Nikolaj Roerich

All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summits."
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance Of Loss







This month I started a book which I meant to review here, The History Of Love by Nicole Krauss. Apart from some good glimpses here and there, I found it unoriginal and poorly written, so I haven't been able to finish it yet. Instead, a few days ago I started The Inheritance Of Loss, by Kiran Desai (daughter of Anita Desai and girlfriend of Nobel prize winner for literature Orhan Pamuk, one of my favorite writers) and I'm adoring it. It's one of those books you want to both devour quickly and savor slowly and carefully, so beautiful it is. One of those books that opens hundreds of doors leading to different unknown or slightly known paths of thought and knowledge.

I will write a review of this novel after reading it, now I just wanted to spend a few words about Russian artist Nikolaj Roerich. I had heard of him before but got curious about him now as Kiran Desai mentions him and his paintings, in particular this one:

Tibetan choksee tables painted in jade and flames colors piled with books, including a volume of paintings by Nicholas Roerich, a Russian aristocrat who painted the Himalayas with such grave presence it made you shiver just to imagine all the grainy distilled cold, the lone traveller atop a yak, going - where? The immense vistas indicated an abstract destinations.

Roerich was a Russian painter, writer, philosopher and public figure, born in St. Petersburg in 1874. He was fascinated by Russia's ancient past, by archeology and architecture, and, after meeting his future wife Helena in 1900, he started to share her passion for eastern religions and traditions, especially Vedantist essays of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, and the Bhagavad Gita. After the political changes following the February Revolution of 1917, Roerich, his wife and two children left Russia and moved first to Finland, then London, where he started to work as a stage designer in order to earn a passage to India and to explore the Land whose culture had been the object of his studies and passions, together with his wife. Due to economical troubles at the theatre company, ne never got any money for his work and the the Roerich family moved to the US in 1920. They fulfilled their dream of and expedition in Asia in 1923. In Roerich's own words, as quoted by Wikipedia, they "started from Sikkim through Punjab, Kashmir, Ladakh, the Karakoram Mountains, Khotan, Kashgar, Qara Shar, Urumchi, Irtysh, the Altai Mountains, the Oryot region of Mongolia, the Central Gobi, Kansu, Tsaidam, and Tibet".
Their travels in these areas inspired his paintings, mentioned by Kiran Desai.

Mathias Énard and Jo Whaley

Thanks to my amazing little daughter, I've recently found out a writer and an artist of whom I knew exactly nothing about, and whom I both like (and cherish, considering they "come" from my daughter!).
This is how it all went: the three of us were in a bookshop, after a pizza in a shopping mall. My daughter chose a tiny book for herself and then just idly walked after me while I was having a look around. Then she found this book:







She was attracted by the cover image and thought it could be good for me. I felt a huge tenderness and the book even seemed interesting, especially because it is set in Istanbul and recently I have been reading a lot of Orhan Pamuk. So I got it. My daughter even wrote the loveliest dedication I've ever had: her name, and the drawing of an elephant.



The book is written by French author Mathias Énard, who is quite unknown I think, considering that the Wikipedia page in English is still missing. Yet the book is truly good, able to outline the subtlest hues of feelings such as love and jealousy with apparently simple words and very short sentences. It tells the story of what Michelangelo Buonarroti might have done in Istanbul if he had accepted the invitation of a Turkish sultan in 1506. The sullen character of the famous artist is perfectly created, his desire for loneliness, his bad tempers, his (supposed) fear of closeness and intimacy. He has been invited to design a bridge connecting the two sides of the Bosphorus and he is constantly torn between the excitement and the fear of being there, in an unknown place. He has a guide, a Turkish poet who silently and desperately falls in love with him. And he has a mysterious lover, a singer of undetermined sex who tries to make love to him in the darkness of his bedroom at night, when Michelangelo is defenseless and alone and confused by wine. Days seem very similar to each other, yet the love of the poet-guide towards Michelangelo gets stronger and the presence of the night lover becomes increasingly eerie, until all the small pieces of the puzzle make sense. But of course I'm not going to say what happens. :)



It was a pleasurable read which also led to he discovery of Jo Whaley, the author of the cover picture that had attracted my daughter. He is a San Francisco based artist who uses both painting and photography to create ephemeral images with insects and other details. Here are some of them....

The Road Reader

I am reading a very special book: L'Oublié, by Elie Wiesel. I have just started but I can already feel the depths of the feelings described. I bought this book on a quick trip in a bookshop, in a period when I find it hard to feel "in tune" with whatever book I read. About Elie Wiesel, I only knew he won the Nobel Prize for peace and that he wrote a memoir about his endless days in a concentration camp.



L'oublié is about many things: love, memory (and forgetfulness), connections between people, roots, loneliness. I was looking for quotes to post on my blog when I bumped into "">the book reader", an Italian young writer who walks along the streets and reads aloud from books. I think it's a great idea, to share books and thoughts like this. There should be more road readers in the world!

