There will probably be real life challenges for everyone in 2013. Life is made up of a series of trials we must overcome and in such a competitive world those trials may well be considered challenges. However, the challenges I'm inviting you to take part in are quite pleasant events with very little competion in them. You are invited to challenge yourself to read as many books as you can. Ready to join the fun?
Each month, a new post dedicated to the HF Challenge will be created. To participate, you only have to follow the rules:
everyone can participate, even those who don't have a blog (you can add your book title and thoughts in the comment section if you wish)
add the link(s) of your review(s) including your name and book title to the Mister Linky they’ll be adding to their monthly post (please, do not add your blog link, but the correct address that will guide us directly to your review)
any kind of historical fiction is accepted (HF fantasy, HF young adult,...)
During these following 12 months you can choose one of the different reading levels:
- 20th century reader - 2 books - Victorian reader - 5 books - Renaissance Reader - 10 books - Medieval - 15 books - Ancient History - 25+ books
You can tailor the challenge to suit you in whichever way you like! To join the challenge click HERE. Itruns from 1 January to 31 December 2013.
If you particularly love a book and would like to bring it to life online, this project is just for you! Read carefully what follows and click on the links to know more about it.
www.bookdrum.com is a community website that aims to be the perfect companion to the books we love, bringing them to life with immersive pictures, videos, maps and music. So far this project has assembled comprehensive illustrated profiles of over 100 important books, including several school set texts that are already proving very useful to teachers and students alike. Book Drum’s unique approach has been praised by authors as distinguished as Sarah Waters, John Banville, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Rice, Paulo Coelho and Peter Godwin.
They are now launching the 2011 Book Drum Tournament, with US$3,500 in cash prizes on offer. This follows the highly successful 2010 Tournament, won by Victoria Hooper. Book Drum was able to give writing commissions to eight talented Contributors on the strength of their 2010 Tournament entries.
As a teacher, reviewer and blogger, I like this project very much and I decided to bring Book Drum and the Tournament to your attention. And of course I’d be delighted to enter myself! If only days were 48 hours long!
When Ann Ward was born in London in 1764 from a wealthy middle class family the first Gothic tale, The Castle of Otranto, was going to be published (on Christmas Eve) by Horace Walpole. She would marry William Radcliffe ,owner and editor of the English Chronicle, and would become extreme popular as a Gothic writer. The marriage was childless and, to amuse herself, she began to write fiction, which her husband encouraged.Her first novel was The Castle of Athlin and Dumbaye (1789), but her The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) made her extremely popular among the upper classes and growing middle class, especially among young women. It was her technique of the explained supernatural, in which every seemingly supernatural intrusion is eventually traced back to natural causes, and the impeccable conduct of her heroines that finally met with the approval of the reviewers, transforming the gothic novel into something socially acceptable.
Jane Austen mentioned The Mysteries of Udolpho in her Northanger Abbey, in which she parodized the Gothic Novel and its melodramatic overreactive heroines. Though as noted Radcliffe's works had clearly influenced Austen's there is no historical evidence of a meeting between the two writers as represented in the film Becoming Jane, where Mrs Radcliffe is portrayed by Helen McCrory. In the mentioned scene Jane Austen is accompanied by Tom Lefroy to Mrs Radcliffe's house where she encourages the younger lady to embark on a writing career.
The Italian (1797)
As many other Gothic novels written in the last 3 decades of the 18th century, also Mrs Radcliffe's THE ITALIAN was set in a Catholic country, namely Italy, more precisely Naples.This was due to exoticism or the cult of the exotic (everything which was distant in space and in time) but also to the protestant prejudices against Catholicism. So the terrible frightening events told take place in isolated convents and abbeys very often and the villains are monks or nuns. This is exactly what happens in this novel I've just finished reading for my 18th-19th Women Writers Challenge.
The love between noble Vincentio di Vivaldi and a beautiful but poor damsel, Ellena Rosalba, is contrasted by Vincentio's mother, the Marchesa, with the help of her wicked confessor, monk Schedoni, and the prioress of St. Stephen's Monastery . They plot and kidnap innocent but brave Ellena, they menace and torture her in order to force her to become a nun and are even ready to kill her. Several twists and turns will lead to the discovery of the real origins of poor Ellena, who eventually finds out who her parents (whom she believed both dead) were and even -unexpectedly and by chance- meets her mother. The clichès of the sentimental Gothic pattern hero/heroine/villain are all there as well as the taste for the sublime nocturnal settings , the supernatural mysterious events all aiming to frighten the easily touched 18th century reader.
