I am quite happy to learn that Peter Handke has been awarded the new Düsseldorf 's Heinrich Heine Prize. Not that I think prizes are really representative of someone's art or greatness: but this can so much piss off all the creepy attackers of Handke's work and it's very welcomed.

Yes I am quite happy for it, regardless the opinions of a once-great-novelist Salman Rushdie, who called years ago Handke 'moron of the year' for his opinions about the Yugoslavian war, starting the whole pillory against him, and regardless the so called 'philosopher' Bernard-Henri Levy, who recently stated that Handke's plays should be banned from all theaters of France; for the Comedie Francaise too, that cowardly and accordingly removed Handke's plays from the scenes, and for the many others who insulted or neglected him and his work without even reading it, because he (while accomplishing new great results with it, particularly with the splendid recent novel 'Der Bildverlust') asked for a country and its people, the Serbian people, room for listening and understanding.

I don't know if the Heinrich Heine Prize is meant to be a political one, since many European literary prizes unfortunately tend to be political (the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example, it's shamefully, stupidly political). The point is that Heine himself suffered criticism and censorship during his life, in his quest for an outspoken truth, but he managed anyway to be first of all a poet. I think that this is the best award Handke could receive, if only to accent this, that he remained first of all a storyteller and a poet, and his politcal opinions have not reduced his talents.
Heine was a poet, a satirist, an endless traveler just like Handke proved to be. And just like Handke do, he always kept his eyes wide, to see, understand, and live to tell. (I must have said already that Handke is my favorite living writer so I'll leave it at that. End of the post.)

-- in picture: Peter Handke in Kragujevac, 1999

Oh, once again. Another book I would like to throw into the Venice lagoon from an helicopter, in thousands copies, to clog the high tides.

"Legendary for fabulous food, persistent men, and a lyrical language, Italy has inspired many great love affairs—with the country itself. From the notorious occupants and cuisine of Sicily, to the ancient marvels of Rome, to the couture of Milan, women throughout the ages have invented and reinvented adventure in this diverse and voluptuous land..."
(From Italy, A Love Story: Women Write About the Italian Experience)

Jesus, "women write about the italian experience"... who are these women anyway? Do they have eyes? Do they have any brains?

I've had enough of this absurd nonsense about Italy. Will this undeserved fortune ever come to an end? Will all this cretin commonplaces ever be over once and for all? Will all the Caravaggios and the Tuscan hills and the Sicilan sea urchins ever dissolve in a great blaze of oblivion? Will this country ever be generally known for what it is, a sinking piece of rotten land that should be run over by a giant road roller? And will my smart countrymen ever have the courage to discourage these ideas instead of riding them when they're abroad?

I'm sorry. But I know how sadly disappointing Italy can be, for real. I have been ashamed of my passport too many times already. From China to Russia, from America to Africa, so many keep looking at this damn country without seeing it. And then when they're here, they just can't believe it. Who really comes to stay, who has eyes to see, cannot but be disappointed.
I have seen too many dreams go into pieces in small ugly apartments (half the size and double the price of, say, Honk Kong cheap housing projects), at working places (ending up touring Russian tourists in Venice exchanging bribes with the local Venetian mafia, for instance), at art schools (where not the great history and tradition of Italian ancient masters is taught, but a pointless rootless modernity that despises and neglects anything "traditionalist"), in the love making beds (where silences and long faces and misunderstanding and long boring evenings rule above romanticism and sensibility)... the list continues.

The sick richness of some parts of this country (the 60% who voted Berlusconi in my city, for instance), its eternal incapability of respecting any law, the unbelievable exploitation of labour, the general mounting egoism and indifference, all the generations of broken dreams that populated this lost land... when all of this will ever be part of the picture taken?

Well, I guess, not until people in this world will blindly keep on summoning such visions, of remote golden lands supposed to save for us all the good ol' things forever. But those places are not from this earth anymore. Only admitting this could give us the force to regain those places back from hell. And I hate the compromising way this post just found to end.

