Di Montale I especially loved his snobbery against clichés. And if sometimes I resort to the unsettled wisdom - now sacralized by tv - and phrases in fact occasional conversations, at school, at least, are systematically trying to destabilize the alleged certainties widely shared through cultural filters ironic and strabismus. The embryos are commonplace prejudices. And the prejudices - you know - should be fought.
- says my wife, who is also an intelligent person - the chrysanthemums are sad.
Yet solar inflorescence was vital, cheerful.
years not more gift flowers to my wife.
education also stationed in the universe can also be dangerous prejudices. In respect of video games, for example. I know colleagues who still call for crusades against Pikachu and Goku, and Digimon Super Mario Bros, Lara Kroft Aki Ross and ... As if their toys for a time with dolls and toy soldiers to be more intelligent and educational strategies for Missile Command or Asteroids.
Moreover, the universe is invoked at each school more driven crusade against television, advertising, social networks, cartoons (Japanese, of course!), SMS ...
I am allergic to prejudice. And the complaints. And the Crusades. And the stupid generalizations: not all Japanese cartoons are silly (Hayao Miyazaki, for example, has produced some real masterpieces) certain advertisements are the most poetic of certain poems stationed in the best school anthologies, with SMS you can give birth to masterpieces of condensation of expression, and so on. And the same goes for video games (Final Fantasy, in many ways, it is wonderful), TV shows, movies, music ...
In some periods of my life, for example, only listened to progressive music (and surroundings): Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Yes, Genesis, Zappa, Tangerine Dream, Black Sabbath, Colosseum, Pink Floyd (my absolute favorite), Procol Harum, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer , Jethro Tull, Van Der Graaf Generator, Gentle Giant, Traffic ... (and that is why today I liked Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Muse ...). In other periods of my life, I only listened to classical music (Schubert, Mozart, Bach, Chopin, Mendelsonn, Chaikoskij ...). In others I infatuated with jazz and chillout or ambient music, or ...
Today, on my Ipod, live together peacefully - without interruption or even compartmentation - Vasco and La Liga, Gucci and de Gregori, Einaudi and ranchers, and Kitaro Norah Jones, Pat Metheny and REM, Sade, Simon and Garfunkel, Coldplay and Mozart, Bizet and Metallica, Sugar and Sigur Ros, Bob Marley and Rea, Bollani and James Taylor, Chopin, Grateful Dead, Neil Young and Petrucciani ...
fusion The same spirit also hovers in my library, where live together happily, back to back, and PD James Kafka, Celine and Joanne Harris, Ambler and Tolstoy, Balzac and the ubiquitous Ken Follet, Austen and Le Carré, Ariosto and Simenon, Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan ...
For me there are genres of Series B and Series A. A novel "yellow" may be more beautiful than a staid historical novel. A science fiction novel can be deeper than a philosophical novel.
And who says that a deep and thoughtful novel should be more appreciated - even academically speaking - a novel, easy and light. Joyce's Ulysses will also be the masterpiece of the last century, but if you asked me what are the novels that have most contributed to my education and human intellectual masterpiece of the Irish certainly does not appear troubled in the first thirty (maybe even in the early fifty, and perhaps even ... does not appear, because I do not think of ever being able to read it all really!).
In the previous chapter I told you about a time when they seemed - to any intellectual - Undisputed masterpieces novels (of Grillet, Butor, Queneau, Perec ...) and experimental poetry (Sanguinetti, Door, Giuliani ...). And the university professor. advanced them to us and we hail them propinano to each course and each seminar. It seemed to me that it was a good thing. And I spent hours reading novels without stories, without characters, without action, without love, without hatred ... and very long poems that list at random items stolen from technical manuals, and dictionaries of Latin and dialogue and improbable ... And I I read the very masterpieces. And I was talking about at dinner or on the bench with his comrades at the university. And there seemed to really think of much: share of enlightened minds from higher.
And maybe I am.
But ...