I'm just teaching the Gothic Novel at school in this first part of the school year and this reading of mine was a perfect compendium to my teaching schedule for my oldest students. It was interesting, if not involving or convincing.
This review is my third task for the 18th - 19th Century Women Writer Reading Challenge. My completed tasks and the ones yet to be fulfilled are on my right sidebar.
“We want to make the world dance to our tune, that's all.
But the world's got a tune of its own, much older than ours”
The author and his ideas
Reviewers and government censors condemned D.H. Lawrence's last novel as radically pornographic, a vision of a relationship and a society without moral boundaries. But Lady Chatterley's Lover is not really a radical novel, unless it can be said to be radically reactionary, a profoundly conservative response to the modern condition. What was the modern condition that Lawrence found so foul, and who was the author, a paradoxical man whose somewhat puritan mind raged against modernity through an unprecedentedly unconstrained celebration of sexuality?
Lawrence was not the only author writing in the decades after the first World War whose work was considered radically immoral; famously, for instance, a furor arose over the publication of James Joyce's great novel Ulysses years before Lady Chatterley's Lover was written. Many of the modernist writers and poets who dominated postwar avant-garde literary art placed a high premium on discarding social convention, which they believed had been exposed as empty by the carnage of the war. Society was morally bankrupt, empty of real meaning, composed of individuals between whom no real connection or understanding was possible. In response, artists began to experiment radically with form, and they set a premium on art that was "real," that eliminated convention to get at the core of life.
D.H. Lawrence was not really one of these formally and thematically radical modernists. While he shared the modernist belief that the postwar world was virtually bereft of meaningful values, Lawrence laid the blame at the doorstep of technology, the class system, and intellectual life. He believed that modern industry had deprived people of individuality, making them cogs in the industrial machine, a machine driven by greed. And modern intellectual life conspired with social constraint to bleed men dry of their vital, natural vigor. Lawrence wanted to revive in the human consciousness an awareness of savage sensuality, a sensuality which would free men from their dual enslavement to modern industry and intellectual emptiness. He was in many ways a primitivist: he saw little reason for optimism in modern society, and looked nostalgically backwards towards the days of pastoral, agricultural England.
The novel
The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood in Nottinghamshire where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story. Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in three different versions.
Lady Chatterley's Lover begins by introducing Connie Reid, the female protagonist of the novel. She was raised as a cultured bohemian of the upper-middle class, and was introduced to love affairs--intellectual and sexual liaisons--as a teenager. In 1917, at 23, she marries Clifford Chatterley, the scion of an aristocratic line. After a month's honeymoon, he is sent to war, and returns paralyzed from the waist down, impotent.
After the war, Clifford becomes a successful writer, and many intellectuals flock to the Chatterley mansion, Wragby. Connie feels isolated; the vaunted intellectuals prove empty and bloodless, and she resorts to a brief and dissatisfying affair with a visiting playwright, Michaelis. Connie longs for real human contact, and falls into despair, as all men seem scared of true feelings and true passion. There is a growing distance between Connie and Clifford, who has retreated into the meaningless pursuit of success in his writing and in his obsession with coal-mining, and towards whom Connie feels a deep physical aversion. A nurse, Mrs. Bolton, is hired to take care of the handicapped Clifford so that Connie can be more independent, and Clifford falls into a deep dependence on the nurse, his manhood fading into an infantile reliance.
Into the void of Connie's life comes Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on Clifford's estate, newly returned from serving in the army. Mellors is aloof and derisive, and yet Connie feels curiously drawn to him by his innate nobility and grace, his purposeful isolation, his undercurrents of natural sensuality. After several chance meetings in which Mellors keeps her at arm's length, reminding her of the class distance between them, they meet by chance at a hut in the forest, where they have sex. This happens on several occasions, but still Connie feels a distance between them, remaining profoundly separate from him despite their physical closeness.
One day, Connie and Mellors meet by coincidence in the woods, and they have sex on the forest floor. This time, they experience simultaneous satisfaction. This is a revelatory and profoundly moving experience for Connie; she begins to adore Mellors, feeling that they have connected on some deep sensual level. She is proud to believe that she is pregnant with Mellors' child: he is a real, "living" man, as opposed to the emotionally-dead intellectuals and the dehumanized industrial workers. They grow progressively closer, connecting on a primordial physical level, as woman and man rather than as two minds or intellects.
Connie goes away to Venice for a vacation. While she is gone, Mellors' old wife returns, causing a scandal. Connie returns to find that Mellors has been fired as a result of the negative rumors spread about him by his resentful wife, against whom he has initiated divorce proceedings. Connie admits to Clifford that she is pregnant with Mellors' baby, but Clifford refuses to give her a divorce. The novel ends with Mellors working on a farm, waiting for his divorce, and Connie living with her sister, also waiting: the hope exists that, in the end, they will be together.
