Il Figlio del Figlio Perduto by Soma Morgenstern

Il Figlio del Figlio

Perduto by Soma Morgenstern new book published by Marsilio and First part of a captivating Trilogy is very interesting because takes in consideration a strong Jewish story innested in that East of Europe, fertile of jewish great representatives completely destroyed,disappeared forever after the latest world war conflict.

The sets are fascinating cities of the East like the now Ukrainian city of Leopoli , then Dobropolje where Welwel one of the protagonists of this book, lives. 

Welwel and Janken leaves Dobropolje because of a congress of Jewish in Wien. Till now the narration is calm, quiet, with powerful descriptions of the trip of these two men, habits of the characters we see in action.

The arrival in scene of Alfred, the son of the brother of Welwel, fallen in disgrace many years ago,  changes the narration, becoming bubbling: this boy will change the destiny of these protagonists forever. This young man is still at the discovery of his past. No one told him the story of his father, kept secret by everyone. Something in the past of his father modofied forever the destiny of his family of origin.

For case, because the tutor of Alfred, Dr. Frankl, joins the works of the congress, Alfred is with him. 

When Dr. Frankl "abandons" the Congress, leaving alone Alfred, something will happen and Welwel will recognize in that young boy the son of his, after all, beloved brother.

Rejected from so many years, the heart of Welwel melts seeing Alfred. Jankel, understanding the prostration lived by Welwel will try his best for a happy reunion...

Beauty! I love happy ends!

Highly recommended 

Anna Maria Polidori

Spillover by David Quammen

If you want to discover everything on viruses read Spillover

by David Quammen book released by Adelphi. I simply adore Quammen a scientific journalist with an approach practical, strong and ironic and profound connaisseur of every possible virus existing on the face of our Earth.

 

Written before the advent of the pandemic, this one is an engaging, beautiful and terrible trip in that hidden world that is the one of viruses. Why beautiful and adventurous?

Because studying viruses can be a mission. A love. A love for a special virus. It could be Ebola, SARS: a life devoted to that special one, attracting the researcher for a reason or another, and, let's add this, with the risks existing in that everyday life spento in laboratories.

 

It is an adventurous world also, like the one of explorers, because, researchers, biologists must afford in the wildest places of the Planet, searching for wild animals, their blood, poo or pee for trying to find some positivity at a certain kind of virus. These animals that they research, they can be bat, other mammals, insects, are the passdoor of a certain new virulent virus in human society.

 

But...What does spillover mean in scientific terms?

The passage of a virus from an animal's body to a human one with devastating consequences, like a pandemic or severe outbreaks in various areas of the world.

When, in synthesis in the body of the new guest, the virus becomes more powerful, more dangerous: a condition, this one that sometimes in animals bringing the virus can be unknown. Yes, a virus can stay silent in the bodies of some animals, while in other ones becoming heavily destructive.

 

EBOLA and  SARS.

 

Ebola is one of the most mysterious and lethal viruses of our modernity. Why?

For the damages caused to our body, but also because offers violent outbreaks with wagons of departures for then staying silent per years. It's of course a stroke of luck this One, but there are a lot of complexities. One for all, for example no one till now have been in grade to discover which is the animal in grade to pass to primates or humans the virus.

 

There are certain animals severely damaged like humans are, let's observe the case of gorillas, disappeared in some African forests because of severe EBOLA outbreaks experienced by them as well, but it is still completely unknown the animal-vector of these outbreaks.

 

Mortality, at the moment there are 5 types of EBOLA, is very high, in particular in the first type, and more weak in the other ones.

 

People started to fall sick in a case after that, someone during a hunting session  found a gorilla in a forest, probably plenty of Ebola virus, dead several days before and brought to the village: although not too fresh, people ate it avidly because starved. It was a disaster in terms of contagions and departures.

 

 

SARS: this one has been a terrible illness for sure. It didn't become a pandemic, but later we have met it again with SARS-COV-2.

 

Yes, this sindrome loves to...flying. The virus started his ascension in China, then arrived in Hong Kong, then America...

Meetings, trips of vacation with fatal results, patients ended up in ICU, that later became super-spreaders...

