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Blindly by Claudio Magris

Claudio Magris has been a professor of Germanic studies at the University of Trieste since 1978.
He is the author of Danube, a best-selling novel now translated into more than twenty languages, and in 2001 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize. He has translated into Italian the works of such authors as Ibsen, Kleist, Schnitzler, Buchner, and Grillparzer.

Forthcoming, September 2012, from Yale University Press

Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly? Clearly a recluse and a fugitive, but what more of him can we discern? Baffled by the events of his own life, he muses, "When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread."

Claudio Magris, one of Europe's leading authors and cultural philosophers, offers as narrator of Blindly a madman. Yes, but a pazzo lucido, a lucid madman, a single narrative voice populated by various characters. He is Jorgen Jorgenson, the nineteenth-century adventurer who became king of Iceland but was condemned to forced labor in the Antipodes. He is also Comrade Cippico, a militant anti-communist, imprisoned for years in Tito's gulag on the island Goli Otok. And he is the many partisans, prisoners, sailors, and stowaways who have encountered the perils of travel, war, and adventure. In a shifting choral monologue—part confession, part psychiatric session—a man remembers (invents, falsifies, hides, screams out) his life, a voyage into the nether regions of history, and in particular the twentieth century.

Originally published by Penguin Canada, April 2010

The Art of Joy by
Goliarda Sapienza

Goliarda Sapienza’s massive novel The Art of Joy (L' arte della gioia, Stampa Alternativa, 1998, and Einaudi, 2008) is a memorable, engaging work that was written over a nine year span, from 1967 to 1976. Published posthumously – Sapienza died in 1996 – it was presented as a “forgotten masterpiece” and soon became a best-seller in France (L’Art de la Joie, Editions Viviane Hamy, 2005, Nathalie Castagné, tr.) where it is said to have sold 140,000 copies. This epic Sicilian novel which begins in the year 1900 and follows its main character, Modesta, through nearly the entire span of the 20th century, is at once a coming-of-age novel, a tale of adventure, a fictional/an imaginary autobiography and more. While the Einaudi book cover displays a kind of Lolita figure, the cover of the 1998 edition, a rather shocking orange, portrays an Etruscan mask sticking its tongue out as though taunting us: “I dare you to read me!”. On the back is a photo of Goliarda, smoking a cigarette and lying in a hammock: that mild gaze of hers, those experienced, all-knowing eyes, seem to be those of the book’s narrator. Indeed Modesta grows up knowing how to get by in life, living every experience with intensity and focus, determined to be the author of her own life rather than succumb to societal prejudices of what a woman should or shouldn’t do or be. Through it all she is at times innocent victim, calculating schemer or violent aggressor. Though Modesta is a transgressor in the extremely repressed world in which she finds herself, the degree of her consent or collusion is ambiguous. Her exaggerated behavior holds both disturbing undercurrents and a compelling power, and these are reflected in her telling. A book that deserves wide readership and recognition.

Forthcoming May 2013 from
Penguin UK and Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The Prince
by Vito Bruschini

THE PRINCE ... work in progress for
Atria Books, Simon & Schuster

THE PRINCE by Italian journalist Vito Bruschini (original title: The Father. Il padrino dei padrini, Newton Compton Editori, 2009) recreates events from 1920 to 1943 with characters and settings ranging from rural Sicily to New York City. Depicting the life of the fictional founding father of the Sicilian mafia, the novel recounts the story of Prince Ferdinando Licata (nicknamed u’ Patri) who arrived in New York City in 1939 and became The Father, il Padrino. The book takes its inspiration from revelations contained in a secret government file dating from 1945, which details the ambiguous collusion between U.S. naval intelligence and the Italian-American Cosa Nostra – often in direct conflict with the FBI – following America’s entry into the Second World War and culminating with the invasion of Sicily in 1943.