Analysis
Well, it is important to remember not only precisely what this novel seems to advocate, but also the purpose of that advocacy. Lady Chatterley's Lover is not propaganda for sexual license and free love. As D.H. Lawrence himself made clear in his essay "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover," he was no advocate of sex or profanity for their own sake. The reader should note that the ultimate goal of the novel's protagonists, Mellors and Connie, is a quite conventional marriage, and a sex life in which it is clear that Mellors is the aggressor and the dominant partner, in which Connie plays the receptive part; all who would argue that Lady Chatterley's Lover is a radical novel would do well to remember the vilification that the novel heaps upon Mellors' first wife, a sexually aggressive woman. Rather than mere sexual radicalism, this novel's chief concern--although it is also concerned, to a far greater extent than most modernist fiction, with the pitfalls of technology and the barriers of class--is with what Lawrence understands to be the inability of the modern self to unite the mind and the body. D.H. Lawrence believed that without a realization of sex and the body, the mind wanders aimlessly in the wasteland of modern industrial technology. An important recognition in Lady Chatterley's Lover is the extent to which the modern relationship between men and women comes to resemble the relationship between men and machines.
This is a novel with high purpose: it points to the degradation of modern civilization--exemplified in the coal-mining industry and the soulless and emasculated Clifford Chatterley--and it suggests an alternative in learning to appreciate sensuality. And it is a novel, one must admit, which does not quite succeed. Certainly, it is hardly the equal of D.H. Lawrence's great novels, Women in Love and The Rainbow. It attempts a profound comment on the decline of civilization, but it fails as a novel when its social goal eclipses its novelistic goals, when the characters become mere allegorical types: Mellors as the Noble Savage, Clifford as the impotent nobleman. And the novel tends also to dip into a kind of breathless incoherence at moments of extreme sensuality or emotional weight. It is not a perfect novel, but it is a novel which has had a profound impact on the way that 20th-century writers have written about sex, and about the deeper relationships of which, thanks in part to Lawrence, sex can no longer be ignored as a crucial element.
BBC Lady Chatterley's Lover (1993)
What many people don't know is that this version was the last of three written by Lawrence and that, in the view of a number of critics - as well as Lawrence's wife, Frieda - it is greatly inferior to the earlier drafts. In fact, the second of these earlier versions was published in 1972 by Heinemann, under the title John Thomas and Lady Jane.
When Ken Russell set out to film Lady Chatterley for the BBC in the summer of 1992, he drew upon all three versions of the novel, deliberately toning down the infamous sex scenes and the language to ensure the program would be shown in a prime-time slot.
There are several differences between the novel and this 1993 adaptation , but it is impossible to say how much it depends on the use of three different written versions and how much from the director's freedom in adapting them for the screen.
The choice for the TV series was to cut down not only the many explicit sexual detaills but also most of the experiences in Connie's life before marriage and also her affair with Michaelis before meeting Mellors, when she was already married with Clifford.
But again I can't say if the many changes are due to the fact that Ken Russel used the 3 different editions of the novel for his script. So, I just and simply warn you that the series is quite different from the book.
The 4-part serialization stars Sean Bean as Mellors, the gamekeeper, and Joely Richardson as Lady Connie Chatterley, with James Wilby as Connie's disabled husband, Clifford.
I read the novel and watched the BBC series as tasks in my DH LAWRENCE CHALLENGE 2010. This challenge is hosted by Traxy at The Squeee. I'm half- way down since I've got a book and a TV movie yet to go: Sons And Lovers.
DH Lawrence is one of the British writers I studied and read the least in my life so it is time to catch up with his work. Thanks to Traxy at The Squeee for this opportunity! DH Lawrence Challenge 2010 starts today , July 1st and ends on December 31st. You must choose at least 4 items from this long list .
Read, watch or listen to anything DH Lawrence-related (original works, letters, literary criticism, etc.) during this time. You can re-read, re-watch and re-listen all you like. The goal is to have read/watched/listened to at least four items during the challenge's duration.
I want to read 1. Lady Chatterley's Lover since I've never done it and 2. watch the BBC series Lady Chatterley starring Joely Richardson , Sean Bean, James Wilby (1993). Then I'll re-read one of the novel I had to study at the uni so long ago, 3. Sons and Lovers and watch an adaptation as well: 4. Sons and Lovers (2003), starring Rupert Evans as the protagonist, Paul Morel.
