Il Museo delle Promesse Infrante by Elizabeth Buchan

 Il Museo

delle Promesse Infrante by Elizabeth Buchan is pretty diversified.

I found it, I confess, pretty dispersive, because the thematics opened by the author are many and maybe because I would have preferred to read  more adventures and magic of the museum of broken promises (hoping to read a book of museum of kept promises, we musn't be constantly pessimistic regarding the human nature) than the heavy, complicated, multiform past of Laure.

I have been to Prague during the Communism, 1989, close to the end of this dictatorship, so I tend to read books where Prague is one of the main attractions because I left there a good part of my heart! It's a city simply enchanting and unique.

Said this, the story starts with a failed marriage, the one of Laure, the idea, being childless and completely alone of opening a museum of broken promised, a choice, this one, because of her connection with the past, in the enchanting city of Paris. The musem is not just successful: the museum is great because puts in connection the feelings of people with the objects that they find in the place, and rooms that they visit. Sometimes their reactions are violents, other ones more calm but always profound. 

Laure hides a lot of her personal story and starts to be affectionated to a starved, loney cat.

A reporter from the South of the Usa, young and with the desire of writing a good piece in connection with Vanity Fair, contacts Laure. Laure is diffident because young reporters are more aggressive than the rest of the category to her point of view.

Slowly, the museum becomes always more pale while the main story becomes the one experienced by her when she was as an au-pair in Prague, baby-sitting two children and spending time with a depressed woman and a husband worried for his wife. That ones were the years of the Communism and people whispered more than talking, together, spied, considered enemies if they spoke a fluent english. Soon Laure meets along her way an artist, Simon who is also trying to make oppisition to the regime...

Plenty of questions that will be resolved at the end, there won't be a happy end in the classic way we imagine it: the author hasn't completely captured what it meant the lack of freedom in the Communist Prague to me, but she went close to it. 

It was a palpable feeling and a sufferance that was in grade of capturing every sphere of the person.

Said that, the book is a good reading for sure and I highly recommend it to you.

Anna Maria Polidori 

L'homme qui plantait des Arbres by Jean Giono

His name was Elzéard Bouffier and he was universally known as the man who planted trees thanks to a little book L'homme

qui plantait des arbres written by Jean Giono. Elzéard was born in Provence.Jean Giono met just for case this solitary man. He was walking in an area in Provence pretty poor of water and trees. But...What Giono was searching was some water although he had also found a nasty wind, pretty strong considering that trees couldn't keep it gentle because the area poor of them.

He met, so, along his way, this solitary house, with a solitary man in company of a solitary, nice and peaceful dog. Jean Giono decided to stay for another day, if for that man was fine. Elzéaber didn't mind, and Giono observed him more closely. He had planted wagons of trees, before his arrival and he would have continued per years. That one was his solitary mission: no one asked him of doing so.

Elzéard as tells well Giono, had lost his wife and son and so he spent his time planting trees. Per kilometers. You musn't imagine that Elzéard planted in little areas. Giono re-visited that places years after, discovering a different nature, real forests, many real ones! thanks to this very good man with which he became with the time good friend of.

Plants are a reality extremely crucial for men. They have always been but now...that nature can in a daily base kill us, because we have killed our environment, altering it, we must plant all new trees: the killing of the lung of the Planet, the Amazon must be interrupted: impossible to think, with all the respect for Jeff Bezos, nothing personal, that his virtual Amazon is successful, and the real one is dying and with it the humanity: planting trees will become a rush for everyone.

I highly suggest to all of you the reading of this book. It is lovely and simply touching!

Anna Maria Polidori 

A Sweet View The Making of an English Idyll by Malcolm Andrews

 A Sweet View

The Making of an English Idyll by Malcolm Andrews is a new book released  November 24 by Reaktion. 

The title Sweet View is taken from a phrase expressed by Jane Austen when, writing, described in the book Emma what she was seeing as "a sweet view." 

