BOOK REVIEW - LUCA DI FULVIO, THE BOY WHO GRANTED DREAMS

The Boy Who Granted Dreams

New York, 1909: Fifteen-year-old Cetta arrives on a freighter with nothing but her infant son Natale: strikingly blond, dark-eyed, and precocious. They've fled the furthest reaches of southern Italy with the dream of a better life in America. 

But even in the "Land of the Free," the merciless laws of gangs rule the miserable, poverty-stricken, and crime-filled Lower East Side. Only those with enough strength and conviction survive. As young Natale grows up in the Roaring Twenties, he takes a page from his crippled mother's book and finds he possesses a certain charisma that enables him to charm the dangerous people around him ... 

Weaving Natale's unusual life and quest for his one true love against the gritty backdrop of New York's underbelly, Di Fulvio proves yet again that he is a master storyteller as he constructs enticing characters ravaged by circumstance, driven by dreams, and awakened by destiny.  (Book Blurb)

OCTOBER WATCHING, READING, TEACHING, LIVING

1. WATCHING - Don't you love Sunday nights?

Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark

Most people hate Sunday nights since the weekend is over and the idea of starting a new working week is not easy to tackle. But I'm lucky enough to have found not one but two perfect antidotes in the recent weeks and I don't mind sharing them with you. This is how I face the ugly truth: Monday you do not scare me!  I prepare all my lesson plans and do my paperwork in advance, which I usually do at night, so that I can sit as comfortably as I can, turn the TV on and 1) enjoy Poldark's 18th century Cornish adventures on BBC 1 then 2) swoon on Victoria and Albert's 19th century royal romance on ITV +1. The result is I head to bed something like this  ...

... mesmerized! And who cares it'll be Monday in few hours!

Why are these series such safe havens? Too long to explain, but I'm sure you can understand. I am so grateful to UK TV for giving us such great period drama series.

READING ITALIAN: FABIO STASSI & ALESSANDRO D'AVENIA

    Fabio Stassi,  La lettrice Scomparsa  (2016)

La Lettrice Scomparsa (The missing reader) is a literary mystery. A book which contains an entire shelf of good books (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, John Fante, Jorge Amado, Luigi Pirandello, Honoré de Balzac, George Simenon among others),  an investigation on fiction and life, a novel wondering how much life and fiction interfere with each other. Can fiction help men and women endure life? Can life, real life, make it to a good book page? Can reading a novel be therapeutic?

Fabio Stassi is a writer I truly appreciate and whom I have already mentioned and reviewed here at FLY HIGH! His latest novels are set in Rome and deal with fragile characters coping with the harshness of reality. They are watched and described through the lens of poetry, music and fiction,  which are Stassi’s solid background.

The protagonist is one of my unlucky colleagues, one who has lost his position after being a temporary teacher in several different schools for years. Now middle-aged and unemployed, Vince Corso has to reinvent himself and to find a way to survive.  Bibliotherapy is the first thing that comes to his mind: as a teacher of literature and a book lover, book counseling is an activity he thinks he can be successful at.

THE ONLY THING WORTH SAYING: WHAT ONE FEELS - FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF TO FABIO STASSI.

“Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.” 

I love this quote from Mrs Dalloway and day after day Woolf's melancholic heroine becomes dearer to my heart.  Mrs Dalloway's suggestion of saying what one feels simply and plain  is something I can agree with. Not an easy task, though. To reveal one's own feelings makes a person fragile but,  if you think twice, it makes a person stronger as well. 

Cleverness may help you look stronger, but it may be silly on certain occasions in life. What ones? Those Woolf calls "moments of being".  It is not your brain nor your cleverness which help you through those moments. It is not a question of sentimentality, but one of honesty and truth. 

I may have become a tiny bit sentimental in my old age, I can't deny it,  and that is something,  I hope,  understandable. However, I think this is the time to say what we feel, because ...  if not now, when? How we feel is important, crucial, vital and we have not much more time to waste in lies and not much more space for regrets. 

I started writing this post after meeting,  for the second time in less than a year, a man who dares to share what he feels, not only what he thinks: gifted writer and extraordinary man, Fabio Stassi. He is highly communicative,  grounded and self-deprecative, smiling and direct, simple and astonishingly deep. 
Second meeting and second epiphany: this man and his words can make my heart melt and my brain  work out a flow of thoughts quite like ... fireworks. So many inputs that my mind's reaction is an explosion of ideas and feelings. You see?  I'm just telling you what I felt, the only thing worth saying.  