P.O. Box Love
by Paola Calvetti

St. Martin's Press, January 31, 2012

Paola Calvetti’s P.O. Box Love (Noi due come un romanzo, Mondadori, 2009) is the charming story of Emma – a divorced, spirited, bookshop-owning heroine who comes to discover that love is possible at any age. Emma’s boutique bookstore in Milan sells only romance novels, since literature, she feels, is nothing but an uninterrupted river of love. Her life is at a turning point: a chance encounter, after 30 years, with the first great love of her youth, a married architect now living in New York, sparks an enchanting epistolary romance which revolves around a love of books and the restructuring of the Morgan library, and gives way to a yearly rendezvous on Belle Isle in France. Emma’s spirit, the irony of her choices in life and the romantic resonance of her story are genuinely appealing, and the novel reads like a delightful catalog of literary browsing and places of the heart, which enables one to dream – albeit with eyes wide open – of all the possibilities of love. The book has been a bestseller in Italy where it is now in its 3rd printing at Mondadori. Full of joy, feeling, romance and books, not to mention echoes of mid-life crisis, it is reminiscent of 84 Charing Cross Road meets The Bookshop meets Same Time Next Year. Translation rights have also been sold in France, Germany, Holland, Spain and Romania.

For everyone who believes in “second chances”

Visit the website...
http://www.poboxlove.com/home

And the French bookshop...
http://www.librairierevesetsortileges.fr/librairierevesetsortileges/main.html

Read the story behind the novel…
author Paola Calvetti tells how P.O. Box Love came to be written
http://bookpage.com/behind-the-book/behind-'p.o.-box-love'%E2%80%94a-novel-as-the-result-of-a-coincidence

View the publisher’s trailer...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywl2NicUTzY

Read the interview: " Awesome Authors: Paola Calvetti"...
http://crazybookreviews.com/2012/01/25/awesome-authors-paola-calvetti/

Follow Emma on author Paola Calvetti’s Facebook page for P.O. Box Love,
due out on January 31!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Paola-Calvetti-PO-Box-Love/210371235718527

From the pre-pub review in Publishers Weekly:
"Emma’s loving descriptions of her bookshop—its content and layout, staff and customers—are an ode to the written word and a wonderful backdrop. Calvetti’s evocative, unhurried prose is fittingly old-fashioned compared to modern communication, and bibliophiles will delight in the setting, passionate book talk, and fanciful anecdotes about the Morgan library and its first librarian, Belle de Costa Green, J.P. Morgan’s mistress." http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-62570-2

I Will Have Vengeance
The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi
by Maurizio de Giovanni

February 16, 2012
Hersilia Press

Maurizio de Giovanni’s I Will Have Vengeance: The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi (Il senso del dolore. L'inverno del commissario Ricciardi, Fandango Libri, 2007) is the first of a series of five crime novels featuring Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, set in the city of Naples in the Mussolini era.
In Naples, 1931, March is almost over, but there’s still no sign of spring. The city is shaken by a chill wind and a cold fact: the great tenor Arnaldo Vezzi – a sublime voice, a world-famous artist, a friend of Il Duce – has been found dead in his dressing room at the Real Teatro di San Carlo before the performance of Pagliacci, his throat slashed by a jagged piece of glass from the broken mirror of his dressing table. Assigned to solve the case is Commissario Ricciardi, from the Squadra Mobile of Naples’ Regia Questura . A strange, introverted investigator whose disregard for orders is only barely tolerated by his superiors, Ricciardi’s tormented soul nurtures an inadmissible secret: from the time he was a child he has been able to ‘see’ the dead in their final moment of life and feel their sorrow at having to depart. The first thing that strikes you about Ricciardi is his desperate loneliness, his almost total isolation from the world as a result of this faculty. Since he dwells in a solitary space between two parallel, disconnected worlds – that of the living and that of the dead – he cannot interact with either one of them. His solitude derives from the fact that he is the only inhabitant of his dimension.
As the days go by and the Vice-Questore, his boss, pressures him, fearing the impatience of the regime in Rome which demands that the guilty party be found and brought to justice, the city trembles under an ominous, livid aura, resentment lurks in the narrow streets and passages, and the sun’s rays only intermittently break through the clouds to illuminate the facades of ancient buildings. The political climate, though obvious, does not drive the narrative, but is simply a background element. The impetus of the narrative comes instead from Ricciardi's gift – or curse – a phenomenon he has never spoken about to anyone. The closest he came to disclosing it was when he revealed to Maione, his devoted subordinate, that the final thought of his son, killed in the line of duty, was for his father.
Il senso del dolore has been translated and published in Germany by Suhrkamp – where it has sold over 20,000 copies – in France by Payot & Rivages, and in Spain by Lumen.