An enchanting nature,the british one: I fall in love for example for a website called Pictures of England, where you  find wagons of pictures of a stunning british countryside.

This book analyzes british painters in love for their countryside, but also what writers said on the stunning, fresh and perpetually harmonic british lands, with its specific characteristics as for example, churches,  cottages, castles. In general their observations were the ones of enchanted people in a wonderful and idylliac world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "England is a garden... Under an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a

plough."

Horace Walpole complained: there were few paintings and few painters interested in portraying the beautiful and fresh british countryside.

Frederick Law Olmsted built Central Park and once in England remained enchanted by what he saw.

John Constable created with his The Cornfield, firstly appeared in public in 1826, the perfect scenario of the rural countryside.

A book analyzing portraits of estimated painters and written words of beloved writers for giving to the reader the exact poeticity felt and seen in the past like in the present: the key makers of the so-called "South Country rural idyll goes to painters like Palmer, Birket, Foster and Jefferies. 

Beautifully arugumented and illustrated, goes for it if you are fascinated by countrysides, and the beauty and fascination of it.

Highly recommended.

I thank Reaktion for the copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Resetting Our Future Long Haul COVID: A Survivor’s Guide Transform Your Pain and Find Your Way Forward by Joseph J. Trunzo, Julie Luongo

 Resetting Our Future

Long Haul COVID: A Survivor’s Guide Transform Your Pain and Find Your Way Forward by Joseph J. Trunzo, Julie Luongo is maybe one of the first self-help books directly involving COVID-19. The publishing house of this book is Changemakers Books: once started the pandemic they decided of giving voice to the problematic appeared because of the Covid-19. Considering that we will still have to cope with COVID and what it means a pandemic for a while, these books can be useful for trying to find some relief.The website of the publishing house is www.resiliencebooks.com.

Mahatma Gandhi said once that the future its up to us and what we do today. For sure we have much more responsibilities in terms of life and death than what we had these past years. A vaccine can protect people and entire communities, reducing the mortality, hospitalization and possibility of infecting other people. The pandemic brought on the table of the existence thematic of great immensity. We discovered that our eco-system re-started to breath, oh yes, also pretty largely, when we were all closed home. Animals re-occupied their places in the past were dominated by us: at the same time the climate changes assumed a different importance, because this one can be just the beginning of a series of pandemics brought by the mutation of meteorological conditions and what it is going on in the North and South Pole.

Sure, as Americans love to saying: We're All in This Together. But... what doest it mean? That there is not a person in this world who hasn't been altered by COVID. A pandemic involves every sphere of the human condition: social, economical, psychological, physical, familial. There is not an untouched sphere in this extraordinary condition that won't touch men.

No one would want to suffer: this is true; but not seeing what it is going on could be worse. The method proposed by the authors for our case (we are all sick from COVID, also if we haven't been yet infected and maybe we won't be, because we don't live anymore with tranquillity but with stress levels pretty high) is called ACT and was firstly studied for other illnesses like the Lyme Syndrome caused by a bite of a tick. While dosctors are still debating if this illness exists or not, patients cope with a lot of pains at various levels: physical, psychological.

This method, so, has been adopted also for refreshing the body and spirit of people affected by COVID-19.

"ACT is grounded in an extremely well-researched model called Relational Frame Theory, which focuses on how our minds form relations and use symbols and language to make

connections in our mental processes." This method will help you to live in the present, bettering the quality of your thoughts for staying more tranquil and relaxed.

It is a good reading. I warmly suggest it to you.

In nome della verità by Viveca Sten

 Not just an unputtable down book this one written by Viveca Sten In Nome della Verità

, but let me add, the most beautiful one of the beloved swedish author, to my point of view.

The story you will see will be pretty intricated and will be.. A story in the story in the several cases taken in consideration. I can't launch myself this time in spoilers because I would ruin the surprise, but let's put things in this way: thematic treated are serious, intense, reals and most of the times, dramatics.

