SADNESS OF THE SAMURAI: Book Review

Novel is set in pre-Franco Spain and in Spain of the 80s as the country is on brink of a military coup.

My husband and I meet doing Aikido, a martial art and anything Japanese that comes my way is always inviting.

This novel, though it has a Japanese sounding title, is not about Japan.  The story is set mostly in Spain, however,  a beautifully hand forged Japanese sword weaves it way from Chapter One through to the end, in appearance, and metaphor.

The Sadness of the Samurai has  page turning plot. It  involves converging generational stories of ambition, love, betrayal and circumstance.  Female lawyer and her one-time Fascist father and misogynistic husband cross destinies with ne’er-do-well Spanish politicians and their low-life sociopath cronies, lovelorn teachers and jailed police investigators. Yes, this  unlikely crew of characters surprisingly weaves together into smooth reading that has a satisfying and strong sense of place.

The novel takes the reader from 30s pre-Franco Spain to  the WW2 Russian front and prison camp in Siberia, to beachfront condo in Barcelona in the 80s, a hospital cancer ward, and a few places in between, including a treatise on Japanese Samurai and seppuku.

The language is both beautiful and brutal: a real treat to read such unusual, unexpected nuggets of words. For instance,  “..a gust of unpleasant wind dragged drizzle along with it”; “her gaze was like boiling water being poured on his beard, which for the last four days had been frozen”; and “she devotedly wrote in her diary as if she were tattooing  each word on the skin of her beloved.”

A warning: at times the descriptions are graphic and violent, as in the case of a woman chained up in a dark house who is servant and sexual slave to a emotionally crippled man whose face and torso were charred in an insane asylum fire. in fact all the women in the novel are abused ( beaten, raped, beheaded) and the main woman character abuses herself with non-stop smoking, eventually suffering the consequences.

The novel’s message is about justice, forgiveness and hope. We all bleed; some wounds heal; others remain. Humans can’t really forget .In the silence of the forgetting  we can still hear  screams of victims and the hatred and pain that never goes away.

A wonderful, large read with many dark corners.

POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL

a story of a poor little rich girl

Amandine:A Novel by Marlena de Blasi

What I liked about this book?  Reading it made me feel as if I were seven again, lying on the floor in my parents house on a Sunday afternoon watching a Shirley Temple movie on the black and white TV.  The main character, Amandine, is cute, curly haired, self-possessed, just like Shirley. The adult men she meets up with– a priest and a French farmer–kiss her forehead and have serious talks with her, a child; the women stand-in for her lost mother, hold her hand, adjust her curls give her perfumed baths and refashion their grown up dresses to fit Amandine. They feed her hearty bread loaded with apricot marmalade while holding her hand in front of a roaring fire. She never complains and asks straightforward questions. What does maybe someday mean?  What is a Jew?  What is war?   Rather than dance like Shirley, Amandine plays the piano.

Amandine is indeed a charming story about a charming young girl and her complicated family. The writing is as equally charming in this romantic World War II novel. Marlena de Blasi’s lush language, detailed descriptions (oh! the fragrance and food detail will saturate your senses! You can’t help but recognize the writer’s early success as a food writer.), and simple rhythmic sentences dotted with French, Polish and  get-out your dictionary English words woo the heart in to a sort of nurturing sway that compels you to turn the pages. It is a sanitized war story, so no harsh images stick i the mind’s eye even though bad things happen.

The novel is set mostly in France. The initial chapters take place in Poland and setup Amandine’s background. She is an aristocrat, granddaughter of a Polish princess and a count who ended his own life and his lover’s life because of the desperation of an extramarital affair: a dead end. Amandine’s mother is the legitimate child of the princess and the count who committed suicide. When she is seventeen, Amandine ‘remains with child’ (De Blasi’s language is at times stilted) after a fling with a Polish officer; she gives birth to Amandine.  Amandine’s grandmother is a bit vindictive. She rushes the infant off, supposedly to Switzerland,

Reflections on Franco Modigliani & Italy at MIT: with Renato Camurri and Nobel Prize Winners Robert Merton and Robert Solow

Seated: Renato Camurri, Francesco Giavazzi and Nobel Prize Winners Robert Merton and Robert Solow ( Photo: Francesco Castellano)

My good friend Renato Camurri, a history professor at the University of Verona, specializes in the brain drain phenomena from Europe to the United States in the period between WWI and WWII. Since he is Italian, Camurri further specializes in Italian intellectuals who, often provoked by racial laws and antifascist ideologies, were forced to leave their university positions in Italy and become ‘intellectual’ exiles. Franco Modigliani was one such man.

