Sparrow: The story of a songbird, by Giovanni Verga

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Giovanni Verga

Maria’s mother passed away when she was seven and her father sent her to a convent to receive an education and become a nun. Now she is almost twenty years old and is spending some time with her father, stepmother and siblings in the country, staying away from a cholera epidemic in the city. There, Maria experiences the freedom of being outdoors, enjoying the sun, the flowers and the fresh air, as well as the joys of the family life that have always been neglected to her. And yes, in those days she also finds love, a new feeling that some days brings her sadness, and others fills her heart so deeply she can hardly believe it’s real.

However, all good things come to an end and, when it is safe to return to the city, Maria has to return to the convent. But once you have tasted a glimpse of happiness, how can you come back to a cage, knowing that you will never be allowed to fly free again? Trying to fight against her own feelings, this young nun writes to a confident who lived in the convent with her in the past, and her missives are so profound and heartbreaking that have brought tears to my eyes.

My copy of the book – a brand new Spanish edition

Beautifully written, this short novel is a journey in a roller coaster of feelings, from the little joys of life, which this young protagonist has never known before, to the despair of being locked against her will, letting go of the love she found and the future she, for a moment, dared to dream. The book is also a criticism of the religious standards of the time: Maria asks her correspondent why God creates all the beautiful things only to deprive His wives of them.

I’m not afraid to compare this Italian classic with my beloved Stefan Zweig, for these two authors can create female characters who are hard to believe they are not real. I felt really moved by Maria and the dichotomy she faced – whether to experience love for a brief moment and then be aware of its absence for the rest of your life, or to live oblivious to what could have been; empty, but perhaps happier. Who can answer to this?

Sparrow: the story of a songbird
Giovanni Verga
Published first time in 1870
180 pages.

 

Miss Pettigrew lives for a day, by Winifred Watson

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Winifred Watson

I had no idea this book existed until Leander gave it to me some months ago, despite the fact that this is a well known classic and there is even a film based on it (which I will watch soon, although I have read it is far removed from the plot of the book).

Miss Pettigrew is a middle-aged lady and not so skilled governess who is looking for a job, when the agency sends her to go to Miss LaFosse’s apartment because the latter has been asking for an employee to take care of her children. But the woman who opens the door to Miss Pettigrew that morning looks like an actress, is with a lover in the apartment, and there are not any children in sight. Before Miss Pettigrew has any changes to speak in order to introduce herself, Miss Delysia LaFosse asks for her first request: to get the man out of the apartment in case Miss LaFosse’s other lovers appear there.

This is the first of a succession of scandalous tasks Miss Pettigrew manages to solve for her new employer while her virginal mind deals with all those disgusting hot kisses Miss LaFosse dispenses among her lovers. And this is only the beginning of an intense day in which Miss Pettigrew will get to know how the other half live; a life that might not seem very virtuous, but which is undoubtedly more exciting.

I have had a great time with Miss Pettigrew: in the first part of the book there are many amusing situations owing to the misunderstandings that take place in the apartment since Miss Pettigrew never has the occasion to explain why she is there and she is suddenly involved in parties, clubs and alcoholic drinks. Besides, had I not read this book I would never have known that plastic surgery was available in the twenties! Don’t worry: Miss Pettigrew doesn’t have an operation 😉

This breathless day has a happy ending for everybody, except for some of Miss LaFosse’s lovers, so this is definitely a delightful tale, perfect for cheering up a couple of evenings.

Book on Goodreads

Lord of the flies, by William Golding

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William Golding

Lord of the flies is one of the books recommended for my English exam: in the second part of the writing I can answer a question about the recommended books, so I wanted to have the chance to do it if I see that the other questions are uninspiring (and they usually are!).

Lord of the flies is the story of a group of children who end up alone, without any adults, in a desert island after an airplane crash. There are many “littluns”, 6-year-old children, and the main characters of the book, who are boys of over 12 years old and are the ones who represent the different aspects of human nature. Piggy is the reasonable one, physically weak but with a lot of practical ideas; Ralph is chosen as the leader of the group and is strong and charismatic; Jack is the other alpha male that at the beginning is happy to lead the group of hunters, but when he realizes that he is the one who is able to bring meat to the others, then wants more leadership within the group.