One of the first themes taken in consideration is bullism, a condition where the so-called more prepotents children abuses verbally and physically of pacific and in peace with themselves, children: then another problem experienced in too many cases is paedophilia, the biggest crime that a revoltating beast can does against a poor and innocent kid; the third theme is a financial trial; the fourth one the possibility of dangerous escapisms. In these stories, connected together, we assist also at the private problems of Thomas and Nora with their partners.

The story is this one: Benjamin, an 11 years old boy is sent by his father at the velistic school located in an island close to Sandhamn: this man is a witness in a financial trial, (where the prosecutor is Nora) involving his ex-friend accused of having stolen wagons of money. Benjamin doesn't start a fantastic vacation: he is attacked by oldest, prepotent teenagers but his bad luck doesn't end there for sure, because, bad companions apart, he receives the attention of a real dangerous, dangerous paedophile...  

I won't tell nothing else. I read this book in a few hours! Enthusiastic! 

Fantastic book!

Highly recommended.

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of the book! 

Anna Maria Polidori 

Practically Pagan An Alternative Guide to Magical Living by Maria DeBlassie

 Practically Pagan

An Alternative Guide to Magical Living by  Maria DeBlassie attracted me so badly. I was ready of using the magical spells for wishes or, telling the truth, just for trying to see if magic works. 

Forget it. 

This one is a self-help book with a touch of magic, but nothing else,  because as explains the author, although a doctorate and a successful existence, she needed to discover something else.

In this book you will find a lot of advice for going on in the existence in a very gracious way; from gym to food and the creation of more physical space for your exigencies, and many other suggestions for bettering your existence in a physical and emotional level.

Interesting book because written with passion and competence and with some magical sparks!

Highly ecommended.

I thank John Hunt Publishing for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

A Schoolboy’s Wartime Letters by Geoffrey Iley

 A Schoolboy’s Wartime Letters

by Geoffrey Iley is an enchanting, enchanting book.

The letters in questions, first of all this is an epistolary book of letters sent to the parents and relatives of Geoffrey, were found when Geoffrey a pretty mature man. He was pleasantly surprised to seeing that all the letters sent and received a lot of time ago were still there, waiting for him.

A lonely child, because of work, Geoffrey's family afforded to Birmingham. Years, that ones, where the cold winds of war were whispering always more persisting. We are at the end of the 1930s. Geoffrey, also for preserving him during that horrible phase for Europe was sent in schools distant from that city, for completing the years.

The letters you'll read documents his weekly activities. From the games he loved to play with, the request for his violin, and many times!!! for stamps: the polemic because of censorship, blue pencil!, passing throught the several illnesses he was affected of or were affected his friends: he concluded most of the time reassuring his parents. Food in the first school wasn't great at all, and at first, because of this reason, he fell ill. He also felt melancholy because he had left his home, but in this case after a short time, recovered successfully well.

His parents were also taking in consideration, if Germans would have occupied the UK, of sending him in the USA, an hypothesis later discarded.

At that time correspondence was the only way for receiving news, gifts, postcards from someone distant. Geoffrey asked for books, for games, bycicles, money, everything you can imagine he could ask for, being satisfied all the times, but not only: her mother sent him also delicious fruits and cakes that he consummed in his bedroom!

I also noticed that Geoffrey, in opposite case avide letter-writer, postponed or interrupted his writings  when it was teatime, a sacred moment for everyone in the UK. 

At the end of the school Geoffrey started a first experience as engineer apprentice becoming much more with the time and building a beauty existence. 

But...But...What you will love the most of his character is that, although little, Geoffrey had a solid, strong character, pretty technical and mathematical, being also happy, cheerful ironic and mature at the same time.

It was a great joy reading this book, where we can see a correspondence spanning through all the years of the Second World War.

Highly recommended book.