Modigliani left Italy in 1939 and became a naturalized U.S. Citizen in 1948. He was educated as a lawyer but discovered his genius is for economics and shifted professions. 1985, he won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on household savings and the dynamics of financial markets.  Among many other contributions in the field of economics, he and American economist Merton H. Miller founded the so-called Modigliani-Miller theorem (the market value of a company’s stock depends primarily on investors’ expectations of what that company will earn in the future).

Last night MIT celebrated the publication of Camurri’s book, L’Italia vista dall’America battaglie e riflessioni di un esule.(Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2010). There are biographies of Modigliani. Camurri’s book, however, is an intellectual biography of a refugee that focuses on the experience of Modigliani the economist, the American, the Italian: an interesting combination of personality, circumstance, and epoch. In addition to a 90-page introduction about how fascism and jewishness impacted the young Modigliani’s career choices and how that choice influenced his future work and allegiances, the book contains articles, interviews and essays that reflect Modigliani’s  particular views on Italy. The intent of Camurri’s book is to portray the assimilation of knowledge and cultures made possible by Modigliani’s experience of being an exile: a view of two worlds told  from the cracks that creep between a human being and his place of birth, between himself and the his place in the world.

It was an impressive evening, and an evening hard to come by if you don’t happen to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Where else on the planet might you have the opportunity to witness and be entertained by a gathering of celebrated minds?

After Camurri finished introducing his book, four economists who worked with, studied under, and a few who were mentored by Modigliani spoke about his contributions to modern economic theory, his passion for economics, as well as his vibrant, irrepressible personality. On board were two Nobel Laureates Robert Merton and Robert Solow.  Afterwards the audience– a balanced mix of MIT students, Italian ex-pats, professors at MIT and Harvard, fans and ex-students of Modigliani, and friends and family of the speakers, sought autographs: a gratifying occasion indeed, considering the celebrities signing Camurri’s book were intellectuals not tabloid, MTV, or sports stars.

Francesco  Giavazzi, Stewart Myers and Solow are professors at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Merton, a MIT graduate, teaches at Harvard Business School.

In the their reflections about Modigliani (who died in 2003), the men mentioned his long-winded, passionate lectures and how difficult it was to stop Modigliani from talking, from thinking, from promoting economic theories.

Merton said there was a running joke that the Sloan School ought to put Modigliani in a cardboard box, hand him a question through a slot on the side of the box and wait a few minutes for the answer to come out a slot on the top of the box.  “And the answer was always right.”  He also noted that before any guests began presentations at the Sloan school, that they warned the guest never to hand the chalk over to Modigliani. If Modigliani got hold of the chalk, he started writing on the blackboard and took over the lecture. “He would go on for hours.”

Robert Solow noted Modiglinai was an all-round economist who did micro, macro, developed theories, carried out research, applied his theories, and performed follow-up studies. He gave special acknowledgement to Modigliani’s wife Serena, who on so many occasions kept Franco in line and prevented him from going overboard. “She was a “queen.”

Meyers recollected how Modigliani held court with students. He never changed. As a young man and as a retired professor, his students gathered around.  “They loved him. And he pushed them, always, to do one more thing.”  When you took a independent study course with Franco, it never ended, Meyers recalled.

After an hour and half  presentation, we possessed a clear impression of Modigliani: an extremely high-energy, quick, forceful, stubborn, brilliant man who was well loved by his colleagues and students.

