Book Review: One More Day by Fabio Volo

I’ve always been a fan of Italian literature. But, I don’t really know what it is that makes me like books by Italian authors so much. Perhaps it’s the way they write; like good old storytellers. Perhaps it’s the subjects they occupy themselves with; like love and remembrance. Or perhaps they seem familiar to me because I also come from a country that’s washed by the Mediterranean Sea. Whatever the reason, Italian books make me feel good, and the one at hand does that better than most.

One More Day is the story of two seemingly different people that cross paths time and again. At the beginning that happens by pure luck, but as time goes by they start trying to steal glimpses of each other at any given chance. He’s Giacomo and she’s Michela, and their story is a story of love and loss, of failure and new beginnings.

As we follow the heroes from Italy to New York, and finally to Paris, we get to know them very well; and we get to like them. They are very human, full of weaknesses and fear, full of hopes and dreams. I guess one could say that the whole story revolves around dreams. The dream of getting away from everything and everyone that keeps you trapped in a cage; the dream of starting anew in a different land; the impossible dream of learning to love all over again by playing a game.

That’s what Giacomo and Michela do, they play the game of love, time and again, but not for very long. Win or lose, at first that doesn’t seem to matter to them. What matters is to get to know each other well, and to get to enjoy what each of them has to offer. They meet, they talk, they drink, they listen to great music and they make love, and the words flow like a serene stream on the page: “I wanted to become a hunter of emotions and memories,” he says. “We have been kicked outside of ourselves,” she states. “She was the door I had the courage to open,” he thinks and smiles.

I could keep writing quotes for a long time, but I won’t do it, since some of the magic of this book can be found in them, and I wouldn’t like to take that pleasure away from you.

I will tell you though, that if you are someone who enjoyed movies like Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight (yes, that great Paris trilogy), you will love this book. The prose is exquisite, the plot is simple and yet intriguing, and the feelings are as real as one could ever find in the pages of a novel. The author seems to inhabit the bodies and the souls of his characters and thus manages to give us a story that’s hard to forget. This novel is a must-read for me.

It has taken me a long time to finish this novel, but that was only because I was so enthralled by its heroes and their world that I wished it could go on and on. Of course, there are other books, as there are other stories; stories that remind us about the most important things in life; like how much it matters to be our own selves and chase our own impossible dreams. Just like Giacomo and Michela did.

Book Review: Pearl in the Sand by Tessa Afshar

I guess one could say, without putting too much effort into it, that Pearl in the Sand by Tessa Ashfar, is a historical romance.

The events of the story take place in Palestine in the era of Moses. It’s exactly there and then that Rahab, one of the main characters, is born and raised. She and her family live in poverty and sometimes despair. That’s exactly why her father decides to sell her, or rather rented her out for a fee to a rich merchant; in order for them to survive.

Rahab will spend quite some time with the man and when she’s finally set free, she’ll decide that what she wants to do is become a prostitute. That way she will earn enough money, but she’ll also be afforded the benefit of being able to choose her own lovers.

The years will flow by fast and she’ll become not only rich, but also powerful and famous. However, whatever she does, no matter how much wealth she amasses, she cannot fill the void that she feels inside. There’s something missing from her life, but she doesn’t know what. And that until the winds of fortune start to follow a different course.

Everything changes in her life at about the time Moses, gets closer and closer to her city, while fighting against and beating in the fields of battle all the tribes that oppose the presence there of him and his people. By his side is Salmon, a man seemingly made out of stone, a fierce warrior and lover, with whom Rahab will fall passionately in love. But she will not only love him, as time goes by, she will also start to worship his god, a god that seems fair and compassionate if compared to the gods she has know so far. Thus she will follow that man and adopt his beliefs, and amidst the chaos of war the flowers of love will blossom.

I have to say that this is not a book that I would recommend to everyone since it’s obvious that its target market is the female reader.

It brilliantly starts off as a historical novel and ends up as a love story. I don’t know the history, or rather the mythology, of the region that well, so I cannot say if the author gives the reader a true representation of it, but that nevertheless doesn’t really matter, since the era only serves as the canvas onto which the mythos comes to life.

Edith Wharton - The Fulness Of Life

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness. The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but now they were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by grotesque visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate presentments of pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of rivers, towers, and cupolas, gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten-through her mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction in the thought that she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine . . . and that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband's boots -- those horrible boots -- and that no one would come to bother her about the next day's dinner . . . or the butcher's book. . . . At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the thickening obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with pale geometric roses, circling softly, interminably before her, now darkened to a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer night without stars. And into this darkness she felt herself sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of security of one upheld from beneath. Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and tired body, now submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her throat to her chin, to her ears, to her mouth. . . . Ah, now it was rising too high; the impulse to struggle was renewed;. . . her mouth was full;. . . she was choking. . . . Help!

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Book Choice: Bunner Sisters