Stanlio
- The story unfolds over a span of about three hours in the year 1962. Hans Schnier is a young clown living in Bonn, the city where the action described in the novel takes place. After yet another unsuccessful performance, back in his lodgings, Hans indulges in a long self-pitying monologue about himself and what torments him most: the abandonment by the woman he lived with, Maria.
- Post-Nazi Germany faced a long period of economic and social misery before initiating the reconstruction process. - The clown's lengthy lament provides the author with an opportunity to describe the conventions of that conservative bourgeoisie which was initially supportive of, or at least not hostile to, Nazism and, once Germany returned to democracy, was ready to reintroduce its rituals and prejudices within the new social framework.
(cit. Einaudi) more
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A trial against Johann and Georg Gruhl is entrusted to Magistrate Stollfuss; it is his last case. They are accused of setting fire to an army truck at the end of a service trip. Numerous witnesses were present at the event because the two burned the vehicle in a field after dousing it in gasoline, and they did so openly: in fact, witnesses report that they sang to the rhythm of the crackling gasoline drums... Georg Gruhl's service trip involved driving aimlessly around in a truck... to the embarrassment of the prosecution and the judge, the Gruhls will be sentenced to damages and to six weeks in prison, which they have already served during pre-trial detention, during which young Gruhl also managed to impregnate the young waitress who brought him meals in his cell... (cit. Einaudi) more
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- The novel reflects the issues faced by many couples in the post-war period.
- The title comes from the fact that in the fourth chapter, Käte listens to a song on the radio And he never said a mumbling word.
- Böll somewhat compares Käte to Jesus Christ: just as Christ endured many humiliations without saying a word, she too endures everything without rebelling.
(quoted from Einaudi) more
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- ... tells the story of Leni Gruyten, a forty-eight-year-old German woman who "no longer understands the world and doubts she ever did." Leni lives on the fringes of post-war Germany's consumerist society, opposing the values of capitalism with her own world made of minimal but deeply felt and authentic values... (from wiki)
- Heinrich Böll takes on the role of a chronicler, following in the footsteps of all those who knew her: from the poet brother who destroys himself to escape the abjection of Nazism to Sister Rahel, from the businessman Polzer to the prostitute Margret.
Through photos, letters, personal objects... (cit. Einaudi) more
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- The facts, from which we might do well to begin, are brutal: on Wednesday, February 20, 1974, the eve of the Women's Carnival, a twenty-seven-year-old woman leaves her city home around 6:45 PM to attend a private dance party. (cit. Einaudi)
- In a preface to the story, Böll states: "The characters and the action of this story are completely fictional. In the event that certain journalistic practices are found to resemble those of the Bild-Zeitung, these similarities are neither intended nor coincidental, but rather inevitable." The author, who had firsthand experience of how media power can overlap with private life, distorting and deforming it... (cit. wiki) more
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Stanlio
Set during World War II, it follows Andreas, a young German soldier traveling on a military train to reach Przemysl and fight on the Eastern front. During the journey, Andreas befriends a homosexual comrade and a betrayed husband. Upon arrival, the soldiers decide to spend the night, before heading to the front, in a brothel. There, Andreas meets Olina, a Polish prostitute...
(cit. Einaudi) more
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"The greatness and significance of Sand Creature lie precisely in the way the descriptions of Maghreb civilization become a mystery, a dreamlike interplay of perspectives, a merging of successive truths..." (Pier Vittorio Tondelli) more
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Stanlio

Tahar Ben Jelloun — L'hammam | DeRank™: 0,00

"Inside me, there’s something dead that I can’t expel."
- The protagonist of this story is a Moroccan pianist famous in his homeland and across Europe...
- He is convinced he has an illness: he believes he smells unbearably.
- Where affection and science cannot reach, perhaps the call of childhood, of forgotten habits…
- Here he reestablishes contact with a masseur-philosopher, the old Bilal, who knows good and evil.
- … further rites of passage will be necessary and the encounter with Haj Benbrahim, a cultured and religious man whose wisdom is more powerful than sorcery. What occurs between the two is a confrontation between men, between cultures, between lifestyles, but also between books used as talismans. (source: wiki) more
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Confined to Tangier, "the city of the Strait where the wind, idleness, and ingratitude reign," a family man, a master of ineptitude in an endless struggle with himself and others, narrates his life while chasing a mirage, and his gaze is softened by dreams...
(quoted Einaudi) more
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A chair at the Faculty of Arts, a wife who has become a stranger, two children studying abroad, and fifty years weighed down by the invisible burden of nothingness. Against the backdrop of a Moroccan society "lacking daring and madness," the profile of a small, prudent, and judicious bourgeois... Departing for Naples... the writer loses himself in the undergrounds of the Albergo dei Poveri, the monumental hospice built by Charles III of Bourbon to hide the annoying spectacle of human misery, and meets the Old Woman, a strange and fascinating character, an immense body, corrupted by time and the harsh trials of life. She is the memory of Naples, the keeper of all stories of passion without return. And it is she, the queen of that court of miracles, who moves within the vast Asylum of Human Waste... (cit. Einaudi) more
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Stanlio