A touching residue of the evening was the coddled after-feeling of having been spoken to by a handful of men who were not only brilliant economist but also gifted educators. Personable, kind and generous. I imagine a student in their classroom would be feed knowledge as if it were honey.  Smooth and sweet.

The Italian Consulate in Boston initiated this event in cooperation with MIT Italy (co-director Serenella Sferza) . Bravo Liborio Stellino, who is ending his career as Boston’s Consul General, for making possible a special evening for the Boston and MIT communities.

THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG: Be Prepared to Love (a Review)

“Indeed, what constitutes life? Day after day, we put up with the brave struggle to play our role in this phantom comedy……to withdraw as far as you can from the jousting and combat that are the appendages of our warrior species, you drink a cup of tea, or perhaps watch a film by Ozu,  and place upon this sorry theater the seal of Art and its greatest treasures.”

 

 

spiky outside, soft and refined inside

 

THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG, by Muriel Barbery, is a novel about class, unhappiness and beauty. It mixes philosophies as disparate as Marx, Dutch painters, Eminen, apartment building gossips, and Mozart. It is a French novel, through and through, in its ideas (heavy on philosophy), language (multi-tiered, claused sentences), its reliance on relationship ( both grammatical and personal), and its description of middle-class quotidian. (The same quotidian that makes French movies seem as if nothing happens.)

I particularly liked the beauty parts: a yellow rose falls from a bouquet onto the counter; a pile of hot noodles; a sleeping cat; red camellias; grammar; moss on a wall in a Japanese film; the feel of a yellow bathroom carpet. Each time a character witnesses Beauty (with a Capital B) time stops, nothing matters but the moment; they feel satisfied and content about being alive and their place in the world. And because this is a thinking novel, the author asks the question: “Is this where we are doomed to live our lives? Poised between beauty and death?  Between beauty’s appearance and its disappearance.

The unhappiness part twirls around a Leo Tolstoy quote, the first lines of his novel, Anna Karenina: “ All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  Which leads to a need to summarize the plot: Renee is the concierge of a fancy Paris apartment on rue de Grenelle that houses rich successful families.  Although incredibly intelligent and cultured, the self-educated Renee prefers to melt into the background and play dumb.  Paloma, an equally intelligent and precocious twelve-year-old girl, lives in Renee’s apartment building. She attends the best school in Paris. Disgusted by the pretensions of her upper class family and neighbors, she plans to kill herself on her birthday and burn down the building. Both Renee and Paloma feel an intellectual, moral and cultural abyss between themselves and others. When a Japanese man moves into the apartment, both Renee and Paloma begin to shift from unhappy people who are rather unique into happy people who are alike in their happiness. Peel back the intellectualizing, the posturing, the criticism, the subterranean shadows in their personalities and voila! they are both suddenly capable of outright love and the appreciation of Beauty ( capital B) can be perused in friendship.

The driving force behind the author’s pen seems to be to pull apart the pretensions of the ruling elite and the mistaken oppression of the working class. In the very first chapter Renee the concierge announces as criticism of one of her tenants, in a Marxist voice: “Whoever sows desire harvests oppression.” By novel’s end the concierge is finally believing another Marxist axiom, “circumstances make men as much as men make circumstances.”  So during the novel the columns holding up the bridges of both the upper classes and the working class come tumbling down. The playing field is leveled, much to the disdain and embarrassment of both sides.

Beauty, happiness and class consciousness intersect in the transformation of Paloma and Renee, who become friends and soul mates, and in doing so they end up making a pun on the Tolstoy quote which so governed the novel. Here is the pun: “All people involved in happy friendships are alike, each person without a happy friendship is different.”

In the end, the characters who people this novel blend into a community of seamlessly smiling characters who down endless glasses of tea in the concierge’s loge, who laugh and look forward to running into each other, who borrow and lend clothes, who bake and eat chocolate cakes for each other.

Afterall, the novel asks, in the words of Renee as she quotes young Paloma: what is important about measuring a life’s worth?