I thank John Hunt Publishing for the copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

PAN The Great God’s Modern Return by Paul Robichaud

PAN

The Great God’s Modern Return by Paul Robichaud takes in consideration in a book appeared in september by Reaktion, a divinity, at the moment pretty popular, considering the Covid-19 pandemic: the God Pan who inspired the term panic for describing the sentiment felt by people who met along their way this divinity, half human and half goat.

Pan has been, during the centuries, much more: someone reassuring, or a real devil, a prince of the abysses, or he protector of forests: of course he is also seen as guardian of wild animals because in de facts Pan was this one in greek mythology.

Pan is a creature who has always refused a tranquil existence, cultivating his freedom and wild spirit.

But...What does Pan means in greek language? It is a verb: "to pasture" for the characteristic of this God. 

The cult of Pan like also poems connected with him, spread pretty fastly in a country like Greece plenty of pastures because of goats and sheep: devotion for this God was very felt in Greece.

But..Who was the father of Pan? 

Hermes.

Hermes fell in love for a girl and has had Pan. 

A characteristic of Pan was that once was portrayed his death but this time it didn't happen as for all the other greek Gods or the same Jesus, who resuscitated the third day: in this case, Pan is simply dead.

In the Middle Age, but also before, when Costantine defined the Christianity the main religion, the cult of Pan disappeared: in the middle age Pan was seen like an infernal demon.

Pico della Mirandola imagined the God as a "One" and Botticelli and other painters as the Orphic Pan.

Rabelais sees in Pan the role of divine sheperds.

Beaumont and Fletcher read the God as guardian of both Christian virtue and English liberty.

Francis Bacon does something else: reflecting on Pan and his mature he sees the God in this duality: "the superior and inferior parts of nature", seeing in the human part of Pan the best of the intelligence and education, and in the animal side, the brutality, but also less nobles insticts of men.

If during the Enlightment there was no place for a divinity like Pan, the Romanticism gave back to him what it was lost in the past century.

Wordsworth represents him singings his pipe in Monte Zappi, Lazio. People can hears his pipe, but no one can sees him.

John Keats removed all the beast's references in Pan, upsetting some people who had read thanks to him a God too much "disembodied": Keats described him as a ‘leaven’ that provides "A touch ethereal" to the mud and muck of our physical world. 

Hunt proposed a new cult for the God Pan, writing: "‘The Great God Pan is alive again."

Wilde, dedicated to Pan a prayer, while Sydney Long produced a beautiful painting on Pan.

 

Operetta: when Offendach wrote Daphnis et Chloé inserted Pan in the play; Pan was also on the cover of The Echo, an American magazine.

The XX century has seen Pan in a darker way of we make a comparison with the other past centuries.

J.M.Barrie, firstly, treated Pan in The Little White Bird portraying Peter Pan as a baby, surrounded by the pipes of Pan... After all the last name of Peter was a direct inspiration of the God Pan: who was Peter if not a baby born wild as Pan? 

Arthur Machen reads the God as a horrible creature, communicating terror.

To Roscher Pan is vice-versa a nightmare demon.

Rosaleen Norton had a great veneration for Pan. She created an altar to the God and has always taken him in consideration in her art and magical practice.

Protagonists in every medium, Pan is important in this XXI century as well leaving us important messages as written at the end by the author: 

"As global temperatures increase dramatically, with wildfires and rising ocean levels, that fear can easily give way to growing panic. It is up to us whether we allow that panic to overwhelm us, or accept it as a gift from Pan and respond by taking responsibility for the well-being of our planet."

Highly recommended book.

I thank Reaktion Books for the copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Postcards The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network by Lydia Pyne

 Postcards

The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network by Lydia Pyne that will be released this next Nov 21 is an immersion in a popular, culturally colored world and in the most undiscreet first social media, as underlined by the author, of our modern times: postcards, ladies and gentlemen. 

