Reviews

Daniil Charms was considered a children’s author and could not stand children all his life. While his whimsical fairy tales populated illustrated books and magazines, giving him something to live on in the silence of his room, he also feverishly wrote tales for adults, equally imaginative but inhabited by an excruciating melancholy, as in fairy tales went wrong. At the dawn of the USSR, this desperate fantasy of his was tolerable only if it was confined where it was least dangerous, in children’s literature. Back then, adults were the children to be motivated and consoled with uplifting novels aimed at glorifying the rise of the proletariat, a literature Charms refused to adhere to. ...

Land and Sea is an essay in short story form written in 1942 by Carl Schmitt. Subtitled “A consideration of world history told to my daughter Anna,” this essay recounts and summarizes the geo-historical-legal evolution of our planet since the discovery of the New World. The originality of the work lies in the author’s identification of the Earth-Sea dichotomy as the driving force of human history. I went into this book knowing very little about the author, Carl Schmitt, and the contents. From the first pages, I considered it a bizarre work, wondering whether a solid basis existed behind some of the assumptions and events narrated. Quoting the back cover of my Italian edition (Adelphi): ...

Medieval Callings comprises eleven essays by internationally renowned medieval historians. Somewhat deceptively, only Jacques Le Goff’s prestigious name appears on the front page, as he authored the introductive essay and handpicked and curated the collection. Each piece presents a nuanced profile of a significant social or professional Middle Ages group. Warrior knights, monks, high churchmen, criminals, lepers, shepherds, artists, and prostitutes, all prominent figures of medieval society, are depicted here with great detail. ...

I saw a wolf: that’s the phrase Ulf, a hunter and former forestry inspector now in his seventies, has been brooding, unable to confess to anyone since he spotted a majestic specimen at dawn on the first day of the year. Something clicks inside him, and Ulf, one of the most respected men in the village in deep Sweden where he lives, feels an increasingly solid and intimate connection with the creature. They both are hunters and loners, but why does he feel like an intruder? Even the memory of his early experiences in the woods with his father, once a source of joy, changes in flavor, just as pride in his hunting diaries fades, as they now only appear as a cold kill list. And his wife’s dry and practical empathy, their comfortable daily routine of love and habits, the faithful companionship of his dog Zenta and the many chases made with her in the snow are not enough: Ulf feels as lost among his stuffed trophies as among the traditions and customs of a community whose violence he now perceives. A society that, he will discover to his cost, is quick at oppressing when one is not aligned with its most deeply rooted values. ...

Zerocalcare is an Italian cartoonist whose strips, especially in the form of illustrated books, have surged to an iconic level in the last decade. His drawing is excellent, but it is with his writing that, I think, he conquered fame. His stories are fun to read and yet profound and vibrant, all at the same time. Also, he often touches on themes nobody else covers, at least not in the comics world. It was the case with Kobane Calling: Greetings from Northern Syria, his graphic reportage from Syrian Kurdistan and the Syria-Turkey border. The author visited the area with other volunteers to support the Kurdish resistance. I think Kobane Calling did a lot in raising awareness of the Kurdish situation, at least here in Italy (an English edition was published too.) ...

Regarding space-related topics and scientific research, Casey Handmer’s blog is one of my references. So when Casey started his Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary and I learned about Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterpiece, I was instantly intrigued. In Casey’s opinion, KSR’s Mars Trilogy is “one of the finest works of literature ever composed.” It took a couple of weeks of futile resistance before I gave in and ordered the first book in the series, Red Mars, a 420 pages tome that attempts to depict a scientifically credible human colonization of Mars1. ...

Sanguina Ancora (Still Bleeding) is not a biography but a passionate and informative tribute to Dostoevsky. The nonlinear, not literary style works and the continuous back and forth between Dostoevsky’s epic and the author’s own experiences as a scholar and Russian literature enthusiast is probably a good idea as it helps stress the actualness of Dostoevsky’s opus. However, the continuous jumping in and out of the Russian’s life, though sympathetic at first, gets tedious over time. While immersed in Dostoevsky’s events, it is not always pleasant to be torn away only to end up in the Parma lowlands for a few entertaining anecdotes (that these anecdotes tend to gravitate around the author’s other works adds to the discomfort.) ...

I wish everyone could listen to the song of the partridges as the sun rises, see the deer on pastures in spring, the larch trees reddened by autumn on the edges of rocks, the darting of fish among the clear waters of streams, and the bees gathering nectar from the flowering cherry trees. In these stories, I write about village places. These natural environments are still livable, about the beautiful social insects that are bees, but also about ancient jobs that are slowly and inexorably disappearing. ...

I tend to shy away from publishing cases, so Stoner has been resting on my yeah-maybe-one-day list for years. Over time I stumbled on notable mentions that kept the book on the fringe of my attention zone. Then one day, I read a brief and intriguing [review][2] in Giovanni Zagni’s excellent newsletter, Incertezze. Like me, Zagni suffers from the stay-away-from-editorial-cases idiosyncrasy, but he finally gave in, read the thing, reread it, and finally tagged it a modern classic. Zagni was convincing, yet it took another year before I surrendered my weapons and took the book off the shelf. I immediately realized I was in front of a beautiful book. ...

This short novel was a genuine surprise. I certainly didn’t expect Voltaire to be this accessible, witty, sarcastic, and also outrageous for the era (1759). Below the surface of a seemingly entertaining and often absurd sequence of improbable events is a constant philosophical struggle. Quoting from the back cover: Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in “the best of all possible worlds.” On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. ...