Henry James said that Trollope's greatest and undeniable merit was his utter understanding of the ordinary. He succeded in feeling any little thing in everyday life not only in seeing it. He felt them simply and directly in their sadness and in their gaiety, in their appeal and in their comical aspects and in their most obvious but sensible meanings. This introduction of an amazingly prolific writer made by another terrific author made me feel guilty and sorry for not knowing him more and deeply. I decided I had to read one of Trollope's novels. Isn't he one of the Victorian writers , I'm so intrested in? He is, but I'm ashamed to say I had never read one of his novels.
So, strangely enough , I happened to start from his latest achievement, written in the final years of his life and only published posthumously in 1884: AN OLD MAN'S LOVE. It was one of my tasks for the Wish I'd read That Challenge 2010 hosted at Royal Reviews.
WILLIAM WHITTLESTAFF, having lost the woman he loved to a richer, more lively rival many years before, lives alone at Croker Hall in Hampshire, looked after by his loyal, odd housekeeper Mrs Baggett. Mr Whittlestaff impulsively takes in as his ward the orphaned daughter of an old friend, nineteen year-old Mary Lawrie, much to Mrs Baggett's disapproval. She — rightly — suspects that Mary's arrival will eventually lead to her master falling in love with the girl, who will supplant her as head of the household. The reserved, unworldly Mary gradually warms towards the lonely bachelor, and he eventually asks her to be his wife. Mary has only briefly experienced love three years before, with John Gordon, a penniless Oxford student who was sent away by her step-mother as a bad prospect. Mary accepts Mr Whittlestaff, but not before making him aware of the history of her short and painful dealings with John Gordon. He dismisses this knowledge, allowing that Mary 'may think of him' from time to time, but privately presuming the young man to be safely out of her life.
But John Gordon unexpectedly arrives at Croker Hall. Fresh from the diamond fields of South Africa where he has made a considerable fortune in order to make himself worthy of Mary, he has come to renew his suit, and she finds herself caught in an impossible situation, feeling incapable of jilting the man whose proposal she has so recently accepted. Mr Whittlestaff, though well aware who it is that Mary really loves, is unwilling to be rejected himself once again, and reluctant to release her from her promise. John Gordon, unable quite to give up hope, goes to stay for a few days with an old university friend, Montagu Blake, a curate who lives nearby. The battle is on for the hand of Mary Lawrie.
The story is rather paradoxical and extremely pleasant: Trollope's irony and wit, his attention to simple ordinary aspects of life, to very simple and ordinary people, his bitter/sweet approach to the theme of old age versus youth made this last of his works a very good, entertaining read.
Maybe some of you have already noticed I've got a professional tendency to find connections and links - a pedantic mania ? - and also on this occasion ... here we go!
Trollope & Austen: Mr Hall vs Mr Bennet
Introducing Mr. Hall, Trollope directly reflects on Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice and, especially, on Mr Bennet. Mr Hall , who has an entailed estate (which cannot be left to his female offspring), lives frugally — in fact in a style well beneath what one expect — precisely because he does not want to have his daughters end up in the world of Pride and Prejudice; that is, unlike Austen's Mr. Bennett, who retreats to his library and proclaims he can do nothing to help his daughters, Trollope's Mr. Hall changes his life, sacrificing much because chosen not "to leave his children paupers", so dependent on marriage for their economic survival. Trollope's character obviously criticizes Austen's as weak and self-indulgent.
Trollope & Dickens-Mr Sentiment
Trollope parodies Dickens calling him Mr Sentiment (seeTrollope, Anthony. "Tom Towers, Dr. Anticant, and Mr. Sentiment." The Warden. World Classics. Oxford: OxfordUP). Reading this novella, An Old Man's Love, and after reading several of Dickens's novels their different approach to story-telling and characterization is evident.
Dickens's exaggerations often make his characters like caritures: both positive and negative aspects in their personalities are stressed and seen as through a magnifying glass. Trollope's characterization is more realistic, his humoristic portrayals are not based on exaggeration and his sense of human drama not approached with sensationalism. You smile and you are sorrowful at the different situations he describes, but you never laugh out loud or are never moved to tears. (Just in brackets, I do love Dickens!)
Many of us have heard or studied great Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge or know about early romantic poets as William Blake, Thomas Gray and William Cowper. But very few have read or studied the numerous Romantic women writers and poets we have in English literature. So I thought I could dedicate my first post in the 18th and 19th Women Writers Challenge - hosted at Becky's Book Reviews - to one of them, one of the most representative.
Charlotte Turner Smith ( 1749 – 1806) was a successful writer : she published ten novels, three books of poetry, four children's books, and other assorted works, over the course of her career. She always saw herself as a poet first and foremost .
