ANDhere they are 5 love stories that you won’t find told in these 5 books: the sugary and cloyingly stereotyped ones of a little original Valentine’s Day. In exchange, surprising opportunities to investigate feelings and how they shape the human soul. And a cat messenger of love.
Best of all in the world is your cat
There are two love stories that run through the pages of Best of all in the world is your cat, (Elliott, €25). The one that feeds on collages, letters and postcards, of which Wislawa Szymborska, future Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1996, was a passionate collector. And which she pours on Kornel Filipowicz, an accomplished prose writer, ten years her senior. She had already spotted him in 1940, when he was seventeen, but her understanding was consolidated in 1966. In the book twenty years of exchanges between two lovers who live in a difficult time, politically and due to the constraints of daily life. The need to fill out bureaucratic paperwork for everything and the extreme shortage of food emerges.
Playful, often dedicated to Kornel’s cat and even more often tinged with jealousy, the letters are crowded with friends and imaginary characters. It is a succession of funny episodes, hunting for vintage postcards (of which the two are ferocious collectors) and precise reports on Kornel Filipowicz’s fishing trips. They are intertwined with stays in a sanatorium, with news on the health of houseplants and to comments on the dullness of politics, very disguised. Why two love stories? Why lovers of the poetess who sings of everyday life, here they find her a thousand percent: with the irony, the melancholy, the fervor that knows how to make every fragment surprising of the world. For those with a poet’s heart.
Wislawa Szymborska and Kornel Filipowicz, Best of all in the world is your cat. Letters 1966-1985, Elliott, €25.00
A woman in the shadows
Here too they are intertwined two love stories. Indeed in this case of bad love. That of Ginto, one of the five children of Cesare Lombroso, the famous criminologist, anthropologist and psychiatrist. She she remained a step behind all her life in service of the boundless egos of the men in her life, her father and her husband. His intelligence his personality were considered only as a useful tool for the intellectual career of Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrara, famous Italian historian and man of letters between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For all life, from the age of twelve, she was her father’s secretary, the ploy with which she tried to attract his attention, perhaps his affection. He continued to dedicate himself to rearranging the man’s notes upon his death, to the detriment of the development of his own more advanced theories.
A woman in the shadow, Clichy, €19.50. The refusal to assert herself, between constraint and sacrifice, of Cesare Lombroso’s daughter, Gina. By Silvia di Natale.
She supported her husband’s career all her life, even intellectually who did not love and who kept a mistress. And he left the man who had made his heart beat to his sister Paola, who was in love with him. He first graduated in literature, to please his family, and only later undertook medical studies, opposed by his father. Caesar was a socialist, he was considered a non-conformistin Turin in the early 1900s, but the ferocious chauvinism of society never put him into question even for a moment. And let’s stop here. An enlightening novel, written in the form of a diary, well documented, which does not arouse compassion. But, fortunately, he is indignant. For women and girls angry.
Old children lost in the woods
Margaret Atwood (Ponte alle Grazie, €16.90) recounts, in many of these 15 stories, the love between Nell and Tig, the two old children of the title.
The dystopia, which tells the future with extremely negative features, made Margaret Atwood universally famous with The Handmaid’s Tale. It is the novel where the patriarchy is more triumphant than ever and women are only mares. But in this one collection of 15 short stories dystopia enters only on tiptoe. The stories of love and death have the greatest weight. AND the one that mixes the two elements with extraordinary poetry, the stories about Nell and Tig, alter ego of the writer herself and her late husband Graeme Gibson in 2019. Minimal details, capable of making all the tenderness, nostalgia and regret shine through. And, of course, also the fear of death, of nothingness. But written so well that it’s gratitudeand for being able to read them to fill the heart. For those who love and love literature.
The will
Nina Wähä ne The will (Carbonio, 21 euros) tells the story of loves, hatreds and alliances in a family that grew up under a master father in Finnish Karelia, on the border with Russia, in the 1980s.
The novel is set in the days of Christmas (1981) in a barren and snowy Finnish landscapebut the story thrives on suspense and continuous flashbacks. There is a master father, Repented, son of a poor peasant life, in a hostile land. He considers his children labor or burdens to get rid of. Siri the wife is the mother of twelve children, she came to marriage to escape death, from starvation or possibly from mistreatment. And the children, from 40 to 5 years old, who have grown up in what is in all respects a dysfunctional family, and deal with that situation every day. Where are the love stories in here? They spread from the center of the story, in the older children’s desire to protect their mother and siblings from their father’s influence. But together there is calculation and a tension that from the first page, as we know, revolves around a murder. But who will do it? For those who love old-fashioned family sagas, but also all the suspense of thrillers.
The world and everything in it
Aleksandar Hemon (Crocetti, €20) draws a grandiose love story with the story of Rafo Pinto and Osman, without adjectives to substantiate it.
The day Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was killed in Sarajevo and the First World War is about to detonate the young man Rafa Pinto pharmacist of Jewish origin is chasing his dream of love, among the crowd that gathers as the imperial couple passes by. And it is a stone’s throw from the man that the fatal shot will explode. A bullet that will subvert an entire world. And she will have the strength to sweep away her old life forever. He will throw him into the trenches of Galiciathen part of Ukraine, filled with corpses of desperation and war. Alongside Osman, his Muslim comrade, his one great love. With him he will escape the horror of defeat only for start a wandering life, sewing his existence as a refugee and that of his soul daughter Rachela to the senseless events of the worldwhich overwhelms everyone’s destiny and plans.
Between spies, Bolsheviks, adventurers and traffickers, climbing mountains and crossing desertsfrom world to world, reaches as far as Shanghai. Thanks to the love for Osman, who once passed away becomes a more ardent presence. An enthralling ride that you would never want to come to an end. For those who believe that love and well-written books know no genres and boundaries.
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