Parole

È venerdì…

… ecco qualcosa per alleggerire le ultime ore di lavoro prima del weekend:

La top-50 dell’antilingua d’ufficio secondo la BBC (via)

Imposture (via)

Vi ho mai detto che sono a sangue freddo? Ecco la conferma.

Sarà blasfema, ma quest’idea è bella lo stesso.

E per finire (citato un po’ da tutti questa settimana) ecco i rischi della traduzione automatica. Buona visione!

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

Viaggiare

Per viaggiare on-line in attesa delle vacanze:

Lubecca: storia della città.

Amsterdam: mappe mentali.

Hay-on-Wye: paradiso dei lettori.

New York: a piedi.

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.)

Three short reviews

NOTE: I’m falling behind with reviews and I don’t have much time for blogging in this period, so I’m going to sum up my latest reads here.

The book: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran

The edition: Italian translation by Alberto Bracci Testasecca

Review: this is the story of a friendship between a boy and an old man, between a Jew and a Muslim, told in Schmitt’s light and straightforward style. They tell me that the movie is nice, too, but I haven’t seen it. Somehow minimalist, as is the case with many French books nowadays, it is like a small grain of pure crystal found in the sand: a little treasure of clarity. You read it in one hour, but it stays with you much longer. Rating: 9/10.

Counts as: July Book Blowout book#1.

The book: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, My Life with Mozart

The edition: Italian translation by Alberto Bracci Testasecca. It comes complete with an audio CD with music by Mozart, to listen while reading, which is important given the strong references to the music in the text.

Review: at first, I was very disappointed with this book. I expected one of Schmitt’s little and beautiful stories, but I found a lot of introspection and big questions (what is life, and the such), and very little narrative. Then I understood: this is not a novel, it is a memoir. As such, it is quite beautiful, but you need to have an understanding of music to follow all of it. Rating: 7/10.

Counts as: July Book Blowout book#2, NFF Challenge book#3.

The book: Aminatta Forna, Ancestor Stones

The edition: Italian translation by Katia Bagnoli

Review: London, 2003: Abie receives a letter from her homeland, Sierra Leone, telling her that her grandfather is dead and has left her the family’s coffee plantation; she goes back, and at home she meets four of her aunts, Asana, Mary, Hawa and Serah; and during her stay each of them tells her stories about their lives. I have contrasting feelings about this book. On one hand it is a great choral novel, a women’s book on the lines of the novels by Marcela Serrano; it has the potential to give a great insight into the African (Sierra Leonean) culture; and it tops it off with a great narrative and style. But on the other hand, I had too little knowledge about that culture to really understand many things, and the author didn’t help in that sense; and what’s worse, I wans’t able to keep the four stories separate: the same characters were very different from one chapter to the next (e.g. in one story Abie’s grandfather is so keen on Islam that he forbids previous religions even to the point of driving one of his wives mad, while in another he sends one daughter to a Christian school/nunnery), and this made it difficult to work out the whole picture. Rating: 7.5/10.

Counts as: July Book Blowout book#3

Credere

Non credo che ci sia una spiegazione. La fede in Cristo non mi sembrava una cosa razionale o scientifica, eppure non potevo fare niente per allontanarmene. Credo che Laura stesse cercando una spiegazione razionale perché era convinta che tutte le verità fossero anche razionali. Ma non è così. L’amore, ad esempio, è un’emozione vera, ma non è razionale… non puoi spiegarlo in termini scientifici. Così come non puoi spiegare la bellezza. La luce non può essere provata scientificamente, eppure tutti crediamo alla sua esistenza e grazie alla luce vediamo le cose che ci circondano.
(Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, traduzione mia)

Letto qui, dove c’è anche una recensione completa del libro. Grazie Laura.

Believe

I don’t think there is an explanation. My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief. I think Laura was looking for something rational, because she believed that all things that were true were rational. But that isn’t the case. Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it isn’t rational…love cannot be proved scientifically. Neither can beauty. Light cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light see all things.
(Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz)

Found here, with a full review of the book. Thanks Laura.

Parole d’autore: Schmitt

Non ho mai visto due occhi ridere in quel modo. Scoppiano dalle risate, i suoi occhi, fanno un baccano d’inferno.

“Perché non sorridi mai, Momo?” mi domandò monsieur Ibrahim.
La domanda era come un cazzotto, un vero e proprio cazzotto al fegato, non c’ero preparato.
“Sorridere è roba da gente ricca, monsieur Ibrahim. Io non ho i mezzi”.
Naturalmente lui cominciò a sorridere, tanto per farmi girare le scatole.
[…]
“Monsieur Ibrahim, quando dico che il sorriso è roba da ricchi, intendo dire che è roba per gente felice”.
“Ecco, è qui che ti sbagli. È il sorridere che rende felici”.

“Il tuo amore per lei è tuo. Ti appartiene. Anche se lei lo rifiuta, non lo può cambiare. Semplicemente non ne approfitta, ecco tutto. Quello che tu dai, Momo, è tuo per la vita; e quello che non dai è perduto per sempre!”.

Era fantastico scoprire come tutto diventava interessante viaggiando con monsieur Ibrahim. Siccome io ero incollato al volante e mi concentravo sulla strada, lui mi descriveva i paesaggi, il cielo, le nuvole, i villaggi, gli abitanti. Le chiacchiere di monsieur Ibrahim, la sua voce fragile come carta velina, quell’accento speziato, quelle immagini, quelle esclamazioni, quelle ingenuità seguite dalle battute più diaboliche: questa è per me la strada che conduce da Parigi a Istanbul. L’Europa non l’ho vista, io, l’ho sentita.

“No, non l’autostrada, Momo. Non prendere l’autostrada. Le autostrade, ci passi e basta, non c’è niente da vedere. Sono buone per gli imbecilli che vogliono andare il più velocemente possibile da un punto all’altro. Noi non facciamo della geometria, noi viaggiamo”.

Un libro molto bello, Monsieur Ibrahim e i fiori del Corano, di Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, nella traduzione di Alberto Bracci Testasecca.

Why not?

With two challenges finished I was thinking whether or not to join a new one. I was having a look around when I noticed this:

It is hosted by Mrs S at Blue Archipelago, and basically the idea is to commit to reading a number (any number) of books during the month of July. Something on the lines of trying to guess the number of books you’ll manage in a month. It’s the first time I see this blog, but it looks very nice and the challenge itself is not hard. So, why not?

As I have some books due to the library by the 15th and some that I’ve just started, and my mother will surely bring in more short reads from the library… I guess I can challenge myself to read… 7 books (playing it safe, as some of the books I am planning to read are quite big and I have some test translations coming my way this month too).

Apart from that, I seem to like “themed” challenge better than “general” ones. And I found one that suits me well: the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge hosted by The Book Mine Set.

It challenges participants to read and write about 13 books by Canadian authors. There is one year time so I should manage. John proposes several different approaches to this (see his blog for details). As for me, I have not defined a list yet, but I know I have a couple by Margaret Atwood and a couple by Michael Ondaatje, and one by Thomas King that I want to read, so I’ll go for “The Free Spirit”. Moreover, most of the names on last year’s list of possible readings are new to me, and I’m sure there are lots of hidden treasures there.