat, with her corkscrew hair tied in a knot in order 'not to stand out' (p.18), she reflects on the meaning of belonging to a place. She would like to shoot the ancient Greek-Sicilian myth of Persephone, the goddess that divided her time between the underworld and the mortal world. 'What are you?', American people ask her, 'where are you from?', Italian people always enquire, curious about her skin colour and her childlike Italian.

The skin between us: a border, a map, a blank page. History and biology. The skin between us that kept  us apart and sheltered us against the hurt we inflicted on each other. The skin between us: membrane, veil, mirror. [...]

What are you?

Black and Italian. African American, Italian American. American.

Other. Biracial, Interracial. Mixed-blood, Half-Breed, High-Yellow, Redbone, Mulatta, Nigger, Dago, Guinea.

Where are you from?
I DON'T KNOW where I was conceived, but I was made in Harlem. Its topography is mapped on my body: the borderlines between neighboorhoods marked by streets that were forbidden to cross, the borderlines enforced by fear and anger, and transgressed by desire. The streets crossing east to west, north to south, like the web of veins beneath my skin.(p.26-27).

Here begins Kym Ragusa's investigations of her identity, split between two communities that hardly interacted with each other: the Italian and the African American communities of East and West Harlem. Her mother, stunningly beautiful (but not at all a tragic mulatta!) and young, with a genius IQ and a career in modeling is the last of a series of strong African American beauties in her family, all light skinned and unfortunate with men. Descended from a Pittsburgh community where German ancestors have mingled with African American former slaves, blond hair coexisting with a 'double-edged pride' of being black, so that their ethnicity was both emblem of honor and deep shame, the author struggled to understand the entanglements of race divisions. Her corkscrew hair, her grandmother Miriam told her, were her father's fault, the result of HIS African roots, rather than her own (which had produced red hair, by the way, of the sort Malcolm X had). The glamor of the Harlem Renaissance her grandmother had experienced, her friendship with Marilyn Monroe in Los Angeles and with some of the greatest poets and musicians working in the Harlem area clashed with the violence in the nieghboorhood. The writer experienced it first hand: a man was murdered in the apartment building where she lived and her mother was threatened with a gun by a drugaddict.

On the other side of the family, a noisy, poor Italian American family, her grandfather speaking always Calabrese and her grandmother Gilda always looking at her suspiciously, because of the color of her skin. Her Italian American relatives struggled to get along with the maternal side of her family: her grandmother Miriam and her aunts thinking that her father was too poor and working class to suit their taste. With a mostly absent father, who after the Vietnam war had become addicted to drugs, and a Puerto Rican step-mother to add into the salad bowl, the author relates how her family, after a whole life spent in the city, tried to adjust to the life in a small place: growing vegetables in the garden, for example.

Revolving around the figure of her two grandmothers Miriam and Gilda, who died one week apart from each other like two sisters crossing the ocean as immigrants to a new land, this memoir is written in an intimate way, never banal and always compelling. It challenges notions of fixed identity, of blackness and whiteness - her skin is sometimes lighter, other times the same as that of her Italian American friends, but it is always perceived as different by others. It strikes me that the two communities are different and similar in ways that I didn't expect: the neighboorhood of La Kalsa, in Palermo, getting rough at night time, resembles the Harlem and the Bronx of her childhood and teenage years. There, as well, civilizations meet: African and Asian immigrants living side by side with the Sicilian people, who also show the signs of the Arabian and the Norman dominations. Also, on her maternal side she can go back several generations to Sybela, a slave who escaped slavery with the master's son, but on her paternal side things are dimmer: one would expect the opposite. The trauma of immigration, together with the ghost of racial segregation add to the picture of a conflicted identity, but her "family portraits" are always affectionate and above all honest. Written with an evident gusto for storytelling, "The Skin Between Us" is a bridge between cultures, an ode to every family and every painful story that nonetheless hides a pleasant aftertaste.       

About the author: Kym Ragusa was born in New York City in 1966. She is a writer and a documentary filmmaker. Her short movies "Passing" and "Fuori/Outside" explore her double heritage. This is her first book.

Jackie Kay, 'Things Fall Apart'

Não tenho ambiçôes nem desejos 

Ser poeta não é uma ambição minha 

É a minha maneira de estar sozinho.

Fernando Pessoa ('O guardador de Rebanhos' in "Poemas Completos de Alberto Caeiro")

I don't have ambitions or desires

Being a poet isn't my ambition,

It's my way of being alone.