What the reviewers are saying...

“This is top quality crime fiction beautifully written by Maurizio De Giovanni… It is unobtrusively translated by the experienced Anne Milano Appel and is an easy read.”
--from Crime Scraps Review: MAURIZIO DE GIOVANNI trans ANNE MILANO APPEL, Posted: January 26, 2012
http://crimescraps2.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/i-will-have-vengeance-maurizio-de-giovanni-trans-anne-milano-appel/

“Reading the debut novel of Maurizio De Giovanni (Il senso del dolor - Fandango) I was reminded of the extraordinary story “The Dead” in James Joyce’s Dubliners. Two very different books, from two equally differentwriters. [...] But there is a connection with Joyce’s vision, in the slowly falling snow that descends on the city of Dublin at dawn in early January, that ever more slowly comes to rest everywhere, on all the living and the dead. It paralyzes Gabriel’s gaze, forcing the story’s protagonist to refocus the strange thing we call reality, which constantly conceals portions that at first glance escape us. In De Giovanni’s book it is the wind that descends, literally, on the city of Naples. An unusual wind, not the African sirocco which reminds us that Naples is a Mediterranean city. It’s a cold, austral wind, and here too it falls on the living and the dead.”
--from a review by Luigi Pingitore (in Italian)
http://letteratitudine.blog.kataweb.it/2008/03/13/maurizio-de-giovanni-filippo-tuena/

“An afterword from the translator is a nice addition, clarifying and pointing out historical and cultural points without shoehorning them into the text.”
--from a review in Killing Time, confessions of a crime fiction reader
http://www.killingtimecrime.com/2012/01/i-will-have-vengeance-review.html

You Will Therefore Understand
by Claudio Magris

Quaderni d’Italianistica, v. XXXII, n. 1, 2011, pp. 7-25

The novella Lei dunque capirà (Garzanti, 2006) takes the form of a monologue, the single voice of a self-styled Muse who in life – now she is in the afterlife – inspired her poet-husband to greatness. The woman has crossed over to what is depicted here as a Casa di Riposo, but has obtained a special concession from the Director of the Rest Home to allow her husband to come and take her away. At the last moment she decides not to go, and the resulting monologue is her explanation to the Director – the “you”, Lei, of the title – of her reasons for not returning with her husband. This latter-day Eurydice’s voice is remarkably direct, leaving no doubt about her high regard for herself and her ambivalent feelings toward her spouse. Her tone can be cutting at times, almost mocking. She is at once tender and merciless, loving yet ruthlessly honest in her dispassionate analysis of her poet-husband and their life together. The work has been performed numerous times in theatres throughout Europe and most recently in New York City.

“The Conch Shell”
by Marisa Madieri

Quaderni d’Italianistica, v. XXXII, n. 1, 2011, pp. 27-36

A short story by Marisa Madieri, "The Conch Shell" (“La conchiglia”) originally appeared in the volume Verde acqua, La radura e altri racconti, Torino: Einaudi, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2006). The narrator is an elderly islander who recalls his deceased wife Naipuni and their life together: "The star-gazing rock is indissolubly linked to my life, or better yet to that part of my life that Naipuni did not carry off with her. So much time has passed since her death, that I can barely recall her features. It is as though her face has dissolved into things, commending herself to them. Sometimes a gust of warm wind suddenly brings me the memory of the scent of her skin, the flight of a bird reminds me of her youthful grace, the rain that bathes me is the light caress of her fingers. Naipuni was my wife. I knew her since childhood."