It will not be a coincidence that at that time I also cultivate strong passionaccia for detective novels and spy stories and all the related literature. For those novels, that is, where the plots are plots, the plots are constructed with wisdom, the characters have personalities and places are dense atmosphere. Certainly the average quality of the novels "yellow" (and similar) is very low. But a novel "yellow" (and similar) is a successful test of mental gymnastics (A. Freeman), is an epic poem of contemporary life (Chesterton), is a passionate companion and intelligent in the pauses of life (Agati). And, as my friend Chandler says: "I can denote someone who does not suffer the detective story: it will certainly be a poor man, poor man, a clever - perhaps - but still a poor man."
And Raymond Chandler has long been my favorite author because of his dark moods, his disenchanted America, and especially the creation of a legendary detective: the tough but honest, thoughtful and tormented Philip Marlowe. A problematic hero worthy to reside in the elite literary heroes. Novels like The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell My Lovely (1940), The Long Goodbye (1953) ... are for me, absolute masterpieces.
And then, the result of a lightning brainstorming, the "mystery writer" that comes to mind with greater affection is George Simenon has narrated hundreds of epic sequences France after World War II and gave birth to another mythical pensive hero: the commissioner with a pipe, Maigret. His method consists in investigating the atmospheres of the places where the crimes were committed, in letting ourselves be guided by their instincts and how to identify and try to understand the personality and humanity of suspects and offenders. To the point, sometimes, to get to justify their behavior and to change the fate they would encounter. Impossible, in this case, to cite some significant way, because all seventy-five novels (and twenty-eight stories) that are based upon the commissioner are somehow rilevanti.Un another investigator that intrigued me and made me smile for a number of novels, is the burly Nero Wolfe, released from the pen of the sympathetic Rex Stout. Nero Wolfe weighs about one hundred and fifty kilograms ("a seventh-ton"), loves good food, cold beer at the right point and sees the work as an indispensable nuisance that keeps a high standard of living. Cultivated rare orchids in the roof garden of his elegant mansion in New York and specializes in solving intricate murder cases that handles from the comfort of his armchair to brood on the large study or blissfully busy to take care of their plants. The narrator of the novels is the handyman and his assistant Archie Goodwin. He is to go to the site of the crime, to interview witnesses or relatives of the victim (except where these are available to go to the house of Nero Wolfe to be heard directly from him), kept under control and then stalk carrying the suspects ... functions of "legs" and "eyes" of his boss. Also remarkable outline of the other characters as the trusty Swiss chef Fritz Brenner and Theodore Horstmann gardener.
Gialloman My sympathy is gone for some time even to good father Brown, a Catholic priest and funny detective, protagonist of many stories of British writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
course, my passion has led me to read with satisfaction other classics such as novels and short stories that follow the adventures of the intellectuals of the now legendary Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle), Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple ( by Agatha Christie), Philo Vance (of SS Van Dine, pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright), Charlie Chan (Earl Derr Biggers) and the various characters born from the minds of Edgar Wallace, the duo hiding behind the pseudonym of Ellery Queen, etc. . And so on.
's not forget the noble fathers of the genre: Edgar Allan Poe, who in 1841, in a story (Murders in the Rue Morgue) stages Auguste Dupin, a detective who can solve criminal cases without even visit the scene of the crime, only on the basis of media reports due to its enormous powers of deduction. Émile Gaboriau, who like Poe, creates a policeman Monsieur Lecoq. Above all, Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone, which I consider - and I'm not alone - one of the best detective books ever.
speech, time, branch and should therefore be long. He should talk, for example, legal thriller (yellow when the protagonists and solvers are the lawyers and the courtroom) and great authors like Erle Stanley Gardner, Scott Turow, John Grisham, or the category of thrillers in which they play the main role the coroner and forensic specialists with authors like Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs, or psychological thriller like warps dall'inquinante Patricia Highsmith, or historical mysteries such as those of Ellis Peters; or Italian crime writers such as Scerbanenco, Lori M., Pederiali, Lucarelli, OR ...