No sure you, I am a postcards addicted and collector! Not anymore as in the past because in our country shipping costs are prohibitives, but I do sure am a member of Postcrossing and I have friends, as Maria, from Moscow, that when sends me postcards from the places she visits (she travels a lot, lucky girl) enchants me with her observations of places, cities, restaurants and views. 

Why do we send postcards? We send them mainly because we are affectionated to the sender, and we want to transmit something of special: our joy, sharing observations, some facts of the places where we are in; someone can just write a succint: 

Ciao from Venice! Love... 

No sure you, I do that all the times! being also a postcards's collector  I request the postcard to my friend tourist.

You musn't never think that the final message of a postcard is what written on the back. The cover, its "face" is extremely important, like also stamps, because messages that postcards vehicolate are the most diversified ones and thanks to stamps you also learn the cultural touch of a different country. Being creativity the motion engine of postcards, most of them will be so beauty that  we will add them all in special places of our home, for being showed by everyone, remaining in our memories forever.

A postcard is also important because as it does the Postcrossing for example, you can start to learn every little or big place in the world and it is a powerful method this one: the creation of a lot of connections in the most diversified places in the world.

The first two decades of the XX century people sent something like 200 billion of postcards.

Postcards became famous and largely used just before the First World War.

The physicality of the postcard is immediate, and mostly joyous.

What can you find in a postcard? An universe that must just be discovered!

I can tell you I received maps of several states of the USA; but also monuments, seascapes, landscapes, cartoons and much more.

The most beloved ones remains the ones of the Holidays!

There are countries like Iceland where sending postcards for Christmas means a real big big work for the post offices.

We speak of postcards sometimes leaving apart the work that there is behind every postcard sent. Rapidity of the post offices are indispensibles for a good connection.

The author writes: "Postcards have been printed, sold, mailed, and received on a scale that makes them, historically, the largest class of artifacts that humankind has ever exchanged."

Postcards are collected as I wrote before, and Lydia tells the example of his grand-father. He collected hundreds and hundreds of postcard since the beginning of the XX century to the 1920, the so-called Golden Age of Postcards.

Reading the postcards of someone, sent to someone else is like to enter in the existence of that two unkown people. You don't know them but you try to understand, where possible, their existences.

Lydia, for studying better the topic, asked to her family members of sending her the postcards received and she will accompany her observations in the book using them.

A billion postcards passed through Germany in 1903. Personally I can tell you that Germany, has kept stamps pretty cheap: Germany is one of the most important members of the Postcrossing where not the strongest partner; another way for keeping a business going on with success.

When the biggest crisis affected postcards? Again the guilty is the internet, with the advent of electronic postcards (that, anyway expires after a while) because people saved a lot of money.

The United States Post Office was in crisis in 1909 but, surprise! had a surplus of a great amount of money thanks to postcards: it is, after all, what it is doing Germany at the moment with the possibility for every person of cultivating a good hobby, remembering people also thanks to this method; vice-versa Italy is doing all the opposite; it is seriously too expensive sending many postcards from our country.

Postcards were also a powerful vehicles for sending to beloved ones other items with them. Some people for example shared also journals, with news, items, postcards and facts; these journals were sent to all the family members that lived in different States of the USA and each of them added news, postcards, pressed flowers, stickers for being seen by the other participants.

The Washington Post in an article by Frederic Haskin wrote in 1910  that "The post card business is very profitable to the Post Office."

An impressive portrait is the one of rural areas, seen as abandoned places without any right and neglected by post offices: situation changed when government understood the importance of giving coverage also at these places and so postcards became, also in these parts of the USA, where streets and roads were less excessibles, something romantic, painting a society suggestive and plenty of good values. 

In 1874 thanks to the Treaty of Bern several countries decided the legislation for sending postcards in other countries.

In the while in six decades Curt Teich & Co. produced a billion of postcards! The production in mass of postcards began!

Curt Otto Teich arrived from Europe and his family was involved in printing. It was simple to start also the production of postcards, because, natural, it was a new business.

