My Five Favorite Books

I have been asked what books have changed my life. A challenging word.

I have been reading since I was a child, and my first story, as my mother told me, was “The Jungle Book”. I've always liked it and books have been my best friends.

I don't think there have been books that have changed my life, if not one, but it's a philosophical work and not a novel. Of course, there are books that I loved very much, and it's almost impossible to draw up a ranking, because what we like at an age doesn't necessarily mean we like it the same way in the future.

Then there are books that are classics, which everyone should have or read once in a lifetime; especially if you love to write, because as you cannot photograph well if you do not look at the photographs of the Masters, so you cannot write if you have not read at least once Dostoevsky, Joyce, Hesse, Kundera, Hemingway, Kafka, and in Italy Calvino, Pirandello, Buzzati, and so on.

So, I decided to tell you which books I love the most, as far as novels, poems and essays are concerned.

At first I thought five, but then I thought it better to focus on the first three, plus two others briefly mentioned. These rankings could be the top ten, or twenty, or fifty, and never end. So, it's better to give a cut and choose three (plus two).

Also, I wouldn't even want to talk about the storylines, because I think that telling books is like films, it ruins something.

 

1) The first book at the top of my personal ranking, the one I would take with me to the famous desert island is “Blindness” by the Portuguese writer, Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1998, José Saramago.

At the beginning I didn't know who he was, as always in the bookstore we browse random books thanks to the titles, the cover notes, and this title was inviting for a photographer: “Blindness”. I read it in one breath. One, two, three times. Tremendous.

And as happens when you love certain books you start giving them to the people you love well, and I have given this book as a gift many times. Now it's one of the best-selling books, together with Camus' “The Plague”, because it deals with a theme that involves us all. A sudden contagion in an unspecified city.

A feature that makes me love books is their opening words, how they start: they must capture from the first word. There are novels famous for their incipits, which are among the most difficult things when writing a story. Saramago does not use quotes in speeches, does not use people's names, everything flows like incandescent magma.

At a traffic light all cars leave at the green, except one, because the driver has suddenly gone blind, he sees everything white: it's the beginning of a contagion that will blind the whole population of the city, except for a woman – the wife of a doctor – that she will be forced to see at what very low and amoral levels men are reduced to in extreme conditions, worse than beasts. Her is a condemnation rather than a privilege.

Interned in a former mental hospital, the evils blind men control and abuse the weakest blind in every way, including rapes described in a terrible way that will leave you nightmares for nights and nights.

It will be women who lead the rebellion and try to reverse the law of the fittest in a fight for survival.

Saramago, during the speech to the awarding of the Nobel Prize, said that contemporary society is blind because it has lost the sense of solidarity between people. Of compassion.

"The world is full of living blind people."

Fortunately, recent Covid-related events have allowed us to see another human, with hundreds of doctors and nurses sacrificing their lives to save that of strangers. One of the rare cases where reality is better than imagination.

But this book remains a masterpiece and a terrifying warning. To never lose that solidarity and compassion that allows us to “see” the other. The worst blindness is that of the heart.

"It is this paste that we are made of, half of indifference and half of malice."

"The only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see."

 

2) “Norwegian Wood” (“Tokyo Blues” in the Italian version) is – I think – the book that I gave as a gift the most, together with “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse.

Written by Haruki Murakami in 1987, between Greece and Rome, it is taken from the story “The firefly” (Hotaru), and is the first novel that distances itself from Murakami’s previous novels and stories, with surreal and fantastic content.

“Norwegian Wood” is a long flashback of the protagonist Toru, who remembers his university years, during the student protests of the 60s, divided between the love for two girls: the fragile Naoko and the brisk Midori. It's a long account of adolescence, loneliness, the inner struggle between being what society wants and being oneself. Toru, like a young Japanese Holden (and Salinger is one of the favorite authors and translated by Murakami, together with Carver) is looking for the most congenial path to his life.

With a flowing and sweet writing, rich in details, he sinks his nails into the heart and affective and sexual torments of an adolescent, in which each of us can recognize ourselves.

Growing up means giving up our dreams, ideals. Each protagonist is wrapped in a spiral of death and suffering; Murakami himself, in the Afterword, dedicates the novel to his deceased friends.

It's a book that tells us how even those who seem strong hide their insecurities and how, sometimes, it's difficult to get out of the shifting sands that drag us down. It's a book that speaks of love, but without its saving capacity.