But I stay up this front, citing only two authors that have fascinated me most in recent years: Phyllis Dorothy James White (PD James) and Susan Elizabeth George, both weavers refined of plots and atmosphere.
addition to the "yellow" company have done to my trip, my summer holidays and my logorrheic sitting in the bathroom dozens of spy stories (and related): all the James Bond novels (Jan Fleming), and almost all the novels of John le Carré (The Spy Who Came in from the cold in La Mole, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People ...) the works of Eric Ambler (Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios, the process Deltchev, Chance Schirmer, Topkapi, The light of day, a new anger ...) ... and some novel by Len Deighton (The Battle of Britain, played in Berlin, The Ipcress practice ...) by Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator ...), by Robert Ludlum (Scarlatti Inheritance, Dirty barter, The train of Thessaloniki, The manuscript ...) ... And of course, the great Ken Follett (Eye of the Needle, The Man from St. Petersburg, On Wings of Eagles, A bed of lions ...). Occupying centimeters and inches of my library, then, there are other novels by Ken, not attributable to the espionage adventures and war: The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End, A Place Called Freedom, The Hammer of Eden, Triple, white ...) ...
I never loved particularly, however, the Romans blacks, those of terror and bloody thriller too, although I have read with some admiration, especially for the style, some things by Stephen King ... and not even science fiction novels are my unconditional love, even if I read with some pleasure the trilogy of Asimov, the emblematic Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the mighty Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick ... and little else.
As you see, then, the prof. Do not spend time dedicated to reading only among intellectuals and pages of classic bricks. But read what they like. Regardless of labels and lists of critics and pundits. I, moreover, is an omnivorous reader and very messy. I start many books at once. Then someone I finish, someone I read, many of them leaving after a few dozen pages. So, just to give you an idea, the books that now inhabit the most at the hands of the home, those just read and appreciated, so to speak, or those who are on the verge of ending, for example, are ...
Mauriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Isabelle Allende, The House of the Spirits, Paul Jordan, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Delphine de Vigan, side effects of Dreams, Nick Hornby, All for a girl, Milena Agus Ali's father, Elizabeth George, School murders, Ian McEwan, Atonement, Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, Joanne Harris, the school desires Erri De Luca, The weight of the butterfly, Philippe Delerm, the first sip of beer, Jonathan Coe, The Winshaws, Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, Frank McCourt, Hey, Professor!, Tracy Chevalier, strange creatures, Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the day, Niccolo Ammaniti, Let the party begin, Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale, John Fante, a bad year; Joanne Harris, wine, potatoes and red apples, Milan Kundera, Slowness, Alessandro Baricco, the barbarians, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Banana Yoshimoto, Tsugumi; Ildefonso Falcones, Cathedral of the Sea, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind; Gianrico Carofiglio, the perfect interim, John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire, PD James, A moon for the Inspector Dalgliesh, JM Simmel, is not always caviar, John Grisham, The Firm, Isaac B. Singer, Shlemiel When he went to Warsaw, Marcel Schwob, imaginary lives, Andrea Camilleri, The trip to Tindari, Peter Handke, The woman handed; Skármeta Antonio, The Marriage of poet Raul Montanari, strange things, tomorrow, Tiziano Scarpa, Stabat Mater , Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame, Luis Sepúlveda, The shade of what we were, Zhang Jie, No items, Sam Savage, Firmin; Andrea Vitali, The milliner ...
A sample of various literary: from thrillers to romances philosophical texts from serious to humorous ones, from books to novels engaged surface, from books to those most beautiful beautiful (the ugly, no, I have not mentioned!). From classic to those who perhaps will become more and those that certainly do not ever become.
because, as Italo Calvino, one must read the classics (Italo Calvino, Why read the classics), and because, as Daniel Pennac (Daniel Pennac, as a novel), we all have the right to not read, the right to skip pages, the right not to finish a book, the right to review, the right to read anything the right to the cattlemen, the right to read anywhere, the right to nibble, the right to read aloud and, above all, the right to remain silent.
And I, finally, I am silent.
AMEN - Mario Agati - Wilde Web Chapinero - 
