Hemingway in Italy by Richard Owen

Hemingway in Italy by

Richard Owen ex correspondent of The Times in Rome is the newest gem of Haus Publishing and the branch: The Armchair Traveller.

Red cover, red bookmark, there is a pic of the beloved author. Hemingway looks at the photographer who is taking the pic,ironically, maintaining high interest. He was at that time a mature man in Venice.

Incredibly detailed, this book will reveal a lot of curiosities,anedocts; it has been written with sincerity and with the purpose of reporting an incredible story of an incredible man, focusing in particular the attention in the years spent by the author in Italy. I am sure you'll find it intriguing.

It seems impossible to believe it, but Italy has been for Ernest Hemingway the most important country of all his life.

The formative one, let's say, regarding life, regarding love.

Hemingway lived his strongest emotions in our country, seeing death, pieces of human beings here and there, seeing horror, experiencing, discovering the joy of love and sex, friendship, passions; he was wounded in Italy and found comfort, joy and love, thanks to this scaring experience.

Privately, and professionally our country meant to him everything.

Later, also his re-born as writer thanks to a latest girl.

Yes, of course we musn't forget the relaxing years spent in Paris or the ones in Cuba, but in Italy, Ernest fell in love for the first time with an American nurse in Milan when he was still sick after that he was injured in war.

The girl, Agnes von Kurowsky exchanged with him letters, notes; when Ernest recuperated they spent a lot of time in Milan. They visited iconics and important places.

You musn't never think that Agnes was the only girl with which Ernest had strong flirtations. In totaly there were a bunch of girls seduced by the American writer and someone wants to say that somewhere there is also an italian son of Hemingway. Mario Soldati discovered this news...

With the time and decades all places visited by Hemingway became a sort of sanctuary dedicated to him, and appreciated by tourists as well. It could have been a winery, a hotel, a place where he just passed by rapidly, where he was injured. You find a memory-touch everywhere. No one want to forget that man but everyone, in every part of Italy would want to say that Hemingway passed in their land. Why? Simply because Ernest Hemingway was a man with a strong character, with strong opinions and emotions but was very sociable with everyone. He loved food, he loved eating and drinking.

He was sociable not just with writers, editors, people of his same environment but also with all the rest of people; this treat of his character, this being sociable with everyone like also his brilliant intelligence, created a miracle: he entered in the heart of people for then, staying there forever.

Shocked because abandoned by Agnes, Hemingway returns in America destroyed but also with the idea of finding mrs. Right. Chicago: there he meets his first wife Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. Married, at first Hemingway would have wanted to return to Italy in a wonderful honeymoon but at friend of them, suggested the left bank of Paris, a cheap hotel.

The following ones will be the Paris years of the couple.

Jean Mirò, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach who "nested" under her wings everyone thanks to her bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Life was simple, romantic, less aggressive than the one seen in the past in Italy; sweet. The First World War was over, and now Hemingway collaborated with the Toronto Star. In 1922 he covered an important italian conference in Genoa where he described Benito Mussolini a colleague like him in policy as a "dragon" and fascists "a brood of dragon's teeth."

Fascinated again by Italy he insisted for bringing his wife to Italy.

Later he would have interviewed Mussolini. His opinion in the 1950s: "A coward in the war and as a crooked journalist."

The book analyzes also the catholicism of Hemingway, while slowly he would have divorced a first,  second and third time; the last wife was Mary Welsh.

These ones are the years of Cuba, Spain, but also the moment spent in Venice and the crucial meeting with one of the most powerful muse he experienced: Adriana Ivancich.

As always Hemingway could be spotted at the Harry's Bar, Cipriani.

Mary was not worried by someone like Adriana, after all; other women worried her; she has always been cold and distant regarding these numerous infatuations of her husband, some of them platonics like the one, it seems, with Adriana, because she knew him well.

If Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea is just thanks to his infatuation for Adriana. The writer wrote her: "I love you more than the moon and the sky and for as long as I shall live."

Ivancich hanged up herself decades later the suicide of Hemingway.

Hemingway loved to report in his books and short stories the daily-life seen, experienced, and no one has been excluded so the best thing you can do once you'll finish to read this book is to grab a book written by him for trying to understand realistically who he had met in the reality. No one is more powerful than Hemingway in portraying realities, people.

In this sense Hemingway has been privileged, but now I also understand why once Gertrude Stein suggested him of giving up with writing for magagazines and newsmagazine. Too sincere and direct: simply adorable!