Murakami is very good at describing moods, inner details, and has a great sense of rhythm that derives from his passion for music, which is present in every novel, and in this the soundtrack is omnipresent; the same title is a Beatles song.

“Norwegian Wood” is a novel to read many times. Years later. And, like “Blindness”, it is a warning not to give up as Toru does, unable, after all, to make the most important decision in his life.

The price is loneliness.

“I don't know what to do anymore and I'm terribly confused. I absolutely don't want to try to justify myself, but I have always tried to live with sincerity, without lying. And I have always tried not to make anyone suffer.”

“The moment we live, death grows within us, but this was only part of the truth we need to learn. [...] As much as one can reach the truth, nothing can ease the suffering of losing a loved one. There is no truth, sincerity, strength, sweetness that can heal us from such suffering. The only thing we can do is to overcome suffering through suffering, possibly trying to draw some lessons from it, even though we know that this teaching will not help us the next time that suffering suddenly hits us.”

3) “One, no one and one hundred thousand”. I bought this book in 1991 when I was still writing the dates of purchases in the bookstore on the first page, in the last year of high school, when the love for literature and art exploded in me: I wrote a lot and devoured novels and poems. In fact, the following year I enrolled in the faculty of Literature and Philosophy.

Luigi Pirandello is one of our six Nobel Prize winners for Literature, in 1934, “for his courage and the ingenious presentation of dramatic and theatrical art”, as stated in the motivation. He was a great playwright, his “Six Characters in search of an Author” are famous, and his most famous novel remains “The Late Mattia Pascal” of 1904.

I loved this book very much, with its unmistakable style that combines humor with Kafkaesque themes, because Pirandello is able to investigate the human soul in-depth, with a particular interest in psychoanalysis (which owes a lot to this author).

This novel has a great beginning: a man is in the mirror, Vitangelo Moscarda when his wife points out that his nose hangs to one side. Which he had never noticed, and this makes him collapse the whole conception of himself that he had had until that moment. A long story begins in which we laugh not to cry, in which we witness a theme that will become a classic of much forward literature: the crisis of the individual, the “theme of the masks”, of which Pirandello can be considered the progenitor. Who are we? What is our true identity? What is built by ourselves or what others build for us? Am I for myself, or nobody because in reality I am one hundred thousand for each person who sees me and thinks of me outside?

All from the first moment that becomes aware of himself in front of the mirror, anticipating the “mirror phase" by ten years, theorized by the psychoanalyst Lacan in the 1936, or the stage in which the baby, between 6 and 18 months of age, recognizes himself for the first time in the mirror.

I have always loved this topic, and then deepened it with my studies in Psychology and Literature at the University. The human soul is an abyss in which we cannot reach the bottom. We can only go inside with a small lantern in hand.

Pirandello did it superbly, and with a lot of irony.

“A reality was not given to us and is not there, but we must do it, if we want to be: and it will never be one for all, one forever, but continuously and infinitely changeable.”

“Of what I can be for me, not only can you know nothing, but neither can I.”

The last two:

4) "The Tartars Steppe", written by Dino Buzzati in 1940, is the book that fought hard with Pirandello for third place, and in my heart they are tied. Bastiani Fortress, Giovanni Drogo, the Tartar Steppe, have entered the way of saying of many of us. Like Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" (author on which I did my degree thesis), the Tartars are the symbol of expectation, of something that comes to make sense of our lives, but that never comes.

When it finally arrives, we are no longer ready but we have learned to live with death, and not to be afraid of it.

A novel that never abandons you forever, because in each of us there is a Bastiani Fortress.

“It was at this period that Drogo realized how far apart men are whatever their affection for each other, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence the loneliness of life.”

5) "The Trial" by Franz Kafka, published posthumously in 1925, could easily be the first novel on the list, because each of the books mentioned, and who knows how many others, are all children of this twentieth-century masterpiece. Joseph K. is the symbol of modern man crushed by the incomprehensible, by the authority that annihilates us without an explanation. If we still say today for something that we do not understand and it seems absurd to us that it is a “Kafkaesque situation” it will mean something.

An absolute must read.

“From a certain point onward, there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”

  

Josè Saramago: Cecità (Einaudi, 1998)
Haruki Murakami: Tokyo Blues (Feltrinelli, 1998)
Luigi Pirandello: Uno, nessuno e centomila (Mondadori, 1991)
Dino Buzzati: Il deserto dei Tartari (Mondadori, 1989)
Franz Kafka: Il processo (Mondadori, 1989)

Italian version