“Mirror Images of Remembrance
in Marisa Madieri’s La conchiglia and
Claudio Magris’s Lei dunque capirà”

Quaderni d’Italianistica, v. XXXII, n. 1, 2011, pp. 37-47

“Mirror Images of Remembrance in Marisa Madieri’s La conchiglia and Claudio Magris’s Lei dunque capirà: A Translator’s Notes” by Anne Milano Appel explores a kind of parallelism between Madieri’s short story La conchiglia and the novella Lei dunque capirà by Claudio Magris. In La conchiglia there is a she (Madieri the author) who writes in the voice of a he (the narrator and surviving spouse) who recalls another she (his deceased wife Naipuni) and their life together. A similar stratagem can be noted in Lei dunque capirà, though in the novella there is a he (Magris the author) who writes in the voice of a she (the narrator Eurydice) who talks about another he (her poet husband Orpheus) and their life together. So we have a him, Orpheus, seen by a her, Eurydice, seen by him the author. The idea that comes to mind is that of immagini speculari, mirror images or rather lives reflected in a mirror which mirror one another.

Quaderni d’Italianistica,
Literary Intersections. Claudio Magris and Marisa Madieri
v. XXXII, n. 1, 2011
Konrad Eisenbichler, Editor, Sandra Parmegiani Guest Editor
http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/qua/issue/view/1238

Blindly by Claudio Magris

Penguin Canada April 2010 Hailed as a masterpiece on its initial publication in Italy, Blindly (Alla cieca, Garzanti, 2005) is a novel of highly original, poetic intensity. One reviewer, writing in La Repubblica of May 19, 2005, describes the work as a voyage through time and space, whose innovative form is the narrative voice of a pazzo lucido, a lucid madman. The unity of time and place are shattered, and there is not so much a plot as two categories operant in the world: the revolutionary and his inquisitors and persecutors. Formalistically speaking, the novel is an experiential vortex: the narrative is a river of words, a flood, a sea – a stream of consciousness and flow of associations that becomes a torrent. Thematically it reprises recurring motifs found in Magris’ work, such as the sea, as well as his concerns with lives that are derailed and left high and dry. Indeed the author has written that the writer's task is to pull shipwrecked lives out of the water and “take them aboard a precarious Noah's Ark of paper”. That and to set the world right.
Claudio Magris, born in Trieste, Italy, is one of Europe’s most renowned writers, essayists and critics. His work, translated into numerous languages, has won him worldwide acclaim and numerous awards, and he has often been mentioned as a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Professor of German Studies at the University of Trieste, Magris is a member of several European academies and has been visiting professor in many North American and European institutions. He served as senator in the Italian Parliament from 1994 to 1996.
30th Annual Northern California Book Awards, Finalist in the Translation (fiction) category for the novel Blindly by Claudio Magris (Penguin Canada, 2010)

Scent of a Woman by
Giovanni Arpino

Penguin UK
April 2011

Giovanni Arpino (1927-1987), a professional journalist, was one of Italy's most prominent postwar writers. He wrote seven other novels before Il buio e il miele (1969), which is counted among the most important postwar Italian novels. Considered a minor classic, it was the basis for two films: Dino Risi's Profumo di donna, starring Vittorio Gassman (1974), and Hollywood’s Scent of a Woman, starring Al Pacino (1992).
A dark, mysterious narrative, Il buio e il miele (literally the darkness and the honey) tells the story of Fausto, a military officer who has lost his sight and a hand as a result of a peacetime accident. Accompanied by Ciccio, a soldier with whom he forms a secret, silent pact, Fausto sets out on a trip from Genoa to Rome, and then on to Naples, where an appointment with death awaits him. A man who lost everything, Fausto can feel the presence of a woman but doesn't want to be loved for pity.The original title, referring to the darkness of blindness and the honey of love, derives from a letter by Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted as an epigraph at the beginning of the novel: “Transform? Yes, for it is our task to impress this provisional, transient earth upon ourselves so deeply, so agonizingly, and so passionately that its essence rises up again "invisibly" within us. We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke (Modern Library, 2005), Ulrich Baer, tr., p. 23.)

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