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Joseph Roth — Ebrei erranti | DeRank™: 0,00

These pages repopulate before our eyes, with the magic of words, that part of Europe where almost no Jews remain today and anti-Semitism continues to reign undisturbed. (cit. Adelphi) more
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Joseph Roth — Zipper e suo padre | DeRank™: 0,00

At first, young Zipper is just a freckled classmate who always mentions his father as the source of all authority; and old Zipper is a man bent by the fatigue of the immense stride he has taken: born a proletarian, he has become petty-bourgeois, and now he defends his conquest with his nails, wandering through his life like the mismatched sixteenths of a popular encyclopedia. (quoted from Adelphi) more
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Joseph Roth — La Marcia di Radetzky | DeRank™: 0,00

This book, from the first line to the last, sweeps us away like a wave, and we finish reading it abandoned to a final ebb.
Never before have the imperial totality unfolded so faithfully on these pages, like a mantle that equally covers the marshy regions of the eastern frontier, the boulevards of the Ring where the Lipizzan horses parade, amidst black and golden helmets, under "the blue porcelain eye of the Emperor," and the garrison towns, with their clubs, barracks, brothels. (cit. Adelphi) more
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Joseph Roth — Le città bianche | DeRank™: 0,00

For three months, between September and November 1925, Roth wandered through the South of France. That journey was accompanied, for him, by a sense of liberation: at thirty, he discovered the “white cities” of Provence, which he had dreamed of during a gray childhood. At the same time, he felt every oppressive Germanness drifting away. He experienced a new way of breathing: “I have gained the freedom to stroll, among ladies and gentlemen, among street singers and beggars, with my hands in the pockets of my trousers...” (from Adelphi) more
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Joseph Roth — La ribellione | DeRank™: 0,00

Andreas Pum, the protagonist, is a war invalid who still believes in the order of the world and of men and dreams of owning a stamp shop. But fate, behind which masks the inescapable oppression exerted by society, gradually transforms him into a scapegoat, into a helpless Job, forced to acknowledge the omnipresence of evil. (from Adelphi) more
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Joseph Roth — Il peso falso | DeRank™: 0,00

... his writings, while preserving the realistic framework, seem to naturally allude, transparently, to a further meaning... (from Adelphi) more
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Joseph Roth — Destra e sinistra | DeRank™: 0,00

... this novel is a perfect example of hot narration, where those extreme characters—graspers, terrorists, crisis-ridden bourgeois, conspirators, drifters, failures—become narrative ghosts that flourished in pre-Nazi Germany... (cit. Adelphi) more
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Joseph Roth — I cento giorni | DeRank™: 0,00

With the same immediacy, in the same direct manner in which he narrated the events of obscure Jews from Eastern Europe or Habsburg officials, Roth tells in this book (first published in 1935) a story of Napoleon – specifically the most dramatic phase of his epic, which spans from the escape from Elba to the defeat at Waterloo and the boarding for Saint Helena.
These are the "hundred days" that made the world dream, for one last time, of new perspectives. (quote. Adelphi) more
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Barney talks to us about his three wives – an existentialist poet, a billionaire with robust appetites and an unstoppable chatter, and Miriam, the beloved Miriam, who has just left him.
He shares his passions, like commenting on the newspapers or listening to Miriam on the radio at night.
He describes his entertainments, such as imagining Terry McIver struggling in a shark-infested sea, or throwing galoshes at the forward of his hockey team who has just missed a goal. (from Adelphi) more
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Mordecai Richler — Il mio biliardo | DeRank™: 0,00

