I try to read one Italian novel, and one history/political theory book per month. I started early on the Italian novel thinking I’d be finished with it after March 1st, but actually finished it before. So technically I read it in February, but I’m gonna count it as my March Italian novel, so it gets included here. 

Busy month with 11 books read. 

Seta- Alessandro Baricco  (1996) 
An Italian novel about a Frenchman who travels to Japan. Seta means silk, and the novel is about a Frenchman who travels to find silkworms to bring back to his hometown. There is a pestilence that affects Europe and Africa, so he travels to Japan to buy silkworms there. Japan at the time of the novel (1861) was a closed society, so foreigners weren’t really allowed to legally do business. While he is there, he meets with a local warlord who sells him the silkworms. But the Frenchman notices the warlord’s concubine and becomes obsessed with her. Before he leaves, she gives him a note in Japanese, which he can’t read. When he gets home, he takes it to the one Japanese person he could find in France, and she reads the note for him: Come back or I’ll die. He returns and they spend one night together. Back home, he is loving to his wife, but she seems to notice something. He goes back the next year but Japan is in a civil war and the warlord seems to have discovered the incident. He tells the Frenchman never to come back. The Frenchman returns home. A few years later, he receives some pages written in Japanese. He takes it to the Japanese lady in France to have her read it, and it is a love letter describing his night with the warlord’s girl, but telling him to forget about her. A few years later his wife dies and he lives quietly for a bit, but then he goes to look for the Japanese lady in France again. When he finds her, he asks if she herself had written the note. She confesses that she did not: it was his wife who had written it, and asked her to translate it into Japanese.  

The War with Hannibal: Livy  (27-9BC) 
This Penguin Classics compilation of Livy’s writings covers books 21-30, dealing with Rome’s conflict with Hannibal. The details of the second Punic war were fascinating to me. In the previous books of Livy, I was not so interested in the battle details, but this was different. I also found the negotiation speeches interesting. The time period covered was 218 BC to 201 BC. 

The Dark Heart of Italy- Tobias Jones  (2003) 
Really interesting book for someone who loves Italy, but has also been frustrated by the country.  

He discusses the deep hierarchy that infects much of Italian life below the surface of vivacity. The Italians love of rhetoric over truth, and the impossibility of getting to anything resembling truth in a highly politicized and polarized governmental system. 

But he also recounts the many refinements and sophistications that mark the lives of Italians. While the title is the “dark heart” of Italy, the book isn’t really about how Italy is all dark. It’s just that the darkness is part of the equation. 

Villette- Charlotte Brontë  (1853) 
This is the last novel Charlotte Brontë wrote. The story is of Lucy Snowe, a young English girl who makes her way across to the fictional village of Villette in France (Belgium), where she finds work as a schoolteacher. The main claim to fame the novel has is it’s deeper exploration of the character’s psychology, rather than the plot itself. 

I could have done with less French in the book, which Brontë sprinkles, untranslated, pretty liberally throughout the book. But while I don’t know French, I’ve had enough Italian and Spanish to not be totally lost…. assuming at least that my guesses were more or less correct. 

The book contains a quote by Lucy Snowe that I very much identified with: “The beginning of all efforts has indeed with me been marked by a preternatural imbecility.” 

In all the plumbing of Lucy’s inner thoughts, I feel like I might be able to recognize them in someone else I know, but that’s of course conjecture on some level. It did make the novel more interesting to me though. 

The Red and the Black- Stendahl  (1830) 
The reason for the name of the title is apparently unknown. The story is of a peasant carpenter’s son, Julien Sorel, in 1830’s France, who manages to rise through various opportunities to a place among the most powerful men in the country. Along the way he picks up the hypocrisy of the day. 

One of the constant discussions in the book is how conversation, and really even personality, in the upper class Parisian circles were utterly devoid of any substance. The basic reason is that if one were to show anything more than the most banal cliches, it would open that person up to ridicule- the one thing that must be avoided at all times. This resulted in vapid pointless speech, wrapped in vapid pointless ‘wit’ and the ever-important “courtesy” and decorum that was considered essential. 

Julien, occasionally steps outside this mold though and attracts the attention of some notable ladies, including the daughter of the duke to whom he acts as a personal assistant. She becomes pregnant and Julien’s once brilliant career totters. But he then returns home and commits an inexplicable crime, which gets him sentenced to death. 

The Turn of the Screw- Henry James  (1898) 
A short kind of ghost/horror story. Not one of my favorites. 

The Prince and the Pauper- Mark Twain  (1881) 
Well-known story about a beggar boy who, about to be beaten by a guard for merely wanted to glimpse the royalty, is taken in by the young prince. The boys swap clothes and discover they look alike. At some point the prince runs outside, but being dressed as the beggar, isn’t recognized as the prince. He is then mistreated. The beggar on the other hand is assumed to be the actual prince. 

The morality tale show that being the other isn’t always what one imagined. The prince learns a little about how difficult life can be for those not born into privilege, while the beggar learns that being a prince isn’t all about getting one’s way. 

Twain wrote this amusing bit about a conversation between two farm girls who come upon the prince after he fell asleep in their barn:

Who art thou, boy? 
I am the king, was the grave answer. 
The king? What king? 
The king of England! 
The children looked at each other, then him, then at each other again. Then one said, Didst hear him Margery? He saith he is the king. Can that be true? 
How can it be else but true, Prissy? Would he say a lie? For look you Prissy, an’ it were not true, it would be a lie. It surely would be. Now think on’t. For all things that be not true be lies; thou canst make nought else of it. 
It was a good tight argument, without a leak in it anywhere; 

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court- Mark Twain  (1889) 
This is a funny book, which one might expect when the author is Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). It’s essentially a satire of medieval monarchy and chivalrous notions, that gives the author plenty of opportunities to contrast modern American ideas of democracy against the feudal times where the story takes place. The basic story is that a young mechanical engineer from 1880’s Connecticut gets knocked unconscious and is somehow transported to sixth-century Britain at the time of King Arthur’s court. 

He uses some of his more modern knowledge to impress the people, then travels around confronting various social paradigms of the day. 

The Island of Dr. Moreau- H.G. Wells  (1896) 
Early sci-fi work of the ‘mad-scientist’ sub-genre. Dr Moreau builds a lab on an otherwise deserted south pacific island so he can conduct his experiments mixing humans with animals. The half human/half beasts at some point rise up against him and everything goes about as badly as one might expect from such experiments, even if they were possible. 

Pere Goriot- Honore de Balzac  (1835) 
Father Goriot, or old Goriot, is an old father obsessed with his two daughters. He lives vicariously  through them, even though they have rejected him, and lives in a state of financial ruin hoping only to see them do well, even if from afar. him to financial ruin  

The story also includes two other characters who live at the boarding house where Goriot stays: Eugene de Rastignac, a student from outside Paris, and an older prison escapee, Vautrin. 

The Invisible Man- H.G. Wells  (1897) 
Griffin, a young scientist, discovers a way to make himself invisible. He imagined the positive usages for this, but didn’t foresee the negatives. Once invisible, however, he finds himself hunted by society. He descends ever deeper into a me-versus-everyone attitude until he reasons the only way he can protect himself is by instituting a reign of terror over the local people.  

In his attempt to do so, he is captured and killed, and as he dies, visibility returns to him so the people can see Griffin.