Fernando Pessoa ('The Keeper of Flock' in "Alberto Caeiro: The Complete Poems")

I never speak about poetry in my blog and I don't know why. I don't know if poetry works on the internet, where people come into a blog like this and read quickly a post in multitasking mode, hardly reaching the end of it. I'll try anyway.

I'll start with a poet some of you may not know. My intention is not to post Wordworth's "Daffodils"; for that you can go everywhere on the net. I want to post something that I find interesting, slightly different from the poems we are used to read in literature classes, and then write something about it.

The first poet I’d like to talk about is Jackie Kay. She was born in 1961 in Scotland, from a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother. She was adopted by a white couple and raised in Glasgow. She has written poetry ("The Adoption Papers", “Off Colour”, “Life Mask”), novels for both adults (“Trumpet”) and children (“Strawgirl”) and, more recently, a memoir (“Red Dust Road”). Some years ago she went to Nigeria to meet her biological father and had written a piece for the Guardian whose copyright is now expired. To know that story I guess you’ll have to read her memoir (I’m eager to, by the way, as I’ve read her novel “Trumpet” some years ago and loved it). Alternatively, you can read this poem:

Things Fall Apart

My birth father lifted his hands above his head

and put the white mask of God on his handsome face.

A born-again man now, gone were the old tribal ways,

the ancestral village - African chief's nonsense, he says.

I could see his eyes behind the hard alabaster.

A father, no more real, still less real - not Wole Soyinka.

Less flesh than dark earth; less blood than red dust.

Less bone than Kano camels; less like me than Chinua Achebe.

Christianity had scrubbed his black face with a hard brush.

'You are my past sin, let us deliberate on new birth.'

The sun slips and slides and finally drops

into the swimming pool, in Nico hotel, Abuja; lonely pinks.

I knock back my dry spritzer, take in the songs

of African birds. I think he had my hands, my father.

                                                                                (From "Life Mask", 2005)

I have chosen this poem, over several others by Jackie Kay, because it is highly resonant with names and tropes of postcolonial literatures: two great Nigerian writers are named, not to mention that the title immediately takes us back to the atmospheres of Achebe’s most important novel, “Things Fall Apart”. The discordance between expectations and real events is the main focus of this short poem. The old tribal ways swept away by the religion and the customs of the colonizers, as it happens in Achebe’s novel, are paired to her disappointment at a father she has long imagined and now that he is in front of her, in flesh and blood, looks like dark earth and red dust to her. Unable to reconcile her father with the figure of the Nigerian intellectuals she knows, she is finally left alone in the hotel and thinks of his father’s hands, so similar and dissimilar from hers, those same hands that were lifted above his head to take God's white mask and to put it on his handsome face (Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” is the obvious reference here).

I like this poem for its simplicity, its refusal of the idea that poems use difficult words and complex figures of speech. It blends the narrative intent and the lyric moment, lending words in a most crystalline way to an emotion that we have all felt: disappointment and disenchantment.

“The Gift” by Vladimir Nabokov

Year of first publication: 1937-38
Genre: novel
Country: Russia

At some point in “The Gift” a man called Valentin Linëv from Warsaw reviews the book written by the protagonist, a mock biography of revolutionary democrat and author Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. The reviewer dismisses the work, considering that its author has, among other faults, a poor use of the Russian language. This fictitious reviewer, I learn from the afterword to the novel, failed to recognize all the allusions to great Russian authors in the book, thus missing its prominent aesthetic value. I am exactly like this wicked reviewer, because my grasp of Russian literature is sketchy, if not worse. “The Gift” has in fact been written for those readers who are familiar with the works of Pushkin, Tolstoj, Turgenev and many other important Russian authors. If you are not one of these lucky readers, then you are excluded from “The Gift”, because the book is entirely about literature and the plot has little importance.

