Dave Ross

All posts tagged with italian

7 posts found

My Brilliant Friend

This is Elena Ferrante’s first book in the Neapolitan Novels series. It follows the intense friendship between two girls, Elena Greco and Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, growing up in a poor neighborhood in post-war Naples. The novel explores themes of identity, class, and the complexities of female friendship. As the girls navigate their lives, their paths diverge: Elena pursues education and a more conventional life, while Lila’s fierce intelligence and rebellious spirit lead her to reject societal norms. The story delves...

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Honeymoon

In Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano, Jean B., the narrator is submerged in a world where day and night, past and present, have no demarcations. Having spent his adult life making documentary films about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career. He begins to take what seems to be a journey to nowhere. Jean pretends to fly to Rio to make another film but instead returns to his Parisian suburb. He decides to spend his solitary days...

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Missing Person

In Modiano’s Missing Person , Guy Roland is an amnesiac detective who has lost his memory ten years before the beginning of the story, which opens in 1965. His employer retires and closes the detective agency. Roland embarks on a search for his own identity. I guess he didn’t get vacation days. His investigations uncover clues to a life that seems to stop during the Second World War. It seems that he is Jimmy Pedro Stern, a Greek Jew from...

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The Periodic Table

Primo Levi’s Periodic Table is a group of autobiographical episodes of the author’s experiences as a Jewish-Italian doctoral-level chemist under the Fascist regime and afterward. They include various themes that follow a chronological sequence. His ancestry at the start. Then his studies of chemistry and practical use of the studies in wartime Italy. A pair of imaginative tales he wrote at that time, and his subsequent experiences as an anti-Fascist partisan follow. Subsequently, a piece about his arrest and imprisonment,...

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Foucault's Pendulum

Foucault’s Pendulum is Umberto Eco’s novel of a few Milanese book editors who are bored with their work. To pass the time they cook up an elaborate hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with occult groups across the centuries. Becoming obsessed with their creation, they produce a map. The map indicates the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled. It’s a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault’s Pendulum. But in a fateful...

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Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities in 1972, but it feels as if it had always existed. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories...

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Numero Zero

Numero Zero is a novel written by Umberto Eco and published in 2015. It is a satirical work that explores themes of media manipulation, conspiracy theories, and the blurred line between truth and fiction. The story is set in Milan in 1992 and follows Colonna, a freelance writer who is hired to work for a mysterious publishing project called “Domani” (“Tomorrow”). “Domani” aims to create a nonexistent newspaper, which would be used to manipulate public opinion and serve the interests...

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