There was also who created propaganda in the most different ways using postcards.

George Eastman, Kodak, created picture postcards. Which was the difference? In this case there is more reality, and the picture is taken for vehicoling a precise message.

The movement of suffragists used  picture postcards for spreading the message of their cause.

Picture postcards could be personalized by the sender, because they captured a moment of interest in his existence.

Postcards served also tourism, of course. In 1990 the Klein Postcard Service of Boston decided to publish a series of postcards as a protagonist their beloved and yummy! delicious lobsters. This, for intending that everyone in Boston was at home.

The Grand Tour of the last century was reason for sending postcards, letters apart and during the past century people started to travel abroad more massively than not in other periods.

An important chapter will involve the places disappeared with the time because of political reasons mainly.

The final chapter is about the...life of a postcard when received.

Postcards remains a big instrument of communication for discovering new places, people, customs, traditions of distant and unknown land.

If you love postcards, if you collect them, if you treasure them, if you, simply love to send or receive them, this book is for you!

Highly recommended.

I thank Reaktion for the copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori

 

La Carte Postale by Anne Berest

 La Carte Postale

by Anne Berest intrigued me immediately when Grasset sent me the e-mails with the new rentree litteraires and the possibility of reading them before their publication.

I was right: this book, one of the strongest and most important ones in France, finalist of an important prize like the Goncourt but also of many many other ones, will touch your heart closely, because written with great compassion, humanity, attention  respect.  

This story starts thanks to a postcard received by the mother of Anne, in 2003. It was with the rest of mails and it was a shocking surprise because there wasn't the name of the sender, just four names: Ephraim, Emma, Noemi and Jacques, the relatives dead in the camp of Auschwitz during the last world war. It appeared clear that, if family, friends didn't send it, maybe some old neighbors of the family of Ephrain dit it, but...Why? The mother of Anne had planned to present a dossier to a commission regarding her disappeared relatives  that months. Maybe someone didn't want? Why? 

It's an investigative book as well, this one, pretty detailed, spanning through letters, memories, postcards, pictures, of what remained of Ephraim, Emma, Noemi and Jacques. It is a complete reconstruction of a family dilaniated by racial laws and deportation but traces, magistrally well, also what happened later to Myriam, one of the daughters of Ephraim and Emma who, thanks to Ephraim saved the existence; there is also a section that will let us see who is living now in the houses  where Ephraim built his existence: these two women in fact, Anne and mother, at a certain point searched for memories, informations, objects, photographs of the family and.. written notes!

Let's start from the beginning: the first part of the book tells the story of the Rabinovitch family. They had Russian origins, but then they left Russia in 1919 for another country. The father of Ephraim asked to the children where they wanted to afford because few places were safe according to him in Europe. Ephraim choosed Riga, disgusted by the idea of spending his existence in a deserted land like Israel was.

His business was great, but at a certain point he decided to leave and this time was constricted of asking to his father some help, ending in Israel. If his father was a passionate of that land, Ephraim didn't feel any kind of enthusiasm.

He understood that, after all, the agricultural works of his parents didn't give to them a lot of money. Although the place was appreciated by his children, maybe because also the devoted attentions of their grand-parents, they decided to move to France, Ephraim's biggest dream.

Ephraim, to my point of view had a special and beautiful character: he was an optimistic, I would add, dreaming man: he couldn't understand completely the badness of the world, and spent the rest of his time, always in Paris and french countrysides thinking that, anyway, he was protected by french people and french government:  a devoted and beloved cousin told him that the air wasn't good at all, and that it was better to leave France for America. Ephraim sounded disgusted by the idea and told to Emma that he didn't want to re-start everything from the beginning. Not in the USA. During the following years they didn't receive anymore news of their jewish relatives in the eastern european countries...A worrying sign of what was going on in Europe.