Smith's poetry and prose was praised by contemporaries such as Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as well as novelist Walter Scott. Largely forgotten by the middle of the nineteenth century, her works have now been republished and she is recognized as an important Romantic writer.
But more than by her works, I have always been attracted by her unfortunate hard working life which inspired her novels and poetry.
Charlotte was born into a wealthy family and received a typical education for a woman during the late eighteenth century. However, her father's reckless spending forced her to marry early. In a marriage that she later described as prostitution, she was given by her father to the violent and profligate Benjamin Smith. Their marriage was deeply unhappy, although they had twelve children together. Charlotte joined Benjamin in debtor's prison, where she wrote her first book of poetry, Elegiac Sonnets. Its success allowed her to help pay for Benjamin's release. Benjamin's father tried to leave money to Charlotte and her children upon his death, but legal technicalities prevented her from ever acquiring it.
Charlotte Smith eventually left Benjamin and began writing to support their children. Smith's struggle to provide for her children and her frustrated attempts to gain legal protection as a woman provided themes for her poetry and novels; she included portraits of herself and her family in her novels as well as details about her life in her prefaces.
For this challenge I read , little by little, and from time to time, many of her ELEGIAC SONNETS ( on line HERE).
Smith wrote in response to a public that could pay: she urgently needed revenues from her subscriptions, which opens a difficult ground for considering the relations between form and public expectation. Important also in this regard is Smith's decision to write poetry at all, when clearly the real money to be made was in prose fiction. She did eventually make her mark as a prolific novelist, but she defined herself primarily in terms of the dignity afforded the lyricist. In insisting upon her status as lyric poet, she asserts her membership in a cultural elite, one to which she would claim rightful inclusion in spite of her financial dependencies. She defiantly locates herself within the very public that knows what is worth paying for.
Smith appropriates the form that during the Renaissance, was linked to a particular kind of "mythologizing the woman", one that absolutely cancels her physicality. Great sonneteers had depicted idealized unreacheable beautiful women whose chastity and spirituality were basic features of their personality.
Now in her Elegiac Sonnets- written while she was in a debtors ' prison with her husband - Charlotte, a woman trying to make her way in a largely inhospitable world, tormented by the dross of domestic despair and financial crisis, laments emphatically real losses through the same 14-line-layout that conventionally had been used to suspend the concrete actuality of the feminine in favour of mythic presence. This is Smith’s absolute novelty in her revival of the sonnet.
Romantic poetry is pervaded by a deep sense of loss and mourning that renders much of it elegiac in tone, reflecting as it does a sense of the world in which it was written as alienated, broken and torn. The affective individual, newly shaped by contemporary debates on sensibility and feeling, was expected to respond compassionately, if dejectedly, to the ruination engendered by Britain’s war with France, the failed revolution, rural poverty and an enclosed and ravaged natural landscape. The elegiac mode thus offered Romantic poets a form in which to address the perceived devastation of society through subjective explorations of grief, death, bereavement and consolation. The latter is what is difficult to find in Smith's poetry. Her sonnets are defined elegiac but the melancholic tone of loss and sorrow are not followed by the conventional consolation which is , instead , typical of elegy. Here is an example of this attitude.
SONNET XL. FROM THE SAME. FAR on the sands, the low retiring tide, In distant murmurs hardly seems to flow, And o'er the world of waters, blue and wide, The sighing summer wind, forgets to blow. As sinks the day-star in the rosy West, The silent wave, with rich reflection glows: Alas! can tranquil nature give me rest, Or scenes of beauty, soothe me to repose? Can the soft lustre of the sleeping main, Yon radiant heaven, or all creation's charms, "Erase the written troubles of the brain," Which Memory tortures, and which guilt alarms? Or bid a bosom transient quiet prove, That bleeds with vain remorse, and unextinguish'd love!
Here’s a sample of how her sonnets are strictly linked to her condition of woman totally deprived of rights and freedom. She, thus, defies the male canon:
To Dependence
Dependence! heavy, heavy are they chains, And happier they who from the dangerous sea
Or the dark mine, procure with ceaseless pains
An hard-eard'd pittance--than who trust to thee! More blest the hind, who from his bed of flock Starts--when the birds of morn their summons give And waken'd by the lark--"the sheperd's clock." Lives but to labour--labouring but to live. More noble than the sycophant, whose art Must heap with taudry flowers thy hated shrine; I envy not the meed thou canst impart To crown his service--While, tho' Pride combine With Fraud to crush me--my unfetter'd heart Still to the Mountain Nymph may offer mine.