On the brink of falling asleep, even if only for a few seconds sat in a segment of sun against the ugly squared pillar in Diaz square, passersby's voices undergo a sort of sublimation in my head, becoming a deeper, neater, very focused thing against a more uniform background. Could be they skidded on a plane slightly aside reality, in axis with my inside, or they just got purified, for few secs before entering the realm of sleep, of the thoughts forever evaluating and judging, the watching that always downsizes and displaces.
It's like they turn, seconds after I close my eyes, more alien and more beautiful at the same time: like from the world of the sleeper, next to its clumsy nightmares, the world of real things would appear. A world of resonant, passing things without anything of the fuzzy confusion alert senses give us either in dreams or reality.

Voices of conversations slide beneath the plastic chair I sit on sprawled, sounding so definitive and objective, like this woman saying "I've been running all day and cell phone was off", it's like her voice is perfectly floating it in the void, for the first time in the world. Then she goes, and her voice fades out, and a man approaches the bubble of my perception, the deep tone of his phrase fading in, so clear, "I knew he was gonna accept that".

Alert. I'm awake. I wasn't sleeping. I open my eyes and run them swiftly to the XVII century books set on their side edges over the stall. They're all there, thank God. I know I should stand up now to look busy and conscious to the folks on the other side of the stall, and I should also stand up to avoid falling asleep like an ass again. I try to recount how many hours I have been staying awake now, I come to the quite impressive result of thirty hours, so I recount again, I decide it's twentyfivehours and I have to last at least four more. I wish I was allowed to sleep here for a while. The sun is warm and pleasurable and keeps my eyes half-closed.

I stand up. I move in the shaded area near the stall, where the air is cold and wind-flapped, the books are all opened at wrong pages. I move around arranging leafs, I look busy. Then I move back behind the stall and start the restless dance of the chilly seller, who pushes his feet against the ground one by one, sways his hips, bobs his head, looks into vacancy. I don't have the prescribed woolcap and the half-gloves, but I enrich the dance by singing in my head, and few words of the song I'm singing slip out and get heard. Someone looks at me. I grab a book and get back to the seat in our moving segment of sun. Fuck you customers who never buy no shit.

(in picture, above: gettin' back home, later, riding the lousy brand new green tram)

It's about twilight outside, so the globe lights in the room, always on, are slowly getting visible now. Forced at the bookshop all day, only three customers bought something in seven hours -- for € 56 -- and I wonder how this place run its errands... After all I am expecting to be paid sometimes next week. I still think about it as I line up the titles in the scaffolds climbing up and down the aluminum ladders, while KJAZ is playing again. Some of these books have been here on the shelfs for months or years or forever probably. My hands are covered in a brown, micro, tacky dust.

Too bad the boss is soon going to make the window all hidden with new shelvings of books, because it really is beautiful to watch outside, sitting at the desk to archive volumes, the lucky side of the canal always in the sun, just about now warmed by the orange sun light setting between the roofs.
Our unlucky side is always in the shade instead , and all the entrances to the courtyards give you that dank feeling when you walk in and out of the condos.

I foresee the moment I will walk out of the place, sweeping corianders with the bottom of my shoes, it is going be cold and pleasurable to walk out finally, and just this thought, of the feelings about to come, fills out my mind to the point I almost do not notice the nth customer stepping in the bookstore who is in fact, again, a seller of his own old books to be courteously dismissed.

© some rights reserved

(consider also part I and II of the list)

7) Aldo Busi, Seminario sulla gioventù
From the countryside of Brescia, escaping to Paris, Milano, trying to fit in, making all compromises possible so to never really compromise with anything... into different forms of tragedy, comedy, and longing for freedom. With its mixture of young sex and family violence and misfortunes, the intense experiences and visions and small tragedies and indifference to others' violence and indifference, the story of the precocious kid then ambitious, always broke, waitress-dancer-hustler tenacious Barbino is not only the rich epic, the formative debut novel of the most important living gay italian writer. It's the epic of every fugitive who does not want to get stuck into his own fears and weakness or into others' fears and weakness. Equipped with the occasional endearing reasonable megalomania, this is an elegant, scathing book ready to push you forward. In the tradition of Proust, Gadda, blah blah.
It is translated into this book.