Richard Owen created a real jewel. I read this book in a few hours. It is brilliant; the author has visited all the places where Hemingway stayed in our country, from Rapallo to Taormina, passing from Milan to Cortina, Venice, the places of war: to my pont of view it helped to  create a vivid, passionate, human reconstruction of The Man and The Writer.

I thank Chicago University Press and Haus Publishing for this physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori

La storia dell'acqua by Maja Lunde

La Storia dell'Acqua by Maja Lunde translated superbly well f

rom the Norwegian, original title Bla by Giovanna Paterniti and published by Marsilio is a powerful story about the present and the probable future of water, 2041; migrations in other countries because of this reason.

Signe is the daughter of a journalist and the massive impact and influence of her dad will mean to her activism once adult, once journalist.

Her mother was the owner of a hotel and for this reason, she was also in policy, they approved the construction of a termo-idraulic reality in grade to devastate the eco-system, destroying the beautiful river as they had known it.

Signe's dad will fight against this project; Signe also when she will grow up will continue to fight close to her dad for protecting the environment.

That icebergs are excited to melting down is not a novelty, but ice is also extracted in Norway and sold in other parts of the world at rich people with great damage for the environment, remarks the author.

In love for Magnus, another kid, with which Signe will grow up in company of, they will lose contacts per decades. Magnus will become her opposite, someone who would have accomplished that system she doesn't like at all. Signe, mature now hasnt lost the rebellionn of her youth.

The other story the one of David and Lou. French, their family house burned in a fire: they escaped away finding some peace in a camp, searching for some news of their beloved ones, with the desire of emigrating somewhere else once reunited with the rest of their family: where there is water.

Not the one of sea, constantly more high, but not good for being drunk.

David worked in a factory where sea water was transformed in sweet water.

They search for the rest of their family, meeting new people, but at the same time maybe with different results from the one expected.

What I noticed in this story is this trying to going on, for not become crazy.

When a person has lost everything, it is crucial and important what remains of his/her life.

It is surely a scary, scary world the one portrayed powerfully well by Maja Lunde. A world where there will be a lack of water; a world where people will be constricted to emigrate somewhere else; a world without fruits, without veggies, without the reality as we know it. A desertification of our Mediterranean area.

While I was reading this book I thought at this world in transformation: at this lack of peace: wherever we look there are quakes, floods, devastations in grade to change the course of the existence of entire communities and countries.

And, it is sad to write this, there is no escapism, because wherever a person would want to go for finding peace, would find other stress, and other environmental problems. And this one, to my point of view, is a problem.

My granny loved to saying that when there is peace in the environment there is also peace in the heart of people. Who knows: maybe it's this uncertainty the cause of this strained world.

I loved the introspective thoughts of Signe, her life; I also loved the intesity of her thoughts; what she said once, a kid, changed the existence of her parents.

"That one was the beginning of the end...It's my fault, just my fault my solitude, I have choosen that, I am condamned to be free, I can't absolve myself for the responsability that I have."

Another important, crucial thematic of this book is sex and what happens in the psychology of children still unprepared for seeing scenes like that ones. Sometimes it's a devastation.

The quoted passages of this book, the phrases said by Signe and reported by me are in fact referred at her personal responsibility for what she said when very little. Something that can remains impressed in the mind of others and in the one of the person who reported that. Forever, changing the story of a family.

Let's hope that this  book will be in grade to stimulate a serious reflection regarding the state of the Planet. The previous book by this author tells the story of bees. It's important to protect our eco-system.

Personally I am a peaceful girl.

I don't kill any animal. I have a buddhist philosophy; I love peace, I give peace, I desire peace for everyone but I declared war to hornets and swaps when I understood that they kill bees.

Why keeping horrible insects? Why do we want to live in a horrible world, wanting horrible animals, without to protect peaceful and adorable ones?

Let's reflect.

Highly recommended.

Anna Maria Polidori

The Travelling Companion by Ian Rankin

The Travelling Companion

by Ian Rankin is a surprising book. The first gothic short novel, you read it quickly it's just 89 pages, that I read involving Paris.

Roland is a boy and student from Edinburgh. He decides to spend some time in Paris, working at the bookstore of Shakespeare and Company. He leaves two happy and proud parents and his girlfriend Charlotte. His parisienne existence becomes to be intense, and plenty of wine, drugs, smoke of various genre, shower undone per days, lack of food and nocturnal life. Roland discovers new worlds. Some of them parallel at the one he is living in.

Along his way he meets Mike an old man curious by the story of this boy. Roland is in fact interested in Stevenson and all his works. Alice will become the new girlfriend of Roland...