Ephraim had invented a machine for the accelleration of the bakery process of the bread: the news was also reported internationally in the Daily Mail and of course french people and bakeries sounded more than interested in this new machine in grade of letting them save time.

Ephraim tried to ask for the french naturalization changing his name and last name but it didn't happen. He didn't want that the children (all very good students) had to grow up with a jewish culture: they didn't go to the sinagogue. Sure: he understood when the nazis invaded France that there would have been problems, but nothing could have let him believe that his children would have been killed: they assured him that they had to leave for working in Germany and the news sent by Noemi in her letters were reassuring. Yes, he had had a good intuition: considering that the name of Myriam wasn't in that list, because in the while Myriam married Vicente and lived in Paris (she returned that days) maybe there wasn't the necessity of adding this daughter to the list: he asked her of hiding herself. Ephraim was a special soul who, to me eliminated the badness and cruelty of this world automatically from his soul, like Jacques did, in particular if you read the extremely moving final thoughts that Anne and her mother imagined he could have thought when arrived in Auschwitz and they brought him to the shower....

I don't want to spoil what happened in the camp at Noemi and Jacques: they also met along their way Irene Nemirovsky author of Suite Francais, deported as well and Noemi was largely mentioned in a book written by another prisoner, Hautval, a doctor who cured people in a french camp; Noemi was her favorite nurse and that lady tried all her best for saving Noemi and Jacques.

It was moving the chapter, just few words, dedicated to Jacques and his ends...

Myriam in the while, returned to Paris, but she had to escape again. Vicente and her will start an existence at la Jean Giono; as told by the beloved french writer, what is there more beauty than living in a countryside? An idea embraced by people of left, creatives, Jewish, and all that people who wanted to spend a good existence at contact with nature. 

There will be problems: a menage a trois, Vicente used drugs and he won't end well  leaving Myriam with a child of 3 years and the other man with which she was also in love, Yves. With the time Myriam lost his mind, because of Alzheimer and unfortunately she completely forgot, it happens, the use of the language acquired later, french; she spoke only russian at the end of his days. 

Anne focuses the attention in the anti-semitism sentiments that sometimes appears in the most diversified places: for example her daughter once said her that a kid told her at school that he didn't like Jewish.

And Anne could not sleep that night...When once she was to school, the teacher of french asked to them of composing their Genealogic Tree. When she understood that Anne had a lot of relatives disappeared in the camp of Auschwitz, can you believe it? She treated the girl differently and she wasn't anymore her most beloved student.

 

Said it: Anne didn't grow up with a Jewish culture. His parents embraced the ideals of the '68s, freedom of expression in every sense! wonderful years that ones! so the values that they transmitted her were that ones: also Anne's partners hadn't to be absolutely all jewish. She didn't mind and in general her parents didn't mind. But, it will be the last one, Jewish for case as weites Anne, who invited her to dinner for the celebration of a beloved Jewish dinner and appeared clear that maybe she was trascuring too much her being Jewish. 

Beautiful and intense. Highly recommended to everyone.

I thank Grasset for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

La Cattiva Strada by Sébastien Japrisot

 Days ago I ordered several books at my book club. I was attracted by this one, a beautiful ad quick reading: La Cattiva Strada by Sébastien Japrisot.

It's the story of a young, and at first, prohibited love between a nun of 26 years and a boy of 14 years in Paris.

The two will start at first a frequentation but maybe without to understand the intensity of their love; slowly it will become more than clear to both of them what they proved and that they wanted to live their love and passion in peace; they will try all their best for doing it, imagining a society and a rural existence without complications. 

The drama will be bypassed by the certainty that they were doing the right thing and that they didn't do, after all, anything wrong; their life will change irreversibly but one thing will be more than clear: their love-story is forever. Wisely well written, the feelings of the two are portrayed with intensity clarity and purity, without any kind of sordid touch

but like the most limpid love story, in grade, with the time, to win the prejudices of people and society.

Beautiful!

Anna Maria Polidori