Parole

NFF wrap up

Ok, just to be honest: I’ve been very lazy with this challenge, and only visited a couple of reviews now and then. Even so, I’ve enjoyed reading my five (1. Banker to the Poor; 2. My Life with Mozart; 3. Water Wars; 4. Shakespeare. The World as a Stage; 5. The Millennium Problems; which were not my original five) and found many titles to add to my wishlist:

• Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris (seen here)
• Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree (seen here)
• Chandler Burr, The Perfect Scent (seen here)
• Matt Rogers, When Answers Aren’t Enough (seen here)
• Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (seen here)
• Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz (seen here)
• Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss (seen here)
• Stephen King, On Writing (seen here, but already on my wishlist before)
• Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (seen here)
• Bob Curran, The Truth About the Leprechaun (seen here, makes me wish to try my luck with Ireland again)
• David Mas Masumoto, Four Seasons in Five Senses (seen here)

It was a very nice experience, though, and helped me get to some of that non-fiction waiting forever on my TBR pile… Thank you, Joy.

One Canadian, two Canadians…

I was almost giving up entirely on the Second Canadian Book Challenge: 13 books, 2 months gone and I still had to read my first. Then I realized that it’s not entirely so. Somehow inadvertently, I have read two books that fit the bill. So here’s reviews. (And this is how I jump over the Ontarians and turn into a Quebecois. Which I wouldn’t mind to turn into, except for the cold weather. But then again, that must be the same for any corner of Canada. I’d better keep to my (almost) sunny Italy. )

The book: Saul Bellow, The Actual

The edition: a somewhat oldish Italian edition translated by Vincenzo Mantovani. (I couldn’t find the right cover anywhere on the Internet, so I put this one instead.)
The story: Harry Trellman and Amy Wustrin share a personal history that goes back a long time. Yet, she married Harry’s good friend, then divorced him under a scandal, then remained a widow. Even under the circumstances, Harry is not able to propose, if he  is not pushed into her arms.

My thoughts: I liked the way Bellow weaves the story as if he was embroidering a tapestry collecting small beads with his needle. The book is one big flashback with continuous minimalist flashbacks and flashforwards inside it (a style that I have come to appreciate, although it means that you only throughly enjoy a book the first time you read it), but it is seamless, you don’t feel like you’re jumping here and there in time. Rating: 8/10.

Counts as: 2ndCC book #1 (I don’t know how this fits into the challenge, as it didn’t tell me anything about Canada, but Bellow was Canadian-born, so it counts ).

The book: Anosh Irani, The Song of Kahusha

The edition: Italian translation by Anna Rusconi. As you can see, the Italian cover (left) is much softer than the original (right). I didn’t expect the book to be as harsh as it actually is.

The story: A 10-year-old orphan in Bombay, Chamdi suddenly decides to leave his orphanage and look for his father. He is completely unaware of what racial tensions mean for people living in the city, and even less aware of what life is like on its streets, of the brutality of a life of begging and crime. He makes friends with two other children who live on the street, and starts working (i.e. begging) with them for a big and cruel criminal boss. Chamdi dreams of a city where everything is good and everybody is happy, and this helps him survive to brutality, but his dream can only stretch so far.

My thoughts: it is very very harsh and violent, and even though I understand that things are probably realistically portraited (more than, say, in The Kite Runner), and I am fine with the fact that a happy ending is unrealistic here. But as you see everything through Chamdi’s dreamy eyes, you keep expecting everything to turn out fine. Which in turn makes the book’s violence and harshness even less bearable. It made me sick. Rating: 6/10.

Counts as: 2ndCC book #2 (Again, there’s nothing about Canada, but the book figures here, so I thought it would be fine.)

Review: The Millennium Problems

The book: Keith Devlin, The Millennium Problems

The edition: Italian translation by Isabella C. Blum

Contents: the seven Millennium Problems were identified and presented in 2000 as the most important problems now open in modern mathematics (ok, apart for one which, it seems, has been solved by now). The Clay Insitute has offered one million dollars to the solvers of each problem. Devlin tries to make it as simple as possible — which is not at all simple, though.

Pros: Devlin knows his way in math communication. As far as possible, the book is clear. Sure, you need a deep interest is the subject to go through it, but the author succeeds in giving a human touch to all the math. Be prepared not to understand everything.

Cons: I hated that, again and again, Devlin tells the readers that they can jump over parts and chapters they don’t understand. He keeps telling you that it’s perfectly normal if you don’t understand. Ok, true, it IS normal not to understand many parts of the book if you are not a specialist, but as far as I know, jumping over passages is exactly what you don’t want to do if you are to learn and understand anything about maths.