SWANS AND PISTOLS : A REVIEW

I couldn’t quite get a grip on the author’s character and personality or understand why she wrote the book. Topics that might have enriched the story in ways that profoundly connect writers to readers, that illuminated the human condition, casually slid across the page and then disappeared. For instance, in her autobiography, Leon Bing never tells us how not knowing who her father was impacted her emotional life and the choices she made about men. She doesn’t speculate how her mother’s parenting set the stage for the success and failure of  her own mothering, or tell us much about how the two most important people in her life–her daughter and mother–related to each other. She doesn’t talk about the emotional, intellectual or psychological snags of being an only child ( Her mother and daughter are also only children.)  Every career move happens as if by magic and certainly without effort: Mary Leon simply goes out to dinner, meets celebrity and then the next thing you know she’s a runway model or out on assignment for Harpers and Rolling Stone.

There were mixed messages. For one, she engaged in serial adultery, got very enthused about the creativity or wealth or sexiness of each lover, and at the same time espoused high standards about ‘the right way to live’ and the need to

Art Is the Opposite of Disintegration: Woman of Rome, A Life of Elsa Morante

After reading ARACOELI (truly brilliant novel), I became curious to know more about Elsa Morante. I did know a few tidbits: her friendship with Pier Paolo Pasolini; her affair with the filmmaker Viscontii; and her marriage to Alberto Moravia. Not much more. Many years ago I had waded through the first third of her difficult novel History . Since I couldn’t go to the end, Morante fell outside my interest and my corral of favorite Italian writers.

Just so happens this last month Lily Tuck came out with a biography of Morante–the first in the English language and a noteworthy recognition. Morante is underrated in the States. The angle of the biography is rather interesting. Tuck places herself in the biography.  She starts as a child in Rome, sitting in cafes with her father, a filmmaker. Possibly Tuck sat across the table from Morante at a cafe in the Piazza del Popolo, but she does not remember for sure. The book plays off many possible past encounters with its subject Morante throughout its pages. Tuck also intersperses a narrative about  her own experiences in Rome as she wrote the biography.  Tuck, for instance, suffered a harangue from Morante’s ex-landlady when she ring the landlady’s doorbell during lunch time.

What sticks to me after reading the biography–besides recognition of her great  talent– is Morante’s wild, stubborn, almost mean independence, her vanity, and her proud triumph over an economically thin and unusual background to become a writer on top of her world. A writer who, with the help of her ambitious nudgy mother, her body,

Elsa Morante’s ARACOELI: a disturbing story of memory, rejection and love

I never met a woman named Aracoeli. As I read Elsa Morante’s impressive and  disturbing 1982 novel, of the same name, I wondered how to correctly pronounce “Aracoeli” and if it might be a common name for girls in Italy. My Italian friends Francesca and Renato both wagged their heads and fingers when I asked. “No,” they said. “It is a latin word. Imperative tense, a command, in fact that orders you ‘to look up to the sky’.”

And then, after finishing the book, I remembered having visited a church in Rome, located at the top of a hundred steps and to the side of the ‘wedding cake’ on Capoltine Hill: Santa Maria in Ara Coeli. It’s a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin for having given birth to the first son of God. At Christmas, pilgrims come from all over the city to adore the infant, play music for him,and leave him gifts.

The latin verbal command, along with the Blessed Virgin and child Jesus signifiers, are gateways into the novel, which like much of Morante’s work combs through childhood: how children look up to mothers who (at least in the beginning) love them unconditionally; and from that pinnacle of perfect the painful descent into adulthood. Life chips away illusions, fantasy, dreams, and family love.

The narrator of Aracoeli, a boy named Emanuel, laments that he is torn from the uterus but, as a reward for that pain, is glued to the wonderful teat of his beautiful mother,

HOW TO LIVE TO 100

Our oldest living Nobel laureate and the first ever to reach the 100th birthday

If you want to live to a 100, you might consider following Rita Levi-Montalcini’s routine: get up at five in the morning, eat just once a day, at lunchtime, keep your brain active, and go to bed at 11pm.