The Travelling Companion as you will discover, is not a title referred to a trip Roland did, but the first draft of a beloved novel, unpublished but not thrown away...

A strong little book.

I love the cover, precious, read, studied and important.

Recommended.

Anna Maria Polidori 

On Company Time American Modernism in the Big Magazines by Donal Harris

On Company Time On Company Time American Modernism in the Big Magazines by Donal Harris

American Modernism in the Big Magazines by Donal Harris published by Columbia University Press is an intriguing and fascinating book for many reasons.

It speaks of Modernism, a time after all not too distant from us; born at the end of 1890s and following decades, we will follow in this book the evolution (we can still see it) of modern magazines.

Modernism: before the arrival of this movement magazines were mainly dedicated to a niche of people: the elite. At the end of 1890s the idea of a different kind of magazine in grade to incorporate news, gossip, daily life, policy, short tales, in grade to be loved by everyone, middle-class included. A larger audience.

Close to books, in every American family it would have been possible to find a magazine for all the family.

At first, in particular short tales section, was treated by freelancers.

Tales were written by journalists or writers, as proved by Ernest Hemingway and Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

Cather started to write at 14 years and still very young she had seen published something like 520 short tales and pieces!

With the time this role of freelancers changed, because editors understood  that maybe a good story-teller could be put under contract because precious. The modern magazine with all the possible differences is still the product of this American evolution of information apported by Modernism at the end of 1890s.

Which sectors and people were mainly involved?

The book treats Cather and T.S. Eliot as well although I would want to dedicate some words at W.E.B. Du Bois. The contribution given was spectacular with the magazine The Crisis. Du Bois wanted to create good magazines for black people.

The idea was to reach million of houses with this magazine; realistically just a little number of black people was reached, but it was a good idea and a change of perspective.

Black people at that time were pretty stereotyped in books, magazines and it was necessary, first of all, to change the idea that there was of Black Americans. Most of them were people of culture, they read and wrote fluently and they were  happy to see a differentiation of positions thanks to this new black cultural movement innested in the Modernism. Du Bois, being an editor, saw also the negative side of the coin. Once he complained adding that: "Magazines and newspapers are festering abominations...They are a hodge-podge of lie, gossip, twaddle and caricature." Sure, Du Bois tried also to create realities that complained about the behavior of white people. He wrote: "It is not the positive propaganda  of people who believe white blood divine, infallible and holy, to which I object....It is the denial of a similar of a similar right of propaganda to those who believe black blood human, lovable and inspired with new ideals for the world." For Du Bois it was also difficult to take pictures of colored people because they were scared of being stereotyped. Popular, the magazine started to register a negative trend in the 1920s when new magazines like Opportunity appeared to the horizon and when Claude Barnett founded the Associated Negro Press in Chicago in 1919. For sure The Crisis represented an iconic moment for black people. Just a personal reflection; it's a pity that, again, information, and magazines were "divided" in the USA (I would want to try to understand if they are still) as it was for the rest of the existences of black and white people; different churches, different schools, different buses, different everything; the circulation of ideas in this way was not implemented in the entire social tissue of the society but just dedicated at black ones. Maybe no one could act differently considering the social, political condition and discrimination experienced by black people in the US, just this one to me was a big limitation of freedom and a limitation of personal, cultural growth for both the parts, white and black, in the understanding of all the voices of the social tissue of the USA.

Said that, in the book the iconic history of Time, and Time Inc with James Agee and its founders. I read it with pleasure being Time the first magazine I read and the one with which I tried to learn the humble english I try to speak and write.

Ernest Hemingway has been an important and massive esponent of Modernism. Some of his most iconic books, The Old Man and the Sea for example was published in Life with an extraordinary success of audience. 5318,650 copies were sold in just 48 hours receiving an enthusiastic, great success from common readers and academic circles.

If the past decades, critics continued to write that Hemingway hadn't anymore anything to write to his audience. The Old Man and the Sea was in grade to prove the opposite. Imitated, searched, wanted, adored, the Hemingway's writing-style became iconic. Hemingway started to collaborate actively with the Esquire, publishing wagons of pieces about fishing mainly in 1930s.

The final chapter, the future of magazines.

I love the cover. It transmit a lot of serenity, happiness, relaxation.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

The Sunflowers are Mine By Martin Bailey

Can you believe possible such luck? The author of The Sunflowers

are Mine, Martin Bailey tells this wonderful anecdot: he was in Paris, spending the last of the year with a couple of Parisian friends and sharing with them his interest for Van Gogh. The couple, so, encouraged, told him a singular, absolutely stunning adventure.