Read this if: if you like math books such as Ian Stewart’s; if you are passionate about maths and specifically want to know more about the Millennium Problems.

Don’t read this if: if you hate maths; if you want to approach math communication, but have never read anything before (start with something easier).

Rating: 8/10.

My reasons for reading: it was given to me by the person who causes my interest in maths. It counts as NFF book #5 (and last).

Autumn

Autumn is here. I like autumn: although it’s cold here (and that means no more trips to the seaside and no more sunbathing ), autumn means it’s time for roasted chestnuts, and grape harvesting, and the smell of must set to rest in cellars, and blue skies and yellow leaves, and a hot cup of tea. And as it’s cold outside, it’s easier to sit back and relax with a book. So what better than a reading challenge to celebrate the season?

Katrina at Callapidder Days is hosting the Fall Into Reading Challenge 2008. Post a list of books you challenge yourself to read between September 22nd and December 20th. The nice thing is, you get to choose the number and categories of books, so you can actually fit anything into the challenge! (And there’s book giveaways, too). BTW, Callapidder Days seems a good addition to the list of blogs I read regularly.

Enough with idle talk, here’s my list:

From TBR pile:

1. Denis Guedj, The Parrot’s Theorem
2. Maxence Fermine, Le Labyrinthe du temps
3. Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe
4. China Mieville, Un Lun Dun

For the 2nd Canadian Challenge:

5. Yann Martel, Life of Pi
6. Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

From the library:

7. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta
8. Neil Gaiman, Stardust

For the Planet Earth Challenge:

9. Fritjiof Capra, The Web of Life

That should me more than enough to keep me reading through the season…

Review: Shakespeare (plus bonus review)

The book: Bill Bryson, Shakespeare. The World as a Stage

Synopsis: Bryson goes on his own quest to tell us the life of the Bard.

My thoughts: Bryson is surely not the first one to try and tell the story of Shakespeare’s life, many have done so, and most were more entitled than him to try. Still, Bryson is a good and witty writer, so when I saw this one out, I grabbed it at once, looking forward to the chance of having his distinctive voice telling me the story. Well, forget it: there’s none of his usual humour or lively prose. This is just another account as you can find plenty of in many literature books. So much so that the very few smiles I reversed on these pages were not due to Bryson, but to some funny features of the English language itself:

General admission [to the theatre] for groundlings — those who stood in the open around the stage — was a penny. […] The money was dropped in a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping — the box office.

All in all, Bryson must have been completely deprived of inspiration while writing this book. Rating: 5/10.

Counts as: July Book Blowout book #8(1), NFF Challenge book #4

Bonus review: News From an Unknown Universe

I only read half of this book before returning it to the library, but I want to write a short review nevertheless. I decided to add this review here, as it counts as the second half of book #6 for the July Book Blowout, and also because it is non-fiction, so that any visitor from NFF may be interested.

The book: Frank Schaetzing, Nachrichten aus einem unbekannten Universum

The edition: Italian fine translation by Roberta Zuppet. The Italian title is Il mondo d’acqua. Alla scoperta della vita attraverso il mare (Water World. Discovering Life Through the Seas).

Synopsis: the author retraces the origins of life (and of our planet), going through the story from the point of view of species living in the seas.

My thoughts: I’ve seen a lot of criticism about this book, basically because the author’s previous works were passionating novels (such as the Fifth Element. I will add here that I have never read any of those), while this is not. True, this is not a passionating novel. This is (passionating) science communication at its best. There plenty of science stuff and plenty of information, plenty to learn from it, and still you go through it as if through a novel. It belongs in that same Olympus of great science books as Bill Bryson’s Short History of (Nearly) Everything. And it picks up exactly where Bryson had come short: the parts about fossils and geology and dinosaurs. While Bryson tried to involve the reader by working on the scientists’ and discoverers’ quirks and witticism, Schaetzing works his way through cells and fossils and dinos by simply making them behave as human beings. (I loved the dinos proclaiming a Marxist revolution…)
Rating: 9/10.

Counts as: July Book Blowout book #8(2)

Books written by translators: very bad and very good

July Book Blowout book #6:

The book: Tefkros Michailidis, Delitti pitagorici (Pythagorean crimes), Italian translation by Andrea Di Gregorio. Written in modern Greek. As far as I could understand, it has not been translated into English.

The story: a detective story were everything revolves around maths. A mathematician is killed. His best friend, and a fellow mathematician, recalls the story of their lives, of how they first met at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900, of how their respective research (and their role as on-lookers on the great history of mathematics) was at the basis of their friendship. Was it also a motive for the murder?

