Neve, cane, piede- Claudio Morandini  (2016) 
Story of an old mountain man/hermit, Adelmo Farandola, who hates being around others. He lives alone high up in an alpine valley, when an old dog makes his way to him. At first he tries to chase the dog off, but the dog stays and they develop a companionship. Through a tough winter, the man reminisces to the dog about his abusive childhood, hiding in the mountains to avoid the wartime conflicts, and his learning to deal with hunger, thirst, and sleep deprivation in order to stay hidden.  

But as Adelmo has gotten older, his memory is slipping and his thoughts, while locked in his cabin for the long winter months, are becoming more disjointed. He also struggles with sounds he hears from the movement of the snow and ice. Avalanches are an ever-present, and real, concern.  

Adelmo and the dog converse. The dog acts as a kind of ‘second opinion’ where alternative ideas are sounded out. The dog’s opinion is the device for the old man’s inner dialogue. Clearly, Adelmo’s memory is slipping badly as the book moves along. In the spring, after they make their first trip down the mountain to restock on food, they discover a foot sticking out of the snow. 

Adelmo figures there is no rush to do anything about it since the man is dead already. The dog suggests maybe they should tell someone in the village about it. The man puts it off. Later he does attempt to tell the shop owner in the town, but she doesn’t realize he is serious. At some point later, Adelmo begins to recall perhaps having shot the man some time earlier, and his body had come down in the landslide. He decides he will bury/hide the body in an abandoned mine. Adelmo then decides to lay down with the cadaver and has a long conversation with it too. 

Sicily- An Island at the Crossroads of History- John Julius Norwich  (2015) 
A history of Sicily. Sicily’s history goes back to around 700BC. The island was colonized by the Greeks in the east and the Carthaginians in the west. After the Punic Wars the Romans had effective control over the island. When the Roman empire fell in 476AD, the island was left largely to itself until the Byzantine empire invaded in 535 and took back the island for itself until around the mid 800s. The Arabs were invited over, then conquered the island for themselves and Sicily became an Emirate until the mid 1000s. When the Normans came, Sicily entered a golden age of multi-cultural prosperity that was the wonder of Europe. But when the island was turned over to the Hohenstaufen (German) dynasty through marriage around 1200, the island ceased to be an independent kingdom. 

From that time on, the history of Sicily is told in the history of French, Spanish, and Austrian decisions made outside of Sicily. The island passed from one nation to the other with little to no regard for what the Sicilians themselves wanted. 

Relegated to provincial status, treated as a place to be exploited, Sicilians learned to trust no one, and look out for themselves and themselves only.  

As a Sicilian/American, it’s heartbreaking to read. I loved learning more about the history of Sicily,  but it’s tough to take at times.  

Thus Spake Zarathustra- Friedrich Nietzsche  (1883-5) 
Reading the prologue, it’s not hard to see the philosophical connection between Nietzsche and some of the more heinous political systems that arose in the early to mid-twentieth century. I know Nietzsche fans will say that they didn’t properly understand him, which may be true. I’m not saying that the Nazi’s thought: Nietzsche’s the thing… how can implement a system that best encapsulates his philosophy? 

But looking at the philosophical ideas floating around at the time: Darwin was relatively new and people were still wrapping their heads around survival of the fittest, and the evolutionary idea that selection will find a way to get genes into the future.  

Nietzsche talks about the coming superman; the fact that we won’t be the superman, but we may be the direct ancestor of the superman. He speaks of the glory of manliness and being a warrior. These things tie in nicely with the idea of how we best bring about this new superman, who will usher in a new era of human proficiency. 

Fascism then saw themselves as constructing a society built on such new men. They preached the need or manly sacrifice, and the need for war to toughen men’s bodies and keep them from getting soft. This new society would bring about new men, which would be better than the effeminate populace getting too soft on comforts, and unwilling to sacrifice for a greater good.  

