books to be enjoyed on the sofa in Rome…(or when on the bus for a while!)

IL ROGO DI BERLINO by Helga Schneider

Helga Schneider digs in her childhood’s memories for this account of the 1945 events in Berlin. The perspective of a child, even if in retrospective, makes you imagine what it means to be a civilian – and a child – during a war.

Gaza, Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Congo: we don’t need to go back in time to 1945 to imagine what it means.

LA RAGAZZA DI SETA ARTIFICIALE by Irmgard Keun (Das kunstseidliche Maechen)

Winter days…old movies and good novels. How many times did I repeat Holly Golightly’s words when watching at Breakfast at Tiffany? I know it by heart…both the italian and the original version!

At the Herder German Bookstore I discovered a gem the other day…”La ragazza di seta artificiale” by Irmgard Keun  “Die kunstseidene Maedchen” – published by FORUM 2008, from Udine and with the Universita’ degli Studi di Udine (bravi!).

Doris was there before Holly arrived…theater extra and demi-mondaine, she gets money for powdering her nose, she “gets” shoes and silk blouses…Yet, everything is different. It’s not NYC and the 60s but Berlin and the 30s. The apartments where she happens to be resident range from old Prussia to “full of dentist lamps” brand new Bauhaus.

Holly has just champagne in the fridge and eats breakfast from a brown bag on Fifth. Doris dreams about Schnitzel when men offer her cognac and 4 pfenning cigarettes. New York cannot stand the competition with Berlin on ambiguity.

But both are “ambitious”, “must have a career”, “be a star”.

Do not miss this fabulous novel. Most of all for Doris’s view on men. It’s Sex and the City  70 years earlier. Sex und die Stadt.

I CANI E I LUPI by Irene Nemirovskij (Les Chiens et les Loups)

I didn’t read Suite francaise even if I picked it up in bookstores quite often. So I start my reading of Nemirovskij’s novels from this one…maybe the gorgeous enigmatic elegant lady portrayed by Man Ray on the cover y est pour quelque chose? Sofa reading at first glance.

The story starts in 1914’s Kiev and ends just before WWII in Paris. I have the impression that these characters could be the same described by Patrick Modiano...emigres with a complicated past, always on the brink between financial success and outright poverty.

Also, the extreme banking adventures, the bankrupt governments make this novel feel very in tune with our times.

The writing is precious, still, breath-taking. And I like the word closing the novel.

GLI ANNI TRENTA – IL DECENNIO CHE SCONVOLSE IL MONDO by Piers Brendon (THE DARK VALLEY. A PANORAMA OF THE 30s)

You read this book and you have a strange feeling of deja vu. Oh yes. It reminds you of the news you read on the newspaper this morning. At least, in the italian press.

Good book de chevet – definitely keeps you awake. Plus having your historical atlas at hand can be useful.

MAUS by Art Spiegelman

I read them many years ago, having discovered them at my parents’. Now reprinted as a single book instead of two, it was a good occasion to re-read MAUS and own my own copy. I did not remember old Vladek’s temper…

This is definitely a book for the bus. A statement you want to make, in a moment in which on the bus comments are unleashed, which a couple of years ago nobody would dare to do. Plain racist ones, I mean.

LA MISURA DEL MONDO - by Daniel Kehlmann (Die Vermessung der Welt)

Back and forth between the biographies “romanzate” of Humboldt and Gauss. Truly enjoyable, especially the encounter of the two peculiar men in Berlin in 1828.

Nice for the sofa, and even nicer with a bedspread for these chilly autumn late afternoons…or a lazy cat on your lap…nevertheless, we will return to our friend G. this book that we borrowed from HIS bookshelf, a gift from our common friend C. …books tell stories of friendship…that’s why they are such magic objects…

LE CITTA DIVISE i Balcani e la cittadinanza tra nazionalismo e cosmopolitismo  – by Gian Matteo Apuzzo

I had to have it! Reading it now… so, I can’t comment on it yet, but I’ll write about it soon!

BERLINO – NUOVE INCHIESTE DI JAN KARTA 1935/1937 by Roberto dal Pra’ and Rodolfo Torti

A spy-story cum detective-story set in Berlin and even more, set on trains in Central Europe!