Samuel Beckett — Murphy | DeRank™: 0,00

- The plot revolves around the eponymous “depressed solipsist” Murphy who, urged by his lover Celia Kelly to find a job, starts working as a nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat and discovers that the madness of the patients is an alluring alternative to conscious existence.
- Murphy is an example of Beckett's great interest in the artistic and metaphorical possibilities of chess.
- Among the thinkers who influence Murphy's mind-body debate are Spinoza, Descartes... (cit. wiki) more
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Stanlio

Samuel Beckett — Molloy | DeRank™: 0,00

- Molloy is an old man without both legs. He is in the house of his deceased mother and recounts his pointless odyssey to reach her. He digresses, tells blatant lies. He is devoid of memory, but that doesn’t matter: what counts is not to stop telling the story because in storytelling lies the only chance of being alive.
- It is a fact that Molloy’s tale is sprinkled with humorous moments that arise precisely from the ridicule of important philosophical and ideological principles in our culture; but also from the mockery of basic topos of Western literature, such as that of romantic love. (From the afterword by Paolo Bertinetti) more
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Stanlio

Samuel Beckett — Watt | DeRank™: 0,00

Written during the war, in a small village in the Alps where Beckett had taken refuge to escape the Gestapo, Watt is noted for treating the unknowable home of Mr. Knott (and the mutable, silent, intangible Mr. Knott) like a logical positivist who, with his trusty grids of thought, bumps his nose against the mutability of being. But his paradoxical logocentric will, in the general absence of motivations for every occurrence, for every apparent choice, for every moment of life, will soon transform into an authentic "cognizione del dolore". (cit. Einaudi) more
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- Krapp is an "old wreck" sitting at a table, dominated by a tape recorder and the boxes containing the reels he has recorded over the years.
- Krapp is a writer, but he does not entrust his reflections and memories to the page; instead, he delivers them to the new machine. This emblematic character of the mass-media era no longer needs to seek lost time. Everything has been recorded and cataloged.
(From the Introductory Note by Paolo Bertinetti) more
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Endgame is Beckett's major theatrical work, the most important text of his dramatic output and one of the most significant in all of his oeuvre.
(From the Introductory Note by Paolo Bertinetti) more
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Stanlio

Samuel Beckett — Aspettando Godot | DeRank™: 0,00

One gets the impression that Beckett, in his own home, is laughing malevolently behind our backs, while with a simple television interview he could clarify everything.
We would immediately say that, in our opinion, demanding this "open sesame" at all costs makes no sense. Establishing whether Godot is God, Happiness, or something else is of little importance; seeing if Vladimir and Estragon represent the petty bourgeoisie who wash their hands of it all, while Pozzo, the capitalist, brutally exploits Lucky, the proletariat, is perfectly legitimate, but the Christian "key" is equally legitimate, whereby everything, from the tree present on stage, which should represent the Cross, to Godot's white beard, can be explained with the Gospel in hand... (Carlo Fruttero) more
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Stanlio

Alessandro Baricco — Seta | DeRank™: 0,00

Hervé Joncour, a French silk merchant, is forced to travel to Japan to buy silkworm eggs due to an epidemic that has affected them in all European and African countries. He is received at the royal palace of Hara Kei, an enigmatic man who is always accompanied by a young girl.
(cit. wiki) more
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Stanlio

Alessandro Baricco — Oceano mare | DeRank™: 0,00

The main setting of the story is the Almayer Inn, which Baricco borrows from the writer Joseph Conrad, and where all the characters converge, each with their own past and fears. The theme of the sea, with its magical, healing, but also terrible value, is analyzed from multiple facets through the stories of the individual characters: from the young Elisewin, suffering from hypersensitivity and afraid of everything and everyone, to Professor Bartleboom and his studies on limits... (cit. wiki) more
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And we, who think of rising happiness,
would feel the emotion,
which almost astonishes us,
when a happy thing falls.
And we, who think of elevated happiness,
would feel the commotion,
that almost unsettles us,
when a happy thing falls.
Rainer Maria Rilke more
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