Dear Ragazzi of the FBC,
In an effort to avoid the internet, here are three books I’ve recently read, along with my personal notes. Brad asked me to start this column as the first step in my global sex-strike plan (more on that in the actual newspaper). I’m not supposed to talk about it much in my column, so I won’t mention it again.
“Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World”
Anthony Doerr
A great book celebrating the romance of Rome. Anthony Doerr and his wife have two young twins and they navigate life in the city while he is a resident at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I don’t have children because Athena left me for a man of ill-repute in Milan. I was still able to relate because Doerr is a magical writer. “Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed.”
Read more. Ride more.
–Faustino
“Last Summer in The City: A Novel”
Gianfranco Calligarich
This book will blow your mind. Think the show “Mad Men” meets “Catcher in the Rye” but a Roman version. It reminds me a lot of my relationship with Athena, but that’s over now. “Like I said, I don’t blame anyone. I was dealt my cards and I played them. Nobody forced me. I have no regrets. Sometimes I think about how my life would have been if that morning when it all started it hadn’t been raining or I’d had money and all the rest in my pocket, but I can’t imagine anything in particular. What I do think about is my city, our city. I think about the trees along the river and the summits of the churches against the sky.”
“Roman Stories”
Jhumpa Lahiri
A bit remorseful and sad, but very visual and moving and a few of these short stories are lodged into my brain and I dream about them. “The Steps” is one of those that I can’t forget and is centered around a long staircase in Rome and the ups and downs of the people (literally). Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her collection of short stories called, “Interpreter of Maladies.” It’s not surprising when you can pull off this paragraph: “You travel a certain distance, you desire and make decisions, and you’re left with recollections, some shimmering and some disturbing, that you’d rather not conjure up. But today, in the basilica, memory dominates, the deepest kind. It waits for you under the rock—bits of yourself, still living and restless, that shudder when you expose them.”
Footnote: If you are low on cash (trust me, I’m familiar with that), get your body to your local library and check these all out for free. I love libraries although they work a little differently in Italy. I’d like to include mandatory library cards as part of my global sex-strike plan, but I can’t talk about it anymore in this column.
FROM ISSUE 003 (Faustino newspaper)