Fëdor Kostantinovich Godunov-Cherdyncev, a Russian expatriate in 1920s Berlin, has just published a book of poetry in a magazine for Russian émigrés, but nobody seems to care or hail him as one of the new talents among the not-so-tiny Russian community in Germany. The verses, reported at length together with a reviewer’s commentary, are mainly about the author’s childhood in his native Russia. Fëdor Kostantinovich describes that poetry comes to him in sudden blazes and he struggles to catch all the words, an adjective sometimes escaping him. Like Nabokov, Godunov-Cherdyncev also experiences synesthesia, a contamination between the senses that allows him to perceive words or sounds as colours or textiles (he recommends the reader to try his ‘flannel cotton “m”’). What does Fëdor Kostantinovich do apart from musing over his own writing, anyway? He often visits other Russian émigrés, for example the Chernyshevskys, who oddly enough are not related to the aforementioned revolutionary hero. They had a son, Jasha, who died in a way highly reminiscent of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, although the afterword to the novel mentions Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” as the implied allusion. This is how the novel works: in a now-common postmodern way that scatters metaliterary references all over the novel. It is not hard to spot the influence of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (1913-1927), for instance, in the constant remembrance and nostalgia for the protagonist’s childhood. With regards to this, Robert Scholes, an influential literary critic, once said that ‘once we knew that fiction was about life and criticism was about fiction – and everything was simple. Now we know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metafiction’.
As the novel progresses, the reader understand that the plot revolves around Godunov-Cherdyncev’s maturation as a writer. At first his intention is writing a book about his father, who was an adventurer and an lepidopterist, but then he abandons the project. He meets Zina, a character moulded on Nabokov’s real wife Vera, who is the only one who loved his poems and wants to have a signed copy. She suggests that he should write a biography of Chernishevsky, as an exercise. Here begins the book within the book: more than one hundred pages are devoted to this fake biography of a real man. This chapter of the novel was censored, in the first Russian edition, for the same reasons given for the dismissal of the biography in the novel as a ‘reckless, antisocial, mischievous improvisation’. These words tell us that Nabokov was constantly playing with the reception of the book, because he knew it was not a book for everyone. He constantly mocks and scorns those readers who cannot spot the literary allusions, which can be a little annoying.
In spite of this metafictional feast, the novel failed to arouse my interest above a certain (low) level. Full of juicy titbits (‘the street began as a post office and ended like a church, like an epistolary novel’, p.16 my translation from the Italian), the novel does have some charms, but they are diluted, watered down in a drawn-out book of 450-odd pages, with almost no plot and maybe ruined by a translation that was difficult to make, not to mention an inadequate reader with only a few notions of Russian literature. As he always does, Nabokov tells in a preface what “The Gift” is not: it is not an autobiographical novel, he says, because he did not have an explorer as a father and he never courted Zina Mertz. The problem is that Nabokov never says what his novels really are. It seems to me that, as his other two works I have read so far (read here and here), this is ultimately a novel about writing, the novel that we read being the same novel that the protagonist starts at the end of the book, as if we were in a Moebius strip, a continuum where the end is also the beginning of the novel. The gift of the title is of course the gift of the pen, of poetry and literature, which is all that mattered to Nabokov.

"A Writer's People. Ways of Looking and Feeling" by V.S. Naipaul

Year of first publication: 2007
Genre: non-fiction / memoir
Country: Trinidad and Tobago / UK

In this book Naipaul writes about those writers he came into contact with, helping him find his own way of looking and feeling, that is to say his style and his way of observing the world. As a writer who comes from a place without solid traditions and culture, he had to work out his own material. He examines various writers, as different as Derek Walcott and Cicero, Flaubert and Anthony Powell, not to mention his own father Seepersad Naipaul, trying to explain their ways of seeing the world and of translating their feelings and impressions into words. Halfway between memoir and non-fiction, “A Writer’s People” is not scared to express strong opinions (wink to Vladimir Nabokov) such as ‘ I didn’t do English in the sixth form; and when I saw the text books, the “Lyrical Ballads” and so on, I considered myself lucky’ (p.8) or again ‘what a relief it was to feel that I need never read another letter of sweet nothings from Henry James again’ (p.56). Even though these sentences could sound arrogant out of context, I think that Sir Vidia was honest and humble in this work. He never thinks he is (or was) any better than the writers he assesses, though one must be very careful because the distinction is sometimes subtle. Many things he says about writing are undeniably true: ‘There is a kind of writing that undermines its subject. Most good writing , I believe is like that’ (p.40) and he manages to say what he wants with terse, simple language.