I find it fascinating to read the book more for that sense of grasping the kinds of ideas that were capturing men’s attention at the time. Fascism didn’t just spring up out of nowhere with the idea: hey let’s kill a bunch of people! It was a political response to people’s fears and hopes of the times, and it must have seemed a plausible response to what people saw as the failures of the systems in place at the time. 

Nietzsche hated Christianity and saw its doctrines as effeminizing men and turning them into docile sheep with no creative ideas. He preached strength and virtue, but virtue in more of the old Roman understanding than the Christian. He thought equality was stupid and contra-nature. He criticizes modern (late 1800s for him) culture, but sees Christianity at fault for most of the weaknesses of that culture. 

One of the important concepts of the book is ‘will to power’. But what exactly this means is hard to pin down. Maybe ‘self-determination’ would be a good word. Nietzsche writes that all creatures are obeying creatures. There are two sub-categories: those that command themselves and those that are commanded by others. Commanding oneself however is difficult and carries responsibility with it, so it is often avoided. Those then that are stronger will command others. But it is in the nature of life to continually surpass itself.  
I think this is saying that the strong will naturally rise up and rule in power. Life inherently has the will to power, and it is the weakness of modern man that he has chosen to submit himself and be commanded. 

In the third part of the book, Zarathustra, defines existence as an eternal recurrence.  

The Return of the Native- Thomas Hardy  (1878) 
Hardy’s novels, and I’ve now read five of them, tend to start slow, but by the time I’m halfway through, I can’t put them down. This one concerns mainly two couples, and a few secondary characters. 

Thomasin Yeobright is a pretty young girl that lives on the Heath in England. She is engaged to be married to Damon Wildeve, known in the parts as a bit of a player. The marriage ceremony hits a snag and is unable to go through. We find out that Wildeve is perhaps more in love with another beauty on the Heath, Eustacia Vye. He had been involved with her, but when he expressed interest in Thomasin, Eustacia broke things off. Now they were meeting again, mostly because Eustacia sees him as a way out of the Heath. Wildeve and Eustacia both long to leave, while Thomasin grew up on the Heath and can’t imagine leaving.  

Eustacia’s interest is pulled immediately away from Wildeve on the arrival of Thomasin’s cousin, Clym, just arrived from a successful business stint in Paris. Eustacia sees a way out of the heath in Clym, and shortly after, they are married.  

But Clym has no interest in leaving the Heath. He explains this to Eustacia, but at heart she thought she could bend him towards her will and change his mind. She grows morose when he insists on staying. 

Meanwhile, Wildeve comes into some fortune and Eustacia starts to reconsider her path: perhaps Wildeve would become the way out, but she feels she can’t just leave her husband.  

Without giving away the ending, the story has to do with thwarted desires and frustrations, and the expectations of society versus personal desires. 

Agnes Grey- Anne Bronte  (1847) 
The novel really serves as an exposé for the treatment of governesses at the time. The main character goes to work for two families as a governess, where she is entrusted with raising children, but given no tools to succeed. In fact, both families raise their children to be dismissive and superior to those “beneath them”. The governess is charged with teaching the children manners as well as schooling them, but they are allowed to rule over her. It is their wishes that must be followed, not hers. Yet she is blamed for the resultant problems. 

Cranford- Elizabeth Gaskell  (1853) 
A book with no discernable plot, about a group of ladies in the fictional town of Cranford. These ladies have sticks way up their butts about class, and they’re way overconcerned about all the ways in which they can show themselves better to particular people. This is the main concern of their lives: finely dissecting the layers of society and then demonstrating to themselves that they are better than those “below them” in the execution of just about everything they do. Like I said… sticks WAY up their butts. 

There are occasionally funny lines, for example: “Mrs. Jamieson, meanwhile, was absorbed in wonder why Mr. Mulliner did not bring the tea; and at length the wonder oozed out of her mouth.” 

As the book progresses, there is a severe financial setback for one of the characters and her reduced means force everyone to reconsider their evaluations of caste and value. 