William Wordsworth wrote: “ A lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered”
William Cowper, instead, a close friend of hers, witnessed her exhausting hard work to financially support her family: “Chain’d to her desk like a slave to his oar, with no other means of subsistencefor herself and her numerous children, with her broken constitution, unequal to sever labour enjoined by her necessity, she is indeed to be pitied (…) she will and ust ‘ere long die a martyr to her exigencies”
She couldn't recognize, in her condition of mother-martyr, the consolatory power of Art.
Slow in the Wintry Morn, the struggling light Throws a faint gleam upon the troubled waves; Their foaming tops, as they approach the shore And the broad surf that never ceasing breaks On the innumerous pebbles, catch the beams Of the pale Sun, that with reluctance gives To this cold northern Isle, its shorten'd day. Alas! how few the morning wakes to joy! How many murmur at oblivious night For leaving them so soon; for bearing thus Their fancied bliss (the only bliss they taste!), On her black wings away!— (from THE EMIGRANTS Book I lines 1-12)
In these lines, she identifies herself with the exile from France, those tormented people escaping from a country at war. She, a woman at war against an entire society and their injust laws, conventions and istitutions which had made her sublime and solitary like a byronic hero. A real forerunner of the romantic mood, she conveys the same desperate restllessness we will recognize Byron's reckless atypical figures, his outcast and rebels .
Roberto Saviano. Beauty: his writing , literature. Hell: the life he has been forced to live since he published Gomorrah (Gomorra in Italian) in 2006. Beauty and Hell (La bellezza e l'inferno) is the title of his latest published book I've just finished reading.
When he wrote and got his first book published , he couldn’t imagine that his life and the lives of his dear would change forever. They have become hell. He lives under constant police escort since several godfathers he mentions in his book want him dead. His family had to move and change their identities. Do you think his people living in Campania, Naples and areas nearby, consider him a hero? Not at all. He has been emarginated and left alone, attacked and offended with awful “graffiti” on the walls. They consider him mad, not a hero. Not that he considers himself as such. He is still shocked for the consequences that his thirst for justice, freedom and truth has brought to him.
I think he has been very brave, starting at only 26, to do what he has done so far: in his writings, articles and books he employs prose and news-reporting style to narrate the story of the Camorra (a powerful Neapolitan mafia-like organization), exposing its territory and business connections. He denounced the underworld which, like a cancer, corrodes our beautiful country and consequently his life has changed forever.
I felt guilty since I really couldn’t cope with his Gomorrah. Millions of people read it but I couldn’t go beyond the first pages. Too harsh, too violent, too shocking. The same was with the movie. I just saw some scenes. But it was not fair, I thought. Such a man, one should be proud of, deserves more from me...I have to read one of his books, not only listen to him in his rare touching TV appearances. And I did it. “La Bellezza e L’Inferno” is a collection of articles and writings not only dealing with the Camorra but especially with Saviano’s relationship with writing, the beauty in his life, and the description of his personal hell. His prose is reallly involving, he knows how to use words and this is the reason why his words have attracted so many readers and this is also why all the attention to his words infuriated the godfathers so much that Saviano is to them a “dead man walking”. This young man believes in the power of the words and he is right. Maybe they can’t change the reaility or the entire world but they can touch the most hidden corners of the human mind and soul.
There are so many beautiful pages and thoughts in this book! I’m sorry you can’t enjoy them since it hasn’t been translated yet. Gomorrah was and it was quite successful in the USA. (Read this review by Rachel Donadio in the New York Times)
Let’s see if , with my poor translation, I may convey to you some of his beauty (from the Preface)
The danger of reading
Writing in these years has given me the possibility to exist. Articles and reports. Stories and editorials. Work that, to me, hasn't simply been work. It coincided with life itself. If someone hoped that living in such a difficult situation might induce me to hide my words, they were wrong. I didn't hide them, I didn't lose them. But this has made it a fight, a daily fight, a silent punch-up fighting, like a shadow fight. To write, not to renounce my words, has meant not to lose myself. Not to surrender. Not to despair. ( ...)
The title of this book means a simple thing. It just wants to remind that , on one hand , we have freedom and beauty, necessary for those who write and live; on the other hand, their opposite, their negation: the hell which always seem to prevail.
To close this preface, Saviano quotes Giovanni Falcone who said that "like any human phenomenon mafia too must get to an end". And, finally, he quotes Albert Camus: "But Hell has only one time, then one day Life starts over ".