“I might allow myself a bowl of soup or an orange in the evening, but that’s about it,” she says. “I’m not really interested in food, or sleep.”

A  diminutive, bird-like figure with an alert manner and engaging smile, Montalcini  has the insight stamina and sharp intellect that someone half her age would envy.

This astonishing woman – who studied medicine, survived Fascism and prejudice, and went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1986,  still takes an active part in politics

in the Italian Senate. I recently read her autobiography “In Praise of Imperfection:My Life and Work.”  What touched

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s AN ACCIDENTAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

“All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.”

–Barbara Grizutti Harrison

This book is a good summer read….

Back in 1999, if I had not been asked to review Barbara Grizutti Harrison’s An Accidental Autobiography, I might have bowed out.  From the get-go the tone shifts between being academic to sarcastic to tabloid confessional.  At times it is overindulgent and haphazard (on page 52 Harrison calls Elias Canetti an Italian novelist: He is a Bulgarian Nobel Prize Winner who wrote in German!). Often, I had to check back to determine if I was reading Harrison’s own words, or if she was paraphrasing or quoting someone else’s. But–on about page 95–I caught her peculiar humor and found I was no longer pushing but was being pulled by her story.  The remainder of …Autobiogrphy was eccentric, sassy and entertaining.

The book is not structured chronologically but alphabetically by topics beginning with Breathing Lessons, and ending with Swimming

IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE A “FORMER TERRORIST”?

he claims to be an ex-killer

Book Review: THE BLOOD  OF LAMBS A Former Terrorist’s Memoir of Death and Redemption  by Kamal Saleem

Reading The Blood of Lambs is like seeing a train coming straight at your house, your school, your gut, your bank account, and your children.  I suppose you could put the book down and filter out politically incorrect thoughts, but that’s the problem.  Put it down and, according to the book’s author Kamal Saleem, you will be an accomplice in the rape of your own nation. Radical Islam is counting on you not wanting to know what they are up to: clearing the world of infidels.

They hate Americans with as much passion as they hate Jews. Saleem writes, “Because if it were not for America, Israel would not exist.”

We realize that not all Muslims are extremists. However, according to studies Saleem cites,  one in ten have declared war on our Western way of life.

The Blood of Lambs is a startling book, a nuanced version of the celebrated Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci’s trilogy. The Rage and the Pride, The Strength of Reason, and Fallaci Interviews Herself were her scandalous wake up calls to Europe. We might not remember that after 9/11, Fallaci spoke out against

IN THE GARDEN OF PAPA SANTUZZU

Since we’re going to Italy, I am taking the occasion to write about one of my favorite “Italian Immigration Novels”.  This one– IN THE GARDEN OF PAPA SANTUZZU — is more specifically a Sicily to American novel. My daughter will be enjoying Sicily during her spring break. I’ll be drinking wine in Roma and Bari.

“Cu nesci arrinesci” (He who leaves succeeds)

Tony Ardizzone’s novel, In the Garcden of Papa Santuzzu, is an abundant collection of magical stories and magnificent language woven together to create a extraordinary loving novel about not only Sicilian Americans but also the heartbreak and hope of common people who leave a home to begin again somewhere else.  In Ardizzone’s case the people are poor Sicilian farm laborers who endure backbreaking work in the rocky fields of oppressive baruni.  The place they migrate to is La Merica.  The story begins as the character’s father, Papa Santuzzu and his wife Adriana, push their sons and daughters, one by one, to the land of opportunity and promise.