Such a long, long time

Such a long time away from my blog.

I have been teaching in a high school in my hometown since September, and this new job, together with all the practical changes it has brought about, has given me so many thoughts, emotions, feelings, and so many outbursts of enthusiasm and disappointment that I simply haven't been able to concentrate on anything else since I started. What could I say? It is my dream job. It's the most wonderful job, and the hardest, too. My whole emotional world turned upside down, I feel old and young at the same time, strong and unbearably fragile, positive and doubtful, eager and frightened, all at the same time.

Another big change is Kenji and Midori, our cute, wonderful cats. When they nestle on my lap purring themselves to sleep I wonder how I could possibly wait so long to welcome them into my little world.

“Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat's chest and felt his heart beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own.”

Haruki Murakami

Teru Teru Bozu てるてる坊主

I haven't written on my blog for a long time. I have read a lot of books, I have been to some interesting places, and I have simply been home. Yet some practical changes in our lives made me restless and full of thoughts, and unable to write.
Now I suddenly feel bursting with currents and gusts of impressions I want to translate into words. Most of them are too personal to be written here. What I want to talk about now is the Teru Teru Bozu.

Every year, the first week of September we have the wonderful Festivaletteratura in my home town in Italy (Mantova). Writers from all over the world come and talk about their books, offer readings and interviews, and each corner of the town offers small stands with books, handicraft products, small exhibitions and workshops for kids. The Kokeshi Cultural Association, also based in Mantova, organized lots of interesting Japan related activities, among which a workshop where small children (aged 4 - 8) could listen to the story of the Teru Teru Bozu and could then make their own.
So, we learned that this little ghost-like doll is supposed to have magical powers and can either stop or invoke the rain. This site gives a lot of interesting information about its origins.

I love old traditions, wherever they come from. I especially like those traditions linking in different ways man and nature, man so limited and nature so immense. And my daughter was amazed by this cute little thing that took shape in her hands. She held it all day and now it's hanging on her bed while she sleeps.

Probably our little ghost doesn't really look like a Japanese one but I will always treasure the memory of my daughter's tiny hands building her Teru Teru Bozu and, hours later, looking for a nice place to hang it for the night!

Accabadora, by Michela Murgia

A few weeks ago I read "Accabadora", by Italian writer Michela Murgia, from Sardinia. The reason I became curious about this book is that it had just been translated into Swedish, getting very good praise. I'm always interested in how Italian literature is perceived abroad, and in what is translated and what is not. (In general, Sweden has a very scant selection of translated literature, for example I was recently extremely surprised to find out that only two of Yukio Mishima's works are available in Swedish, while you can find more or less his complete works both in Italian and English).

Plus, I was interested in the main character: the Accabadora. Acabar in Spanish means to finish, to end, and the Sardinian word accabadora probably comes from that, and it refers to a woman (always a woman) who puts an end to the suffering of very elderly or sick people, when the family or even the sick person demands her intervention. It's a form of euthanasia, and I thought it was fascinating to write a novel about this. Woman as giver of both life and death, the first and the last mother, a figure who is both strongly human and eerily bewitched. I bought the book in Italian and was very eager to plunge into its pages.

Sardinia is politically part of Italy but has a rich and fascinating culture of its own which you can perceive just by spending a few weeks there. It's an enchanting place. It even has its own language and folklore, and I thought this novel would bring me deep into all these things. BUT.... I was disappointed. The novel is a quick read and it has some beautiful glimpses here and there, but when it struggles to be deep and introspective, it sounds predictable and the characters's actions and thoughts often feel artificial, reminding you at every sentence that you are "just" reading a book. Most characters (the ignorant peasants, the young, sensitive Maria, the wise Accabadora, the old priest) often express their thoughts in the same way, through puns and witful jokes, and this homogeneity feels totally wrong, of course.

So, big theme, equally big disappointment. And I think it's significant that when I read readers' reviews on the Italian site ibs, the only reader from Sardinia who wrote a comment stated that she couldn't recognize her world, according to her Sardinia is something else. I can't judge this, because my knowledge of this complex island is too little, but I can say that I expected much, much more from this writer and from this novel in particular.

We are soon going to Italy for our summer holidays and I will borrow my mum's collection of Grazia Deledda's works. I think I can find much more of Sardinia in there....

Wet sun

Today we took a walk after it had rained for hours.



The damp glow of sunshine after rain is comforting and beautiful. Nature smells damp and delicious, leaves and flowers are heavy with raindrops, colours glare and shine again and everything seems both virgin and succulently ripe at the same time.
Small creatures go out of their hiding places and enjoy the soaked earth, the fragrant wood glistening with water and the warm touch of the sun fondling plants and trees.