In the first chapter, sardonically called ‘The Worm in the Bud’, Naipaul writes about his nemesis Derek Walcott. Naipaul mocks those who, like Walcott, celebrate the culture of the Caribbean, suggesting that things like the steel band or the calypso are not really worth being called ‘culture’. He claims that Walcott tried to fill up the cultural emptiness felt by the inhabitants of the West Indies by borrowing from other cultures (Greek mythology, for instance) and giving people distorted ways to fill this lack, such as racial hatred and rage against the white people who exploited the islands. Walcott’s mind, according to Naipaul, remained anchored to his small little island, refusing to see the greater picture. For his pessimism, Naipaul has been dubbed by Walcott (a Nobel Prize apiece they are!) V.S. Nightfall and a mocking poem has even been written on the topic. The problem is that by the end of this chapter (and this book) I still haven’t grasped what really is his particular way of seeing and feeling. Apart from feeling disconnected from most writers on the face of the earth, the author does not say it.

In the second chapter ‘The English Way of Looking’, the author writes at length about his friend and fellow-writer Anthony Powell, an influential English writer in the 1950s. He laments that Powell wrote about English society in great detail, but without undermining the subject from within. Probably true. The reason is, according to Naipaul, that every aspect of English society, and especially of English country life, has already been written. However, he also criticized English travel writers (Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham) for assuming that people knew about the socio-political entanglements of the countries they were writing about. He thinks that ‘it seemed, in strange way, that at the end, when the dust had settled, the people who wrote as though they were at the centre of things might be revealed as the provincials’ (p.55). He did not convince me. Naipaul seems to ignore the fact that society is always changing and so is history: a novel written about the English society in 2011 will not be the same as a novel written about that same society in, say, 2007. The recession has happened and the Arab world is in revolt, for instance. Relationships, reactions and lifestyles continually change and are affected by a multitude of factors, so there will always be new material to write on.

The last three chapters follow a circular pattern: the author starts writing about what he believes is an Indian way of seeing and then passes on to some Latin authors, only to shed light on his ideas about Indian contemporary culture, which he essentially condemns as materialistic and culturally dependent on the West. Naipaul details the life of Gandhi, whom he portrays essentially as a provincial man whose view of the world was rather dim, but who had some great intuitions. Strangely enough, the ‘half-view’ of classical authors resembles the Indian way of seeing and feeling, that the author calls ‘looking and not seeing’. Naipaul laments that Indians claim they know Gandhi, without acknowledging the various elements that created his philosophy (his experience in London studying law, his imprisonment in South Africa, the observation of his mother’s faults and essentially the conflict between his admiration and his disgust for the colonizers). Indians, according to Naipaul, are confused. ‘India has no autonomous intellectual life’ he writes at the end of the book, blaming expatriate writers for writing overtly autobiographical novels moulded on creative writing courses that ultimately look all the same.
I don’t know what to make of this book. Did I like it? Did I not like it? I am uncomfortable with some of the conclusions, but I was spellbound while I was reading it. Written in spare prose, with anecdotes that are affectionate and cruel at the same time, Naipaul knows how to use his words and understands what it means to be a writer, the challenges and frustrations of the job. I had never imagined, for instance, that a writer like V.S. Naipaul never got over his shyness in seeing his name in print!

About the author: V.S. Naipaul was born in 1932 in Trinidad. He belongs to a family which descends from the indented workers brought from India to replace the African slaves who refused to work on the sugar plantations. His father Seepersad was a pioneer writer in the small intellectual community in Trinidad. Naipaul left his island for England with a scholarship and studied in Oxford. After his studies he began to write and has pursued no other profession. Among his first novels are “The Mystic Masseur” (1957), “A House for Mr Biswas” (1961) and “In A Free State” (1971). The latter has won the Booker Prize. He has also travelled the world and written about it: his acclaimed Indian Trilogy (“An Area of Darkness”, “India: A Wounded Civilization” and “India: A Million Mutinees Now”) and “Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey” are some examples of his travel writing. Naipaul has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories’. His work has raised a lot of controversy, mainly for political reasons and for his unsympathetic portrayal of the developing world, especially in his travel writing.

"Felicia's Journey" by William Trevor

Year of first publication: 1994

Genre: novel, crime fiction, thrille

Country: Ireland

Where does crime fiction start? Where does it end? When is one allowed to sympathize with the evil characters of a book? These are some questions that "Felicia's Journey" raises.

William Trevor is one of the most important living Irish writers, a master of short stories, always compared to Joyce. This is one of his novels, which slowly explores the story of Felicia and Mr Hilditch, who are opposites. She is a young innocent Irish girl who is looking for her boyfriend in England and he is a middle-age English man, lonely and apparently benevolent. Ok, now I have spoiled everything with only one adjective and you know already how the story will end. Or not?

La recensione di questo libro è disponibile a questo link.