What do Paul Newman, the Queen Mother of England, and the sleepless people willing to watch on television, until dawn, the silent evolutions of colored balls on a full-screen green table have in common?
Simple: a passion, the same one that Mordecai Richler has always had and that he has decided to narrate in this book, his last.
Convinced that billiards is a game too serious to be left to sports journalists... (from Adelphi) more
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As a child, sixty years before becoming Barney Panofsky, Mordecai Richler was absolutely forbidden from turning the lights on or off, answering the phone, or listening to the radio on Saturdays. In the days leading up to Yom Kippur, he was forced to swing a chicken over his head to transfer the sins of the past year onto the terrified animal. At thirteen, having become an apikoros, a heretic, he converted to the secular, socialist, and Zionist faith of Habonim, the Builders, eager to land in Palestine as soon as possible and establish a Jewish state. In the end, Richler would not emigrate to the Promised Land. He would visit it twice, in 1962 and 1992... (from Adelphi) more
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The story indeed spans two centuries, two shores of the Atlantic, and five generations of a Jewish dynasty in which everything is immense: vitality, wealth, luxury, an inclination toward pleasure in every form. But no great family is without blemish, and the blemish of the Gursky family is named Solomon... (from Adelphi) more
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"The room was full of the dead. The moon illuminated their yellow and purplish faces through the windows, their cavernous mouths, their dark and half-closed eyes, their protruding noses... the dead women in caps and shrouds, the dead men, if officials, in uniform... the merchants in their festive attire": the coffin maker has invited his clients to dinner and Pushkin can clamp down on the unruly matter of existence, with his geometric and transparent prose, dry and procedural, yet also biblical and concrete, rendering its mystery and agitation. (from Adelphi) more
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"Have you ever seen a bicycle coffin?"
Reader, this is the only novel in the world where such a question can sound even too obvious.
Just as it will seem obvious that a police sergeant considers humans to be intertwined with bicycles – a bit like, according to the theory of another policeman, the entire universe can be reduced to a fundamental substance called omnium. (from Adelphi) more
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Vladimir Nabokov — Il dono | DeRank™: 0,00

... it is the novel of Russian literature, a narrative score where, through allusions, distortions, hybridizations, every sort of verse, stylistic features, echoes of those authors who contributed to compose the varied substance of Nabokov's style resound; and it is also the story of a search for a father... (cit. Adelphi) more
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Vladimir Nabokov — Lolita | DeRank™: 0,00

...such is the habit of the foolish rule that what makes noise is inevitably devoid of lasting literary quality, so great was the ignorance of Nabokov's work at the time that only a few understood what is today an obvious truth before everyone's eyes: Lolita is not only a wonderful novel, but one of the great texts of passion that traverse our history... (cit. Adelphi) more
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Vladimir Nabokov — Intransigenze | DeRank™: 0,00

Nabokov abhorred interviews. Yet, especially when he became a celebrity, he had to endure a few. But the work of those unfortunate journalists turned into a mere pretext for a spectacular reinvention, with which he aimed above all to erase "any trace of spontaneity, any semblance of actual conversation." (from Adelphi) more
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Vladimir Nabokov — Re, donna, fante | DeRank™: 0,00

Nabokov dissects and summarizes three figures and three levels of consciousness, three stages of self-perception and perception of others: from deep and numbing discomfort to petty vulgarity with its primitive lexicon, up to a more nuanced intertwining of expectations and disappointments. (from Adelphi) more
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Vladimir Nabokov — Pnin | DeRank™: 0,00

In the nearly empty carriage of a train speeding through the countryside sits a man with a large bald head, strong in torso but with a pair of thin little legs on which sag the loose socks of scarlet wool with lilac diamonds. The solitary passenger is none other than Professor Timofej Pavlovic Pnin, an exile in the United States and the holder of a Russian language course at Waindell University, on his way to give a lecture at the women's club in another locality of the vast American province. (from Adelphi) more
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The Defense of Lužin, Nabokov's first masterpiece, is the story of an irreconcilable conflict between genius and normality, will and predestination, reasonable daily existence and the laws of Fate, jealous of the prerogatives that belong to it. And it is also – as the title suggests, alluding to an imaginary move invented by the protagonist – a story about chess. (from Adelphi) more
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