What a stroke of luck!

As many people do, they bought a second-hand book in a bouquiniste stall located close to the Seine.

As it happens often, people bring home used book and they end in the pile of the "I want to read" books. A pile never-ending, let me add.

One day, after a lot of time from that distant moment in which the couple bought the book, the two noticed that inside there was a letter, from Vincent Van Gogh, to Paul Gaugin!

The letter later was recognized as original and it is now part of the Musee Reattu of Arles enriching a world, the epistolary one of Van Gogh, that it is simply immense; after his death people discovered, being a voracious letter-writer something like 820 letters.

This one follows the traumatic decision of Van Gogh of cutting his own ear, a self-injury punishment he inflicted to himself for who knows which reason and the quick departure from Arles of the same Gaugin after the terrible fact.

Van Gogh started to feel interest for sunflowers starting in 1888, when he left Provence for Arles; he is the artist more associated at this friendly, warm summer-flowers.

He was quick when he painted. He completed a painting of Sunflowers in just a week. He fell fascinated by sunflowers once in Paris in 1886.

That years were the most illuminating, most precious, more perfect ones for this artist.

Van Gogh didn't choose of portraying a sophisticated life; he went in particular for common people, countrysides, the work of peasants; he was interested to capture the colors of life seen and read examining the daily life.

Van Gogh composed various sunflowers paintings and in this book the author will drive us, thanks to a historical and artistic meticulous reconstruction, into the same history of these paintings and their destiny once bought.

Beautiful. If you love art, this book is for you!

Highly recommended.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Being Creative: Be Inspired. Unlock Your Originality 20 thought-provoking lessons by Michael Atavar

Being Creative: Be Inspired.

Unlock Your Originality  20 thought-provoking lessons by Michael Atavar is a book published by While Lion Publishing.

Divided in five sections: Beginning, Using Process, Keeping Going, Being Resourceful, Challeges and Difficulties wants to let you find as adds the author at the beginning of this book your "Original Self." This book was born for helping you to find your own and unique voice. You could be a writer, a painter, a reporter; someone in love for scrapbooking, journaling; in the process of creating something.

You are the creator of your own creativity and your own creations and no one else.

Looking outside is never positive; you must search inside what it is important and what it is inspiring you in this precise instant.

Many important tips from the author; let's remember at first the use of cheap journals, and tools for starting in progression, spending few money, and seeing what it is borning from your creative inner world.

It is also important at first to give voice at what you have in your heart, wildly, giving expression at your internal freedom, writing down with freedom, drawing with passion, looking at the reality with the eyes and sensibility you have in your heart, without any kind of preclusion.

Following 20 practical exercises all visuals, you will see that what you see in your heart will become slowly, reality.

I love this book, although I would have thought at a different color for the cover, including the ones of internal pages, more colored and animated, more relaxing, and friendly.

I thank NetGalley and Quarto Books for this ebook.

Anna Maria Polidori

Le Mystere Lagerfeld by Laurent Allen-Caron

Le Mystere Lagerfeld

by Laurent Allen-Caron published by Fayard is a spectacular biography, if you search for a sincere portrait of the beloved genius and creator, Karl Lgerfeld, disappeared just few weeks ago. More: it is tender, and gives back the proper idea of a man, who appeared too often too closed, reserved, distant.

Where raised his mystery, his fascination?

This one is a great question answered clearly by the author: in his look of course, but also in the historical period he lived him.

He was forged by what he saw and breathed during the Second World War; rebellious years that ones, where, also during the nazism he didn't  cut his hair when he went at school. When his teachers asked him of cutting the hair, he replied: "I see that you are still a nazi, teacher."

He was a reserved boy born in a rich family. His dad spoke nine languages and had a big collection of religious books; her mother was a lady of culture as well. Little Karl was fascinated by her library plenty of philosophic books. Three sisters with which he didn't create strong relationship and a strange, absolutely unpleasant relationship with his mother Elisabeth. If his dad motivated him, his mother put him down all the times.

Fascinated by fashion, he decided to leave his homeland for Paris. He hadn't yet clear what it would have done of his life, but he understood that the end of the war meant also the end of a world and that Germany couldn't be the proper place for building an existence or a creative world where to develop his geniality. Plus, it was a sad world.

His mother Elisabeth told him that he would have been simply a common teacher of design. But Lagerfeld didn't teach at all.

A man plenty of culture, with wagons of books of art, philosophy, photography, read in three languages he said about reading once: 

"It's an illness, an obsessive pathology" but, he added, in this case he didn't want to heal.

