Stanlio
"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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Stanlio
Stanlio

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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Stanlio
Stanlio

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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Stanlio
Stanlio

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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Stanlio
Stanlio

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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Stanlio
Stanlio

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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Stanlio
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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Stanlio
When Maqroll begins his tale, he is already at the end of the journey. The ship taking him to Panama is seized by the creditor banks, and he, forced to abandon the rites and ceremonies of the sea, becomes a wreck on dry land, unable to navigate the perils of a bad freedom. (cit. Einaudi) more
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Stanlio
The jungle, the boat, the river, the mysterious sawmills that, like an improbable promise of wealth, await at the end of this journey, are opaque presences upon which something is evoked, between delirium and memory, something that seems to have been lost today: adventure, the different shades of affection, the body of the beloved woman. (from Einaudi) more
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Stanlio
In the various episodes of this novel, he can finally unleash his passions and whims: imagination, resourcefulness, courage, a taste for provocation, cunning, sensuality... (quoted Einaudi) more
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Stanlio
"Of all the literary risks," Gabriel García Márquez said one night to his friend Mutis, "the only one that really seems unachievable to me is writing a gothic story set in the Caribbean." In response, Mutis bet the opposite. (from Adelphi) more
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Stanlio
They are called Tramp Steamers certain cargo ships "of small tonnage, not belonging to the large shipping companies, which travel from port to port looking for occasional cargoes to transport wherever they may be." One of these Tramp Steamers, a sort of ghost ship, the very image of solitary adventure, will fascinate us as we follow it through the pages of this novel, from the icy air of the Baltic where it first appears to us, like an hallucination, to the lost ports of South America. (from Adelphi) more
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Stanlio
We see evoked Roth's childhood and adolescence, his loves and female acquaintances, the discussions in the café with Stefan Zweig, Kesten, Musil, the apprenticeship as an alcoholic, the idiosyncrasy towards psychiatrists and psychologists, the dissolute and destructive years in Paris, the irruption of delirium and mental disconnections.
(cit. Adelphi) more
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Stanlio
Stanlio

Herman Melville — Moby Dick | DeRank™: 0,00

Moby Dick is not just the marvelous novel that everyone knows: it is a total book, where the Whale ("the Whale") stands for the whole ("the Whole"). (quoted from Adelphi) more
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Stanlio
Stanlio

Patrick McGrath — Follia | DeRank™: 0,00

“The love stories characterized by sexual obsession have been my professional interest for many years.”
England, 1959.
From within a gloomy Victorian criminal asylum, a psychiatrist begins to present, with apparent detachment, the most disturbing clinical case he has encountered in his career – the deadly passion between Stella Raphael, the wife of another psychiatrist at the hospital, and Edgar Stark, an artist imprisoned for a particularly heinous uxoricide. (from Adelphi) more
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Stanlio
London, 1940. As Spitfires and Göring's Messerschmitts cross the sky, Dr. Haggard receives a visit from James Vaughan, a young aviator who introduces himself with a lethal sentence: "I think you knew my mother."
Abruptly torn from his vials of morphine and the fetishistic cult of a woman lost forever, Haggard embarks on a long, tormenting confession, recounting for the first time the events that three years earlier destroyed his life.
(from Adelphi) more
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Stanlio
Stanlio

Patrick McGrath — Grottesco | DeRank™: 0,00

Sir Hugo Coal had never been a philanthropist. Even when he wasn't vegetating in a wheelchair, he had a tendency to view human beings – their actions, their motives – as less comprehensible and less elegant than the enormous dinosaur skeleton he was patiently reconstructing. more
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Stanlio
Stanlio

Frank McCourt — Le ceneri di Angela | DeRank™: 0,00

- The story of "an unhappy Irish childhood," which "is worse than any unhappy childhood, and an unhappy Irish Catholic childhood is even worse."
- creates with his words, with his rhythm, a marvel of contagious comedy and vitality, where all the atrocities, even without losing any of their often grim harshness, turn into episodes and apparitions of a wind-swept journey toward a promised land... (from Adelphi) more
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Stanlio
From the railing of a ship, America had seemed to young McCourt the very embodiment of redemption from that "unhappy, Irish, and Catholic childhood" which had been portrayed in Angela's Ashes as the most atrocious, yet also the most comical, of possible worlds.
Here the scene, different and more tumultuous, is instead that of New York in the post-war years.
A working-class New York, where among red brick houses, pubs of Irish emigrants, and loading docks cluttered with goods, with the distant and unreachable backdrop of Manhattan, Frankie finds himself navigating, step by step, a grueling apprenticeship. (from Adelphi) more
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Stanlio
Looking back, move by move, we will find two masters of the game, opposite in every way, fueled by an inexhaustible hatred, traversing the years and political cataclysms, primarily focused on sharpening their weapons to overpower each other. That one of them is Jewish and the other was a Nazi officer is just one of the various corollaries of the theorem. (from Adelphi) more
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