Rosa Dolci, Gaetanu, Luigi, Assunta, Salvatore, Rosaria and Livicedda Girgenti, Teresa Pantaluna, Ciccina Agneddina, and Carla and Gerlando Cavadduzzo all bribe their way out of the poverty of their island–one disguises herself as a man; another gains the help of enchanted eels

Cobra in the Bathroom: Scariest thing that could happen to you

excerpted from Jim Corbett’s story Life at Mokameh Ghat

“One night after my servant had gone into the kitchen I took a small hand-lamp off the dressing table, went into the bathroom, and there placed it on a low wall, six-inches high and nine inches wide, which ran half-way cross the room. Then I turned and bolted the door, which like most doors in India sagged on its hinges and would not remain shut unless bolted.  I had spent most of the day on the coal platform so did not spare the soap, and with a lather on my head and face that did credit to the manufacturers I opened my eyes to replace the soap on the bath mat, and to my horror, saw the head of a snake projecting up over the end of the bath and within a few inches of my toes.  My movements while soaping my head and splashing the water about had evidently annoyed the snake, a big cobra, for its hood was expanded and its

THE VIRGIN KNOWS reviewed

 

BY LIBARY THING REVIEWER Amy Romanczuk

The Virgin Knows by Christine Palamidessi Moore

 

First off, any book that has a picture of Madonna and child on the cover, gets points with me.  I immediately looked up the artist (Pietro Perugino) and the current location (Galleria Borghese, Rome) so that I could do a little armchair travelling and art appreciation.  That done, I settled into the book.

It is an entertaining and interesting world Moore has placed between the covers of her novel.  Though the pace was occasionally uneven, it was highly entertaining.  The number of topics covered is slightly amazing: twin stuff, “mom always liked you best”, post WWII Italy, nursing (the image of a psychic OR nurse really made me smile), translocation, immigration, the old country, conspiracy, art theft, Roman Catholicism, men’s views of women, women’s views of men, love– as I said it was broad.

The title of the book is a nice play on words.  While Alicia, the quinticential spinster/virgin knows all (though some of it is through psychic ability, it was

The Fiddle Case by Christine Palamidessi Moore

Preview review from Italian Americana, (academic journal)Spring 2009The Fiddle Case by Christine Palamidessi Moore. Boston:/IAP Press, 2008. 243pp.

The Fiddle Case

In this coming-of-age story two nineteen-year-old women set out across the country in the summer of 1972, searching for answers about siblings they have lost. Their initial goal is soon overshadowed by the trip itself, reminiscent of Thelma and Louise. What begins as an upbeat adventure evolves into a dark thriller as they try to return a stolen fiddle to a cult member. The plot has many twists and turns, taking us across landscapes from Boston to Berkeley. The language conjures up images that titillate the senses: “sex was like a swirling tornado of white light.” Music of the time pervades; it is the driving force behind the road trip. References to politics (Watergate, Vietnam), to music (Beatles, B.B. King), to something as mundane as cigarette brands (low-tar Salems in Kentucky, Virginia Slims in California) convey larger meanings of the cultural background. The alliance between Anna and Cindy is central; other characters serve to illuminate their personalities or carry the plot forward.

Palamidessi Moore paints a convincing picture of the contradictions that women faced with the new sexual freedom of the 1970s.

Old World Daughter, New World Mother

preview FROM Spring 2009 Italian Americana, cultural and historical journal.  Do not reproduce any part of this review without permission of the author and publisher.

Old World Daughter, New World Mother is a provocative meditation on feminism: a symphony of intellectual, historical, economic, political, social, emotional, and personal aspects playing their part in a final creation that holds together not only the story of Maria Laurino, but also other ambitious second generation immigrant women–perhaps Italian Americans in particular, but certainly not limited to that ethnic group.

Laurino, author of the best selling book, Were You Always an Italian,

Peter Simon’s I and Eye & Squirrel Hill (from 10/15/08)

Peter Simon

Photographer Peter Simon’s I and Eye is a terrific memoir of hippie time and ideals as they intersect with power, money, marketing and the infrastructure of capitalist gain. In particular, the last chapter calls it home: he compares freewheeling picture taking at 60s concerts with the photo taking restrictions at Woodstock 99. Don’t we know it?!!

Reading Peter Simon’s I and Eye  really made an impact on the pleasurable aspects of my memory and my feelings of being connected to all the people I knew back in the 70s.  No one has told this story as honestly  and with as much warmth as  Peter.

It is a big book . Big in more than one way: a big, luscious story of an era that we all hear so much