He wasn't light in his choices and he was a pretty wise man. He remarked he didn't smoke, he didn't drink, he didn't use drugs;  as sedative when necessary the Mandrax. What touches the most of this man was his being always gentle; he had a great simplicity. His same house, in one of the first chapters of this book, is described by him "as a place for sleeping, working and have some baths." He lived in this time but he wasn't a man of this time. Karl Lagerfeld was a man who would have preferred to live in the XVIII century. He searched for that shades, that atmospheres; he searched for that dimension of peace and ideal way of living most of his life, and in particular where after a drama experienced with his man Jacques, Yves Saint Laurent, the companion of Saint Laurent, and a girl, decided of buying a castle. Distant from the frenesy of Paris.

His fascination didn't just pass through the XVIII century, but followed also all his readings: places visited by Marcel Proust, an example, and the Ritz, the favorite hotel where Coco Chanel loved to stay at long.

After all adds Laurent, Lagerfeld was like a german baron ; he considered the biggest civilization experienced since there the age of Empress Elizabeth, known as Sissi, and Ludwig II, Sissi's cousin.

He searched for the past, for revisiting it in the present, or just for being immersed by that. A reassuring place where no one can be anymore harmed.

It's also a story of a painting: the one portrayed by Adolf von Menzel: The Round Table of King Frederic II at Sans-Souci. He fell in love for that painting and he will always have that one in his mind during his existence.

Once in Paris Lagerfeld became friend with Yves Saint Laurent and Victorie, a model with which he spent most of his time together, in particular during the nights. They mainly went in locals for homosexuals; Saint Laurent is portrayed as a young man in search of boys for having wild sex; Lagerfeld tried to search for his soulmate.

He will find his soulmate in Jacques, a dandy in every sense. He was his opposite and maybe for this reason they stayed together 'till the premature departure of him.

His treats in grade of conquering people were his sensibility and morality.

He loved to spend a lot of time at the Café de Flore with his beloved magazines, newsmagazines and books.

He observed in the while the street, people, smells, perfumes, colors.

Karl Lagerfeld built his iconic creative dimension not just thinking "the present" but also reading this world as conceptually the world he would have wanted to live in; the ideal one.

Karl Lagerfeld has always developed his strong and personal style everyone recognized everywhere. In particular his glasses with black lenses. 

When in 1957 Dior died, it was the turn of Yves Saint Laurent in the prestigious maison. Lagerfeld was still waiting his occasion; he signes with Chloé a long contract of collaboration meeting along his way an American photographer and various models in grade to make the difference, with which he became friends with, and with which he spent a  lot of time at La Coupole and other locals; his house included, where his mother was living after the departure, premature of his beloved father. A mother, Elisabeth still upsetting the son, as you will read, in grade of throwing away passages of the mortality of her son (a journal) just because she was too reserved.

After Chloé, he didn't sign with his name the collections, he preferred in this way, the arrival of Chanel. The owners were searching for someone in grade to keep alive and vital the legacy left by Coco Chanel, so someone in grade of respecting the maison and that creative still missed so badly.

Lagerfeld with the time will create and distribute material to the press in occasion of big events; created his own brand; with a strong diet he lost more than 40 kilos, changed look again, and continued to re-invent his world and the world of people connected with him continuously.

The cover of this book introduces to the readers a mysterious Lagerfeld: someone undefined, hidden by his same name, destiny, fame and myth; he said when he was 6 years old that everyone would have known his name in the entire world; reading this book Lagerfeld will start to become chapter after chapter always more clear and  impressed in your soul. The picture at the end of this book will be vivid, real, not anymore distant but I would want to say: mortal and friendly.

Lagerfeld was a rigid man under many ways. There will be a moment in which he will prefer a profound austerity, living without too many objects around for removing traces of the past spent with his friends; a past he wanted to forget because gone.

I confess I would want to tell you all this book. It's amazing. Laurent has had the priviledge of spending a lot of time with Karl Lagerfeld and has had a great sensitivity: to entering in the soul of Lagerfeld, for let you discover nit the big stylist, not the myth, but,  the man.

This book is fresh, sunny, sincere; the king is naked in these pages, because his story has been told, and because now, more than in the past, we can understand the mystère behind his being a Myth.

Laurent Allen-Caron's writing style is engaging and will capture your interest in every page.

I thank Laurent with all myself. This one is the first book I read in french after decades. Laurent presented me a lot of trust, like also the french publishing house Fayard. 

I thank them a lot.

I hope that I haven't deluded their expectations.

Anna Maria Polidori