Manon Lescaut- Abbe Prevost  (1731) 
The story of the young Chevalier des Grieux, who meets and immediately falls in love with the then 15 year-old Manon Lescaut. His unrestrained passion, and Manon’s fickle attitude and desire for pleasures, lead him to repeatedly sink into troubles. Forced out of France, they wind up in New Orleans where Manon dies. The story is narrated by des Grieux, and I’m not sure I’ve found myself thinking: what are you DOING!? so much since the story of Pinocchio. It is both a love story and perhaps a cautionary tale about unrestrained passions. 

I will say though, this story had me engaged from page one. I read nearly the entire novel in a day. 

Steppenwolf- Hermann Hesse  (1927) 
“For of all things, what I hated, abhorred and cursed most intensely was just this contentment, this will-being, the well-groomed optimism of the bourgeois, this lush, fertile breeding ground of all that is mediocre, normal, average.” 

The steppenwolf is the wild wolf of the steppes. Hesse considered that this was an alter-ego that lived alongside the civilized man that the world must be presented with. The wild wolf, he explains, has strayed into civilized territory, and can no longer find its home or the food it likes to eat.  

During the story, Harry, the central character, is handed a tract called the steppenwolf, that describes his life, and tells him he is wrong: his personality isn’t two mutually exclusive characters, it is a thousand, or more, competing characters. He then meets the beautiful Hermione, a counterpart to his life, who further breaks down his analysis, and sets to build up areas of his life that are deficient- but solely for the purpose of showing him that even being proficient in these areas is still nothing but unfulfilling. 

The back cover contains a quote from a NY Times review: “The gripping and fascinating story of disease in a man’s soul”.  

So much of the story is really dealing with meaning. They blame it on the mundane meaninglessness of middle class life. But I think it arises from abundance, and the concomitant depressing thought that if this is all there is, what’s the point. Perhaps in times past, or even current times where life is subsistence, the general sense is “If only I were to have enough”, then I could really be whole”. And it’s true that in modern, western societies, we have enough. Many people still think, “I still struggle a bit, so If only I were to have a little more, then I could really be whole.” 

But enough people, even more than a hundred years ago, had looked around at our prosperous modern western society, and thought, “wait… is this all there is?”, and grew profoundly disappointed in it. 

On the Road- Jack Kerouac   (1957) 
The version I got is called the “original scroll”. It’s basically the original autobiographical narrative he wrote, with all the true names. The names were changed for the published 1957 version.   

There are no chapter or section breaks. Or even any ‘paragraphs’. It is written as one gigantic stream-of-consciousness flow.  

The book is set in the period of 1947-49. Jack Kerouac and friends, particularly Neal Cassady, hit the road moving from NY to California and back, then do it again… then finally down to Mexico City where the book abruptly ends.  

They take ‘carefree’ to the limit of careless, then to criminal and insane. By 250 pages in to this 300 page book, I was so sick of these morons antics, that I was hoping they’d just get locked up. In search of ‘kicks’, they left a trail of brokenness, and hurt wherever they went. Even their own friends were disavowing Jack and Neal by the end of it.  

The Stranger- Albert Camus  (1942) 
A man kills another man senselessly, is put on trial, and is given the death penalty. Camus was an absurdist; which is a philosophy that proposed life has no purpose. It isn’t that everything is “absurd” in the way we typically think of the word now. As the main character muses on his life and death, he sees no real point in either. 

2001: A Space Odyssey- Arthur C. Clarke  (1968) 
This book was a product of a collab with Stanley Kubrick. The story was made into a movie at the same time. Though only Clarke was credited as the author on the book. An unknown, but obviously alien, monolith is discovered on the moon. And a team is sent to one of Jupiter’s moons to explore a second monolith, but things go off course when the onboard sentient computer, HAL9000, flips out. One survivor makes it to the monolith to discover it is a portal to other star systems. He is eventually led to the aliens, but we don’t learn anything about them.