My thoughts: This novel has great potential, it brings the history of mathematics to life. The idea was a great one. Unfortunately, it has too didactic a take and it alternates two lines of narration with long explicative parts. Not only do the readers loose all interest for the crime story, they are also bored to death, as the author feels he needs to explain even the most obvious bits of information. From the Greek translator of Denis Guedj, I expected much more. Rating: 3/10.

July Book Blowout book #7:

The book: Claude Bleton, I negri del traduttore (The Translator’s Ghostwriters), Italian translation by Paola Carbonara. The book was originally written in French and has not been translated into English either, as far as I can tell.

The story: during a drinking night, the narrator, a true weaver of stories, is summing up his life (and going through different versions of it as the night goes by). Basically, the story is that of a man who, finding himself not able to be a writer, decides to be a translator: “The best solution was to copy what others had written. It was the beginning of a true vocation for idleness: I would become a translator.” Unfortunately he is not the best model of translators. ***WHAT FOLLOWS IS A COMPLETE SPOILER*** He starts to write his “translations” and to impose them on the writers for them to “re-create” the “original”. And when his writers (his ghostwriters) start to rebel against him and threaten to unmask him, he starts to kill them one by one. In the end, an avid reader, a retired policemen who reads his translations with the same interest he would dedicate to a murder case, finds out the truth and writes everything in a series of newspaper articles.

My thoughts: If you are already wary of translations, this is not the book to read. That is the only issue I have with this book, that there are already so many people who are wary of translators, that to depict one of us like that is not at all helpful for the category (Bleton is a translator himself, this is his first novel as author). That being said, the book is hilarious, an exceptionally good read. The characters are continuously changing face, so that you never know how much of the story is true. But I do know how difficult it is to make oneself a name in the translation and publishing world, and the new ways the narrator keeps inventing to boost his career are very funny to read about, to say the least. Rating: 8.5/10

Challenge met!

July is over, and so is the

For the July Book Blowout I had challenged myself to read 7 books. I know that is not much, but it seems to be more or less my average. Actually, I not only met that challenge but went a very little bit further at 8.5 books:

• Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, translated by Alberto Bracci Testasecca (1)
• Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, My Life with Mozart, translated by Alberto Bracci Testasecca (2)
• Aminatta Forna, Ancestors Stones, translated by Katia Bagnoli (3)
• Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, translated by Federica Oddera (4)
• Gregory Maguire, Wicked. The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, translated by Michele Piumini (5)
• Tefkros Michailidis, Delitti pitagorici (Pythagorean Crimes), translated by Andrea Di Gregorio (6)
• Claude Bleton, I negri del traduttore (The Translator’s Ghostwriters), translated by Paola Carbonara (7)
• Bill Bryson, Shakespeare (7.5, counts as half because I had started it before July 1st)
• Frank Schaetzing, Il mondo d’acqua (Water World), translated by Roberta Zuppet (8, counts as half because I read exactly half of it and then had to return it to the library)
• Dulce Maria Cardoso, Campo di sangue (Field of blood), translated by Daniele Petruccioli (8.5, counts as half because I am still halfway through)

Top three best books of the month:

1. Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
2. Bleton, I negri del traduttore
3. Schmitt, Monsieur Ibrahim

Worst of the month:

• Michailidis, Pythagorean Crimes

I am way behind with reviews, but will post comments soon.

And now, Mrs S. has offered us some questions as a close. Here we go.

1. Did you discover a new author?

Well, yes and no. I read several books from authors I had never read before (Bleton, Maguire, Michailidis, Cardoso, Schaetzing, Forna), but all of them were on my reading list previous to the challenge. Unfortunately I had very little time to blog during this month, so I almost never checked other participant’s blogs. This didn’t give me a great chance to discover new authors through the challenge, did it?

2. Where was the most unusual place you found yourself reading?

Can’t think of one. I kept reading in the same old places: on the train, in bed, on the couch. Oh, maybe the most unusual was reading on the balcony after sunset, using the remaining light of the day. That was nice!

3. Did you read more than usual?
4. Did you give up anything in order to read more?

Nope. I was somewhat on a strict schedule. And I actually tend to read less during summer, as I try and enjoy the warm weather.

5. If you won the Amazon voucher what would you spend it on?

I haven’t given it a thought yet. I’d probably use the chance to order something from my wishlist in OV, as most of the time I am reading translation… Probably I’d try and pick some French Canadian author. (Although, if I have to order from amazon.com, most of the voucher would go towards shipping expenses, I’m afraid. Amazon.fr seems to be my only choice for ordering abroad.)

6. Would you like to see a 2009 Book Blowout?

Yes, definitely, but maybe not in July. I’d appreciate a winter book blowout. Or maybe an August book blowout, as I normally am on vacation during August and have more time for reading.

