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Hermann Hesse — Siddhartha | DeRank™: 0,00

The success of the book came two decades after its publication and was buoyed by the Nobel Prize awarded to Hesse in 1946. It was largely the result of young people who made the figure of Siddhartha a compendium of adolescent restlessness, the anxiety of self-discovery, and the pride of the individual in the face of the world and history, united in an uncompromising rejection.
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Posthumously published in 1960, Gurdjieff not only introduces us to his teachings, but also lifts the veil on his life before arriving in France. For him, however, as for the ancient sages, veiling and unveiling are the same gesture, so everything will be found in these memories except for a cut of documentary accuracy: these memories, astonishing like a lavish adventure novel, animated in every line by a skillful buffoonery and a spiky brusqueness, narrated in the same manner he employed in life, with an Eastern simplicity that bewildered for its appearance of naivety, are for Gurdjieff primarily a tool to initiate the reader into his doctrines, to subject him to a series of shocks and paradoxes that could guide him towards awakening.
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- It is a satirical play, considered one of the masterpieces of the Russian writer. The characters are corrupt, opportunists, businessmen, exploiters that Gogol' sculpts with ironic involvement as exaggerated, grotesque, duplicitous, ready for anything.
- We are in a small town lost in the vast expanse of Russia, suddenly awakened from its everyday routine of normal and dishonest prevarication by the news of the arrival, from St. Petersburg, of a general inspector, an auditor, sent there to inspect the local notables. Everyone is in turmoil and afraid. Imagine when they believe that the general inspector, in disguise, has already arrived in town. In reality, it is a broke young man who immediately understands the benefits he can gain from the situation. (from wiki) more
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Nikolaj Gogol’ — Le anime morte | DeRank™: 0,00

- It was originally published under the title The Adventures of Chichikov, with the subtitle Poem imposed by the Tsarist censors. It comically recounts the misadventures of a small-time con artist from the provinces of the Russian Empire in the 1820s; the novel is also a fervent denunciation of human mediocrity.
- The initial idea for the book was suggested to Gogol' by Pushkin and is based on a news item.
- This novel is a watershed in Russian literature, which until that moment seemed oblivious to certain realities...
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Nikolaj Gogol’ — Taras Bul'ba | DeRank™: 0,00

In this work, the themes of duma, the Ukrainian folk song, the eternal struggle between Catholics and Orthodox, the autonomy of the Cossacks, and the code of honor and dedication that binds the inhabitants to one another emerge. (from wiki) more
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A barber wakes up early, gets out of bed, breaks the freshly baked bread, and sees inside "something whitish": a nose.
Thus begins one of the most famous tales in all of literature, alongside in this collection four other stories, no less significant and renowned: The Portrait, where a painting carries with it, over the years, all the evil that was in the soul of the character represented; The Perspective, a tale of encounters and fatal or fleeting passions against the ever-changing, sometimes unsettling backdrop of Nevsky Prospekt; The Diary of a Madman, the diary of a lonely man spiraling into madness; The Cloak, a drama of a poor clerk who suffers the theft of his new coat, having accustomed an already miserable life to further, pathetic restrictions. (from Adelphi) more
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The novel tells the story of a married couple who, living with his friend and her niece, face the disintegration of their relationship and the formation of two new couples, which in a very short time will split up due to a series of adverse events, leading to a tragic conclusion. (from wiki) more
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Commissioner "Don Ciccio" Ingravallo, witty and proud from Molise, is tasked with investigating a jewelry theft from an elderly woman of Venetian origins, widow Menegazzi. Subsequently, the wife of a rather wealthy man, Mrs. Liliana Balducci, is murdered in the same building where the robbery took place. The scene of the theft and the murder is a gloomy palace on Via Merulana 219, known as the "Palazzo degli Ori", located not far from the Colosseum. Around it is a crowd of extras: the frail and wilted Countess Menegazzi, victim of the theft, the commendator Angeloni "prosciuttofilo", the brigadiers from the police station, the Carabinieri of Marino searching for clues in the countryside, and the blurred figures of the maids and nieces. The mystery ultimately leads to the discovery of a suspect: the last maid of Liliana, but without any confirmation of this. (cit. wiki) more
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- The Italian history is retraced in 150 dates to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy. The dates chosen by the two writers are not only the historical ones found in books but also dates of events with a personal tone: stories of the people that make up Italy (da recensionelibro.it).
- It does not seem appropriate to suggest to our readers that they should not expect the grand frescoes of Thucydides or Tacitus, of Machiavelli or Gibbon. Everyone knows we are not historians, and we wouldn't have the craft or genius to aspire to such heights. But from those masters, we have indeed learned a lesson: objective history, impartial history, definitively truthful history does not exist; it can only be an aspiration, a goal glimpsed but unreachable. Every page of this book is arbitrary and contestable. (CF & MG) more
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Sigmund Freud — Totem e tabù | DeRank™: 0,00

"Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Life of Savages and Neurotics" is a book published in 1913. It is a collection of four essays originally published in the journal Imago (1912-13) utilizing the application of psychoanalysis in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion.
The four essays are titled:
- The Horror of Incest
- Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence
- Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thoughts
- The Return of Totemism in Children
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- The work analyzes and describes missed acts and the so-called symptomatic and random actions, which differ from missed acts due to the absence of the pretext constituted by a conscious intention, comparing them with the symptoms and typical manifestations of subjects affected by neurosis.
- Freud dedicates the last chapter of the work to the belief in chance and superstition, stating that at their core lies a mechanism of projection directed towards a specific event in the external world. The author expresses an analogy between superstitious behavior and paranoid behavior. (from wiki) more
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The entire opening of "Traumdeutung," the title by which the work is often cited, aims to document how the desire to grasp the mysterious meaning of dreams is not a novelty for which psychoanalysis can take credit, but rather that this need is inherent to the species once it reaches a certain level of civilization. In fact, the inclination to elucidate the obscure meaning of dreams has roots in the most distant antiquity (beginning with the activities of dream interpreters in the Temples of Asclepius in archaic Greece, and of oniromancers throughout the ancient Near East, as also reported in the Bible - cf. the episode of Joseph and the "Dream of Pharaoh"; and from the work of the 2nd century A.D. by Artemidorus of Daldis "Interpretation of Dreams"). -cit. Wikipedia- more
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In this book, as his biographer Andrew Le Vot writes, Fitzgerald "reflects, better than in all his autobiographical writings, the heart of the problems that he and his generation had to face... In Gatsby, permeated as it is with a sense of sin and fall, Fitzgerald takes upon himself all the weakness and depravity of human nature." more
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The book collects a series of episodes narrated by the scientist himself, concerning the entirety of his life, starting from when, as a boy, he gained a reputation as a "magical" radio repairman, moving on to his university years at MIT, where a fervent curiosity for all fields of knowledge and his peculiar penchant for humor found numerous opportunities for fulfillment. (from wiki) more
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Two stories narrated in alternating chapters that never intersect: that of the two lovers who flee from society to enclose themselves in their exclusive relationship and who, in the attempt to terminate a pregnancy, end up self-destructing; and that of the inmate who, during the great flood of the Mississippi, is sent in search of a pregnant woman clinging to a partially submerged tree, finds her, delivers the baby, brings them both to safety, and then, instead of fleeing, returns to the monastic society of the penitentiary. (cit. Adelphi) more
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The Pledge is a detective novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, published in 1958, which was initially written by the Swiss author as a screenplay for the film Il mostro di Mägendorf by Ladislao Vajda. more
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The title represents the underlying message of the story: as stated in the first chapter of the introduction, even a trivial car breakdown illustrates how a small incident can change the course of a life. In the modern world, the author argues in this prologue, the actions of a single individual can trigger chain reactions even on a universal scale, and consequently, chance has a profound influence on the events of every single man's life, in his private world. (from wiki) more
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The story is set in Italy, France, and the islands of the Mediterranean Sea, during the years between 1815 and 1838 (from the end of the reign of Napoleon I to the reign of Louis-Philippe). The main themes addressed include justice, revenge, forgiveness, and mercy. (cit. wiki) more
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- AD displays no small qualities of a great writer... First and foremost, a sovereign shamelessness; a blend of complicity and outrage towards the reader; no sentimentality... the taste for play, for misrepresentation; honest moral deficiency; a noble guiltery, which dictates the exact move to unleash the willing credulity of the public. (G. Manganelli)
- For my part, I do not feel the blush that others would feel flooding their faces when I say that I enjoy and consider the Trois mousquetaires by Alexandre Dumas père to be conducted with great liveliness and flair. Many still read and enjoy them without any offense to poetry, but hide their pleasure within like one would for illicit delights, and it is good to encourage them to lay aside their false shame and their accompanying embarrassment (Benedetto Croce) more
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Charles Dickens — Canto di Natale | DeRank™: 0,00

- It is the most important of the Christmas Books series.
- It combines the taste for gothic storytelling with a commitment to the fight against poverty and child exploitation, tackling illiteracy: issues seemingly exacerbated by the Poor Law, a convenient but ineffective and harmful stopgap devised by the upper classes.
- I wonder if perhaps you have read Dickens' Christmas Books - Robert Louis Stevenson asked a friend [...] - I have read two of them, and I cried like a child, making an impossible effort to stop. As God is my witness, they are so beautiful, and I feel so good after reading them. I want to go out and do good for someone [...] Oh, how wonderful it is that a man was able to write books like these, filling people's hearts with compassion! (cit. wiki) more
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