So what did Fabio Stassi say that was so thought - provoking and emotionally strong? He discussed his book, Come un respiro interrotto, with an audience of readers in a town not distant from mine and I was there with friends. He managed to surprise me with the analysis of themes, motifs and ideas which were different from the ones we had discussed when I happened to listen to him for the first time last summer. 

SUMMER IS FOR READING: THE FAULT IN OUR STARS & OTHER LOVE STORIES

I've been reading quite a lot  in these lazy summer days. That's what summer is for,  in my case. I didn't manage to read much in the past year, so it is the perfect time to catch up, to read as much as I can, both in English and in Italian. I'm sure I won't manage to be completely satisfied in the end,  since to hope to go through all my ambitiously endless TBR list is utopian, but, at least,  I'll try to  make my read-in-2014 list a bit longer.

The latest two books I added to the latter are both romance fiction novels in the star-crossed-lovers/ don't-forget-your-tissues section.
Jokes apart, they are both novels I won't easily forget. I  love them.  Both, as different as they are.

The Fault in Our Stars

"The fault, dear Brutus,  is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings". Probably John Green had this line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in his mind while trying to give his beatiful love story a proper title. But more probably, more than Julius Caesar, he had Romeo and Juliet in mind (... A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life/ Whose misadventured piteous overthrows / Doth with their death... ) , while writing the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters. Shakespearean influences apart, the author was really inspired while depicting his two young protagonists with black letters on white pages: they are two of the loveliest,  liveliest teenage characters I've ever encountered.

MOTHER & SONS

Today is my son's birthday. 23, a young man.  Don't worry, I'm not going to bother you with my memories of when he was just a baby in my arms, how fast time has passed, how kind a boy he is and neither I'll post a picture of him blowing at candles. Even less I wish to start crying on how old that makes me feel. Not. at. all.

It is just a special day which brought some special thoughts to me.

I have been thinking about what to be a mother to sons means. And my idea is that it is quite different from having daughters, at least, with my indirect experience,  it seems different. With my two sons, I sometimes lack the understanding I've got with my nieces, for instance, or the different relationship they have with their mother, my sister.

FATHERS AND SONS, THOSE FLAT ON THEIR BACKS AND THOSE DREAMING OF A WALK IN THE MOUNTAINS ... GLI SDRAIATI BY MCHELE SERRA

Hello everyone! It's been a while,  I know,  since I posted something really personal but here I am, ready to update you about my latest adventures and misadventures as ... a reader . 

I haven't been reading much. Not since my father sudden illness and his too quick departure.  I haven't read much since last December. I don't know why, exactly. I happened to start and immediately drop more than one book. I finished just one and not because I particularly liked it. And of that one I'm going to tell you.
It is a small Italian book titled "Gli sdraiati", in English something like, the lying down, or "those  flat on their backs".  (Apparently,  I am not that good at translating, I can't find a better one for this title, can you?). 

Anyway, the mentioned book is about a father and his relationship with his teenage son. Yes, teenagers.  They are  the lying down .

The more I try to understand them, the more I realize I can't. Is it only me?  It is not just due to the generation gap, it is because I have never been like them. I was a teenager once, I still feel like one at times, but I was never like them. Not like the ones I have in front of me every day, at least. It is like we are not separated by a generation but by an era, a geologic era.

BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS - MY LATEST READS

The Shifu Cloth (The Chronicles of Eirie) by Prue Batten

Back to Eirie everything seems so familiar and extraordinary at the same time. My latest journey to  that land of magic and fantasy was last year with Lalita and Finnian (A Thousand Glass Flowers) . Such a beautiful, gripping love story with surprising twists and a poignant epilogue!  They have lingered somehow in this story too, THE SHIFU CLOTH, since the protagonist is Nicholas, Nico, their son. 

After his beloved cousin Isabella is kidnapped while with him, his sense of guilt or the shock leaves him dumb, unable to express his loneliness and sadness. His only aim in life since then is to find Isabella and to bring her back home.

Isabella, however, now a slave living in the relatively comfortable residence of her masters but destined to live in a harem, has become an expert weaver of rare skills. What she can't do is to renounce her freedom   forever. This is why she has never surrendered to the idea of going back home and she bravely plans her own escape.

The two separate paths of Nico and Isabella meet after a series of fortuitous encounters and discoveries. They will get back home for a bittersweet, unforgettable finale.