 

The book continues with the fascination that only Quemman puts when writing on viruses and that hidden static world, that can appear to us in its complete brutality when a new and powerful destructive virus emerges on surface.

I love this book so badly. I brought It everywhere!

 

Beautiful book! Highly recommended.

 

 

Anna Maria Polidori

 

 

Emergent by Miriam Kate McDonald

 Emergent

by Miriam Kate McDonald published by John Hunt Publishing is an amazing, interesting british book. I start to tell you that, when I can grab, buy, a british book on farms, nature, garden, I don't never hesitate because they treat these topics with profound love: same is here. This book analyzes the relationship between man and eco-system where he lives in, considering that we are nature but that this nature has been destroyed, severely, critically altered: it's important to understand writes the author that climate, biodiversity and health crises is an IDENTITY CRISIS. 

The biggest problem has been the psychological alteration created by man, someone "superior", who could interact with environment as he wanted to do, without to feel it, but thinking that he possessed it. Wrong. Nature is more strong than us and we are seriously risking to do the same end of our predecessorts, ahem, the dinosauruses. 

Our attitude should change. If we would start to consider that we are just a little creature living in a planet of 8 billion of people more or less, located in a solar system, and the solar system in a galaxy, and a galaxy in an Universe  in continuous expansion and much more big, with white holes and black holes (the white ones re-put out matter, the black ones eat matter for being concises)  maybe we would reconsider our own essence and our relationship with nature, in a healthiest way.

Because, simply we are made by stardust and we are part of the whole of this Planet but as participants and pilgrims, not as owners.

Divided in three part, in the first there is a look at that past; the second focuses on the present and the third in the future.

I admit that anyway every section are enchating and extremely clear for every reader.

In the first section there is a reconstruction of our happy and cheerful arrival in the world: it is analyzed the discovery of fire and what it meant to men; wild foods and foraging, hunting: the development of the human brain more or less 70.000 years ago, the discovery of a good place where to stay and live, the birth of farm, arrivals of first animals like pigs, but also the discovery of scythe from Romans, important for storing rich amount of food for animals. New breed of sheep meant great wool. But it was only with the First World War that Britain accepted, without a lot of skepticism chemical fertilizers, necessary because during the war there was lack of food and import was no possible. There was a lot the amount of food imported by the UK: meat, cereals, eggs...

Justus von Liebig a german chemist introduced this new chemical way of cultivating. 

Tractors, chemicals would have been great companions and friends also during the Second World War maybe with the difference that in this case there was a different sensation: that every inch of soil had to be cultivated and had to give the maximum. Interesting the chapter on cereals but also the one on livestock and what became our system, after all we live in a globalized world, where industrial food became predominant, and where nature lost any kind of consideration.

Not everyone anyway wanted to eat in that way and Sir Albert Howard was an example in this sense: if as we said Justus von Liebeg thought that soil was a simplicistic "thing" Howard thought the oppositve. There is a rich complexity and it is better, he thought, to return to nature, composting, for an organic soil and as soon as possible.

The limit of Howard and other inspired Americans was just...looking within agricultural systems but "how farms sat in the wider, and wilder landscape was not their concern" writes Miriam Kate. 

At the end of 1800 appeared clear that nature became fragile, broke, and vulnerable. George Perkin Marsh was the first one in 1860s to write of the impact that he had seen on the natural world asking for measure to protect it.

If America opened a lot of Natural Parks fighting for their conservation, in England people slept a lot and when they created them, it was late and no one thought to preserve wild nature but just a cultural heritage.

No one understood how these animals interacted with the environment, other spieces, and so how to protect the whole system.

The second part is a picture of the current situation and I loved reading on the importance of trees: it starts to be a trend to prefer sometimes to plant trees like walnuts, or nuts or hazels instead of cereals. A tree has a different and more strong impact with soil. 

Trees are solid allied with mychorizzal fungi, redistribuiting in this way mechanisms for water and nutrients, recognizing pathogens and pests gone from years, bulding solid interactions with the deepest soil, capturing wagons of light energy later redistributed into both food production and soil fertility. A tree is life.

The final part is absolutely interesting. For example I didn't know how important was to grow sheep.