8) Andrea de Carlo, Uto
(Not translated.) Quite strikingly, even though De Carlo is a best selling author in Italy, only two of his books seem to have been translated in english, and none of them would be one my first picks, like "Uto" or "Due di due" instead are. Anyway, De Carlo's first novel, The Cream Train has been translated. And while this book has been criticized for its incompleteness, its lacking of the action and rush other De Carlo's titles have, I must say this is a beautiful, somehow magical book. A trip to LA with nothing precise to look for, just a different or instead similar way of life, with eyes well opened to see everything and describe everything from one limited but honest point of view (which is always better than any unlimited point of view in my opinion). De Carlo also directed a movie from this book of his, but I think it never got distribution.
I could say many things about Andrea De Carlo's books, whose descriptions of Milan helped me for the first time to realize how my negative feelings towards this city were not so crazy and unexplicable after all... I know some of my italian readers may be disappointed by this name, because he's a best selling author and all (and feel free to make it clear in the comments if you want), but sorry, it's my list.
(Which by the way I am having a hard time writing since when I had the bad idea of making it a list with reviews included. Man, what am I, the 'italy is falling literary supplement' now?)

(anyway, to be continued)

(also consider Part I of the list)

4) Beppe Fenoglio, Johnny The Partisan
Italian books of fiction about the resistance against Fascism, the civil war that followed the fall of Mussolini, are in the thousands. Few of them are really enjoyable and many are too political involved to make honest novels (always in my opinion).
This novel, instead, is as politically independent and anti-rhetorical as dramatic and captivating. The "fascist beast" is never, in a single sentence, used as an excuse to shade men smallness, be them friends or foes, or to exalt the heroic largeness of certain acts of war.
Johnny, as a partisan, fights against fascism but does not identify himself in any of the anti-fascist groups, and his friendship with comrades never depends on political colors, but just on the intensity of human contacts, and nostalgia for human contacts.
Written in a mixture of elegant italian with english words, mostly adjectives that stand out on the page as small colored stones or flowers (Fenoglio was fond of english language), the story of Johnny is more than a war story: is a powerful meditation on human condition, and a confession of love for his own land, the hills, trees, villages, people of Piemonte that live beneath the morose lid of war. "In quella early primavera..."

5) Luigi Meneghello, Libera Nos a Malo
(Not translated.) Malo, other than meaning 'evil' in the Latin prayer, is the natal village of Meneghello and the background of this book. No, wait: it's not the background, it's the main character.
In slivers of life and bits of intense descriptions and anecdotes, Meneghello, with his gentle and bitter humor, his erotic touch in matter of human affairs (as many writers from the Veneto region have), chose for his first book to tell the daily life of his own village, in the normal as in the exceptional events, with family life, child games, early sex, religious presence and all the typical innocent blasphemy around it. Somehow in a similar way as Fellini will do ten years later with Amarcord, less dreamy maybe, but not less moving and warming. It's all about the Italy that does not exists anymore and so, in a strange reassuring way, both the book and the movie have to be taken as fiction. Important, brave, fiction.
(Too bad this book was never translated! Only another Meneghello's book is to be found translated on the damn Amazon, called the outlaws, and I don't know which Meneghello's book actually that is).