A kind of review: Wicked

So.

Gregory Maguire, Wicked. The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Italian translation by Michele Piumini.

Both in speed and concentration, this is how I read the book. It grabbed my whole attention, and made me rush through. Both the style and the story were compelling, full of interesting turns, so that it kept me wanting to read on and on. Liked.

I have to admit it left me full of questions. There was a general lack of sense in parts of the story, in the way characters were characterized, and above all in the ending. I was disappointed. Characters were great and unforgettable, but somewhat inconsistent. Not liked.

Rating: 7.5/10

Counts as: July Book Blowout book#5

Review: Unaccustomed Earth

The book: Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

The edition: Italian edition translated by Federica Oddera

Synopsis: a new collection of short stories on the themes that are dear to Lahiri: the encounters and clashes between American and Indian cultures for migrant families. The second part of the book is a novella in three chapters.

My thoughts: Lahiri is great, and she is getting better. She has always been a great narrator, with a talent for characterization and an eye for human behaviour, and topped it off with a compelling style. But when I read Interpreter of Maladies earlier this year, I was not completely convinced, mainly due to the fact that I’m not too keen on short stories as such. Here the stories are somewhat longer, the characters more real, and in general they offer more hope. My rating: 9/10 (which I rarely give even to novels, and which is much more I thought I would ever rate a short story collection).

Counts as: July Book Blowout book#4

Ceci n’est pas a review

I should be reviewing this book, which I read in June as part of the NFF challenge. But I’m not really doing so, although you will find some considerations on the book in this post, and especially towards the end. I’m more interested in putting down some thoughts on water itself.

I guess we are all informed on the water issue, the thirsty world, water as the next gold and everything. But as for saving water… are you? I’ve been told to do so since I was very young, but I didn’t really understand the issue until very recently. The point (and my concern) is this: each and every book and project on environmental awareness, when it comes to water, starts from the water cycle. If water goes back to where it comes from, it is endless, so what’s the point in saving it?

The point is the rhythm. And nobody seems to be stressing that.

For my part, I truly understood it only when in this book (which has nothing to do with the environment) I read this:

Cities and towns all along China’s wealthy coast are sinking as cities drain underground aquifers of their water.

It takes time for the water we use to complete the cycle and be usable again. And we are exploiting it much faster than we should. This transforms an endless resource in something we are running out of.

And that’s why the wars of the 21st century will not be about oil, but about water, as Shiva points out. Actually, that is already the case, she argues, although the real reason is masked and dressed up as religous or ethnical differences.

One thing I liked about Water Wars is the way it points out aspects of the water issue that most people never think of or never know about. Such as the problem with growing eucalyptus for the paper industry. Would you ever think that the book you are reading can worsen water scarcity?

In India and other parts of the Third World, the spread of eucalyptus monocultures for the paper and pulp industry has been a major source of water problems. Eucalyptus, ecologically adapted to its native habitat in Australia, is hazardous in water-deficient regions. Nowhere outside its native habitat is eucalyptus a self-sustaining system of vegetation. A study conducted by the hydrological division of the Australian Central Scientific and Industrial Research Organization found that during years with precipitation less than 1,000 millimeters, deficits in soil moisture and groundwater were created by eucalyptus. Even throughout Australia, reports confirm the rapid destruction of water resources as a consequence of large-scale planting of eucalyptus.

I also liked her clear understanding and description of the opposition between a traditional culture of water as free to everyone (in India, she writes, there were “water temples” where the thirsty were offered fresh water for free) and the industrial view of water as a commercial property.

What I didn’t like at all in this book is that Shiva is way too partial in some of her beliefs, and especially so against the Green Revolution. In the 1940s a new form of agriculture was developed in Mexico and exported elsewhere (India and Africa included) since, thanks to which bigger quantities of produce could be obtained, to answer the needs of a growing world population. Unfortunately, it needed huge quantities of water and of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, which we now realize were not a very good idea. Moreover, the Green Revolution brought on monocultures and made traditional crops almost disappear. I understand Shiva’s point — local farmers had selected their crops through the centuries, finding those that best suited the local conditions, but international organizations never took this knowledge into consideration, and now it’s lost — but at the time it seemed a good solution to hunger issues. If you read Water Wars (an excerpt here), according to Shiva it seems like the FAO, WTO and the such always knew the problems that the Green Revolution would cause, and they imposed it out of their love for power or something.

All in all, it’s a good book. It’s easy to read (a bit too many numbers, maybe, and that never sticks with me) and conveys information on an important issue from an uncommon point of view. Rating: 6.5/10.

(This review is based on the Italian edition translated by Bruno Amato and published by Feltrinelli.)