It's a story of keeping cleaned the environment also thanks to the many parasites, little animals enjoying to live close, into the sheep, or in their dung and that  will create a circle of animals, little and biggest, the biggest ones are birds that will help to keep clean the environment thanks to what they will find and eat.

It appears clear that it is this circle that musn't never be altered,  because from the littlest creature, to the biggest ones will assure a healthy world.

Great book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

MASEN'KA by Vladimir Nabokov

 Masen'ka

by Vladimir Nabokov published by Adelphi (18 euros) is simply a sublime little jewel of literature! 

This one was his first book, written in 1925, he was 26 years old and and published in Berlin in 1926. 

A fresco of the German society of Berlin sets in 1923, seen, read and looked through the eyes of a Russian emigrated with other Russians "situated" in this little not truly elegant but cheap pension where they lived together.

This one is an intimate story after all of the past, present and future of the protagonist, Ganin, but also of that distant dreaming land that to these protagonists, born in Russia is their native land. 

It is common, I read it in many other books by Makine, Troyat, Dosto, for naming some of them, the vision of Russia passing through imagination and dreams: a sort of escapism for keeping real their cities, their environment, their dreamland. Sometimes these dreams are distorted, imagination can be more powerful than anything else; other ones are vivids. It's the strongest part of the melancholy felt by them. I admit that this thematic is absolutely fascinating and interesting. 

Ganin is young, beauty and he misses his Russia, left more than 5 years before. The Russian pension owned by a nice old lady, has several iconic characters like the old poet Potdjaging who would want to reach Paris. He suffers of  frequent heart attacks: another old man is Alferov, then there are two beautiful dancers, and Ganin sometimes can be seen in company of Ludmilla his current girlfriend: Klara is another girl living there, less beauty than Ludmilla, robust and in love for Ganin, friend with Ludmilla.

The first love of Ganin has been Masen'ka a girl who lived in  Ukraine. 

Oh, what a passionate first love that one! plenty of desire, expectations. The two lived during their first summer together with that joy and gaiety typical of people immensely in love although this feeling became strained and more tiring the following seasons because of logistic reasons. 

Our Ganin was constricted to reach the girlfriend in fact at 50 km of distance, under any possible meteorological conditions using his bycicle.

Ganin felt cold once arrived: and also the vision of Masen'ka wasn't helpful after all. No he didn't want to return anymore in that park, during the night, with a lot of obscure eyes, that who knows? were looking at them. He wanted to run away from that girl forever. Forever. Yes, because the clandestinity of this story started to be heavy for him.

Oh, he hadn't never thought anymore at the destiny spent, lived by Masen'ka, once they broke-up. No, no. Sure, it remained his first and apparently strong first love. 

Currently he is in a kind of relationship with Ludmilla as said before, although starts to be tired of her as well, leaving her without too many compliments.

Then, one day, Alferov, excited, invites Ganin in his room  telling him of the arrival of his wife. His devoted wife, the reason of his existence, tending him a picture of his beauty.

Ganin loses a heart beat: oh my...But that one is the Masen'ka he had loved immensely. Oh my... Now Married with this old, fat, man.

Ganin lives the rest of these four days waiting for the arrival of Masenka that saturday. 

In this sense the book is not different from The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati or Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett; the main thematic of these books is the waiting, although here there is not time lost waiting for who knows who or for an abstraction: plus, decisions are taken. If in that first two books, protagonists are trapped in their own destinies and desires, Drogo waits for his entire existence the arrival of Tartars and the protagonists of the Godot's play for that phantomatic character, remaining paralyzed in their own human conditions, in this case, thank Lord the protagonist is free and can does what he wants.

In Ganin's case the waiting is searched, scrutinized, analyzed thanks to the collection of old memories that like a flood absorbes him completely: oh, his old feelings for her are back prepotently.

He re-discovers their intensity,  he visualizes their love story, he wants to escape away again with her at her arrival. 

Then, that saturday goes at the train station waiting for her...

Oh, the wonderful Masen'ka, the object of his past desire.

Correct. 

Past.

Old feelings... 

 

Why desidering again someone like her?

The end is spectacular! You'll love it, because surprising and although shocking I loved it, because Ganin sets himself free from a past wrong love, ready to start new and exciting adventures somewhere else.

Absolutely wonderful!

Anna Maria Polidori