6) Lucio Mastronardi, Il maestro di Vigevano
(Not translated.) As some of the other authors in this list, Mastronardi has always been considered a "regional" author. But his books are not regional at all and, as often happens, they picture a transfigured reality which could represents every place in the world. Anyway, nothing of Mastronardi has ever been translated in english. And this is bad, because this book is so much beautiful as it is honest in speaking the truth, which means, it is very often not happy nor gentle, and it contains a sense of rebellion against everything, but without any rage or violence. Because provincial life slows down the appearance of things, envelopes everything into conventions and habits, violence is very difficult, sometimes even among domestic walls. At least in the Italy Mastronardi had in mind, in the sixties. Because of this impossibility of violence, the occasional knocking off of conventions is therefore as intense and tragic as desperately funny.

(to continue. I promise actually translated titles for the next items in the list. At least I hope. And a couple of more recent authors too. Puff, I'm exhausted)

Novelist, poet Dennis Cooper posted on his blog a list of his favorite 50 novels, and it came out a great list. Full of suggestions.
But somehow I felt it didn't make justice of the italian literature. Well, I'm far from thinking italian literature is the best in the world, or, that you cannot live without it. But it was a little disappointing to find only the usual Italo Calvino in it.
Italian literature abroad it's really not a big sea, you know. You always bump into the same fishes, Calvino, Eco. Great writers, but...
Well, maybe we deserve this. After all, Italy is a falling nation, that will disappear in a little while.
Anyway, about the books, I don't think this misfortune is entirely accidental. Why italian institutions, foundations, schools and publishers do not promote our good literature abroad, as, for example, Japan does?
But no, what the hell, who cares for these writers, "describers of carrots". Not only most of the italian best authors are virtually unknown out of Italy. Very often their work is not even translated. But truth is, some of those are not even easy to find in italian bookstores so what do you expect.

Here is a list, ten picks of mine in no particular order. I stayed in the 'novel era', which means the last two centuries with I think one excursion into late Renaissance. This is not fair to italian literature and to my personal taste, but you must admit that listing The Divine Comedy by Dante or Boccaccio's Decameron would be a pretty moronic thing to do. The list is furtherly limited by the lack of translated titles.
If you don't find your favorite, feel free to complain about it in the comments. But remember, this is my taste, as of today, not a definitive summary of italian literature.

1. Giovanni Comisso, Gioco d'Infanzia
Not only nothing from Giovanni Comisso has ever been translated in english; he is also almost impossible to find on the shelves of italian bookstores. Congratulations to our moronic publishers. This book is quite unique. This author is a daydream. You can read an essay of his prose and our brief considerations here.

2. Goffredo Parise, Sillabari
The english translation of this wonderful book is split in two parts: Abecedary, and Solitudes. In Italy the two parts existed but got joined together in a single edition a long ago. Doesn't matter.
This book(s) is a collection of meditations on human feelings grouped alphabetically, written in the form of simple, diverting, melancholic short stories. Quotes (with our lousy translation) can be found here or here.
To me, this book is the perfect goodbye to all the post-modern literary ambitions that somehow assumed everything was already written, and that one could only re-write (call it "the Borges curse"). This kind of curse is still plaguing italian literature. Not so with this book, that goes straight to the formal origins of storytelling, ignoring all the homework done in the meantime. Also, it is the perfect goodbye to politically engaged literature, another tragic plague for my country's writers (sometimes, and to this day, the two plagues join together into the most horrible pages ever written in man's memory. Very celebrated though. No names, sorry). This book is also an important cutaway of Italy between the sixties and the eighties, with few rivals. Most of all, it is poetry in prose. Overall, a must read.

3. Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno
Zeno's Conscience, is one of the "important" novels of italian literature. Published in 1923, tells the story of the imaginary-autobiographical character Zeno Cosini as he himself write it for his shrink. I think Zeno is the character I felt for the more, from all the novels and short stories I ever read (probably with Fréderic from Sentimental Education). His humor, his understatement, his mix of sincerity and lies, his thoughtful shy attitude, his excesses of occasional courage are unforgettable. Zeno is in me.

(to continue. It is so stressing to write epitomes, that I must take a break after the first three two and a half books. My, I'd better write down a couple of stories I have in mind instead of pontificating, and I always put my intention off. Rats!)