Then a series of beautiful writings and articles follows in which Saviano tells us about Miriam Makeba, Lionel Messi, Enzo Biagi, Peppino Impastato 's mother, Joe Pistone or the real Donnie Brasco, Ana Politkovskaja; of his experience at Cannes Festival where the movie Gomorrah was acclaimed; of his being invited at the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize Ceremony with Salman Rushdie; about his faith in the power of words. Words that can unhinge reality, oppose any form of power, witness the certainty that the truth exists, despite everything.
• Newbie 2 books by J. Austen & 2 re-writes, prequels, sequels, or spoofs (by other authors)
• Lover 4 books by J. Austen & 4 re-writes, prequels, sequels, or spoofs (by other authors)
• Fanatic 6+ books by J. Austen & 5+ re-writes, prequels, sequels, or spoofs (by other authors)
-Challenge books can overlap with other challenges.
-Any format counts: bound book, e-book (check online for free downloads of J.A’s copyright-free books), audio book, or any other thing you can think of.
-You can change which level you read!
-Challenge runs January 1st 2010—December 31 2010.
This month I'm re-reading Northanger Abbey for my reading group at the library, or MY JA BOOK CLUB, in order to be ready for our meeting on 27th February. Since I'm going to post about NA from time to time till the end of the month, I'll consider all the posting work part of this challenge. Then of course, I'll go on with the other major novels and, finally, I have to choose some Austen-based books and ... my list is done. Let's say I'll try to take part for the Lover level . Here's my first post for this challenge : NORTHANGER ABBEY: A FEMINIST NOVEL? TROUBLED PUBLICATION & QUIZZES
2. I GOT A NEW BOOK SIGNED BY THE WRITER
This could be the first book in the list for this challenge among the re-writes, sequels, Austen - based fiction. Yesterday I found Carrie Bebris "The Intrigue at Highbury" in my mail box, with a dedication of the author, a kind note by the same in Italian (!!!) on a lovely Pemberley card, some leaflets showing all her works published by TEA in Italy. GREAT!!! I was so happy! I had won this copy of the book at Stephanie's Written Word some time ago.
Thank you Ana, at ANECA'S WORLD. You've just made my day ! I love receiving awards! Indeed.
A Prolific Blogger is one who is intellectually productive… keeping up an active blog that is filled with enjoyable content.
1. Every winner of the Prolific Blogger Award has to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers. Spread some love!
2. Each Prolific Blogger must link to the blog from which he/she has received the award.
3. Every Prolific Blogger must link back to this post, which explains the origins and motivation for the award.
4. Every Prolific Blogger must visit this post and add his/her name in the Mr. Linky, so that we all can get to know the other winners. (Click here for the Mr. Linky page.)
I am going to pass this award on to the following greatly prolific bloggers:
THIS IS BRIEFLY THE PLOT. Two soldiers: one a celebrated military hero and the other a broken veteran living in the gutters of London. Their paths last crossed nearly twenty years ago. Now, amidst a hostage crisis in the Middle East, their lives are about to collide again. And the Strike Back is about to begin. John Porter was involved in a hostage raid in Lebanon in 1989. The raid went disastrously wrong; several Regiment men died. John spared the life of a Lebanese fighter and blames himself for the deaths. Struggling to come to terms with the past, John has hit the bottle and is sleeping rough.Colonel Peregrine Collinson was involved in the same raid. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, it was Peregrine's fault that the mission went wrong. He was awarded a Military Cross and is heralded as a military hero for something he didn't do. After the disastrous raid, the lives of the two men couldn't have been further apart. Until now. A hostage crisis in the Middle East draws the enemies back together again. Who will be the hero this time...
If you had met me only few months ago and told me I might read this book in my future life I would have laughed at you. A military story?!? A best – seller based on action and a very simple plot addressed , evidently, to a male audience?!? Instead...
Record time for my usual reading style. I completed it in only two night reading sessions . I simply could not put it down: just one more chapter, ok one more, and then another … I turned the lights off at 2.a.m. twice and it was over.
Few months ago I started wishing reading it, (Why? Have you seen the handsome man smiling at you in the pic next to the book cover?) only I didn’t dare buying such a book. And if I wouldn’t like it? But, as it has often happened in my recent life, my little fairy "felt" my secret dream and asked : “Why don’t you read Strike Back, it is Richard Armitage ‘s next TV work and you like him so much”? ( How does she know?) And she added: “You can borrow my copy and read it when you have some time …”
That's it. That’s how ( ... and why ...) I came to read it during the recent holidays and here I am to tell you about it.
Nothing particularly clever in this story, a very simple plot with bad guys and a good guy (what a Guy!), well – written (already winking at a camera), compelling and with a quick pace, perfect to be read on the beach, on the train or bus, queueing at the post office or waiting for your turn at the dentist. Only it is difficult to stop once you start so … pay attention to what you have to do in the following hours...You may forget, be late or find yourself in embarassing situations. Maybe the fact that I could see in my "inward eye" John Porter's tall figure, dark hair and piercing blue eyes just like this (see photos) influenced my good disposition toward such a book.
Imagine reading these words with these pictures in mind: "From the corridor behind him, Porter could hear the rattle of gunfire, and then the sound of a man screaming. Without pausing to think, he held his rifle in his left hand, balanced himself, then threw his entire weight into the wooden doorway. As it flung open, ..." (p. 12)
"Her hand was almost touching his now. Porter let his right hand stretch out, his fingers creeping across the bedding, until slowly they reached hers . He could feel the warmth of her skin against his ..." (p. 126)
Well, let's say I may have been influenced, a bit, not much.And let's admit that, since I've read so many books, I can recognize this is not a masterpiece classic reading but , anyhow, it is a good pleasant read.
I wished I'd read it , I did it and ... I'm glad of that.
By the way, did I tell you this is also my RA Friday Post for this week?
P.S. I just wonder, how can they make 6 episodes from this story? They must have added characters and subplots. Furthermore, why did they change the name of John Porter's nemesis from Peregrine to Hugh Collinson? Peregrine was just the right name for such a hateful character! I can't wait to see Sky 1STRIKE BACK in April. The scenes I most long for ... those with John and his teenage daughter, Sally, those must be very touching... and what about those about John's painful descent to hell , guilt-ridden and haunted? I hope they won't change these parts too much: I loved them.
The new year has just arrived and many of us in the blogoworld have already started planning and dreaming as well as listing resolutions they already know they are going to have a hard time to keep to. As for me, personally, no resolutions, no great plans, just some dreams I'm superstitiously keeping secret (shhhhh!) ... As for tonight, I only want to "wrap up" my holidays and get ready to go back to school tomorrow. So, what am I posting about? Mmmm, let's see... I thought I could introduce you some of the future events and challenges you'll find on Fly High in the next weeks.
1. Throwback Thursday – this is a weekly event hosted by Jenny at Takemeaway. It is the time each week to recognize those older books… an older book you’ve always wanted to read, or one that you have read and love; maybe one from your childhood; or review an older book , even a classic! My cup of tea!
Read books written by women authors that were written and/or published between 1700 and 1900. Contemporary historical books set in this time period do not count towards this challenge! The challenge is to encourage you to read some classics.
Here is a place where you can get ideas, but be careful, the list includes some authors who won't count. (The site lists authors based on when they were born. So on the 1801-1900 list, for example, you might find women authors who were born in this time but didn't begin writing and publishing their books until the twentieth century.)
Charlotte Bronte, Villette (also in the All About the Brontes Challenge)
18th century(1701-1800)
Anne Radcliffe,The Italian (1797)
Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (1784-1800)
3. This challenge is for all those books you wish you'd read. It might be Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, a Nora Roberts Romantic Suspense, the Outlander series or a childhood classic Winnie the Pooh. I have a very long list of books that I've been wanting to read , not to mention the list of books I've added to it since I've been blogging. This is a great challenge for getting those TBR piles reduced. So, if you want, go have a look at what you might read and challenge yourself... As for me I've chosen just some:
Chris Ryan, Strike Back (I wished I'd read this and ...I did it! It's my first task completed, very soon on Fly High!)
Georgette Heyer, Venetia (I've read just one of hers but I must read this one too)
David Lodge, Exchanging places ("You teach English, you must read this"!)
Anthony Trollope, An Old Man's Love (never read one of his novels)
Roberto Saviano, La Bellezza e l'Inferno (Beauty and Hell. I admire him, he is one of the bravest men I've ever heard about , we can be proud of him in Italy, but I haven't read any of his wrtitings yet)
I'm sure I'll add many more to this challenge and you'll be the first to know!
4. I've already started this challenge, ALL ABOUT THE BRONTES, reading and reviewing The Professor by Charlotte Bronte (HERE). My list of tasks is HERE or on the right side bar.
5. I also found this interesting blog THE CLASSIC CIRCUIT which organizes tours of classic writers all around book blogs. I've joined the Edith Wharton Tour and I'll post about her The House of Mirth on January 15th.
6. I would also love to host guest posts to introduce the many interesting people I 've met in the blogosphere. I'd call this event MY BLOGGER BUDDIES: WOMEN, READERS, WRITERS & FRIENDS. Who wants to start being my first guest? You could present your blog, work, books, poems, or any other curious/interesting event you 're organizing (or even simply yourself!). If you are interested , write me. My e-mail address is on the right side-bar.