The book tries to show us that human beings are evil and bad workers just because our nature is like that, but this brings up more questions than answers – what would have been the fate of humankind if we are hadn’t been able to cooperate with each other in a tribe? I really think that we wouldn’t have survived beyond the Paleolithic.

When I read it in English, I looked for information about the book in Wikipedia, and I realized that I had missed a lot about things of the story, for example the fact that one of the boys represents religion and mysticism, so I read it again in Spanish and I didn’t get the point either. I just noticed another thing that didn’t convince me: the lack of guilty in the boys when they become savages and kill the ones that the day before were their friends, which takes me back to the other point about the survival of humankind. Besides, they should have been working together because they had a common enemy to fight against: “the beast”. Not to mention that no one looks after the littluns, and I don’t know much about little children, but I suppose that at that age you can hardly survive by eating the fruit you find in the forest.

To summarize, I suppose I didn’t like the book because I don’t want to think that we are like those boys on the island. Otherwise, I think this is a good book to discuss.

Keep calm and read 20 books in English: 13/20

Classics: 6th and 7th/10

Literary exploration: Dystopia

The bear (The Grizzly king), by James Oliver Curwood

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James Oliver Curwood

This is a story about two men against a bear with the Canadian mountains as a battlefield.

Thor is a grizzly bear that has never met any human beings, but no sooner does he smell the first, he gets hurt by their rifles, so he tries to run away from them and goes through the forest towards the highest mountains. On his way he finds a motherless bear cub, Muskwa, and without Thor’s permission, little Muskwa follows the big bear because he has nowhere to go and needs someone to take care of him. Thor seems reluctant at first, but they soon make a good team hunting and climbing together. Nevertheless, danger still follows Thor and they hardly have time to sleep or feed when they hear the humans and their dogs coming closer.

This has been gripping reading from the beginning to the end since you sympathize with the bears and you care a lot about them during the chase. The men are only hunting for fun and the bigger the bear is, the better, because the carpet they will make with its skin will look wonderful in their sitting room, so they are introduced as the animals of the story while Thor seem to be just a being who wants to live in peace. Besides, Muskwa adds a tender point of view in the story, which is something I loved.

This classic has been recently re-published in my country and the publishers sent me a copy for review some weeks ago. It was first published in 1916, and it’s curious because Curwood was a hunter before realizing that nature can be far more enjoyable if you don’t destroy it, so I suppose he built the human characters and the bears thanks to his experience first as a hunter for fun, and then as an observer of the wilderness.

If you like nature and animals, I’m sure you will love to get know these lovely but wild bears.

One hundred years of solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez

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Gabriel García Márquez

One hundred years of boredom, in my opinion.

I was very excited when I picked up the book: it was the kind of book that has been since always on my shelves but I never tried to read, even when everybody said I was going to love it, so when the chance came, thanks to the classics spin, I was really looking forward to reading and loving it.

The fact is that I have found a family saga with several generations and a large amount of people with the same names whose behavior was really difficult to understand for me. Once the author introduces a character, he or she can be perfectly missing until you find them again 50 pages later, and perhaps they only appear in one or two pages – or paragraphs! – but you have to check the family tree constantly because you are lost among all of them. Not to mention that the story didn’t catch my attention and I couldn’t read ten pages at a time without a big cup of coffee. In fact, last week I had plenty of time to read, but I preferred to do other things instead every time I looked at the book.

To summarize the plot, I can say that this is the story of the Buendía family, which founded a little village called Macondo where people live happily but which is so isolated that all the modern advantages are brought by a group of gypsies that travel to Macondo every year. All the members of the Buendía family seem to have a tragic fate because of the war (it is set in Colombia’s civil wars) or because they fall in love with the wrong people, mainly other Buendías; so the story goes back and forth from one Buendía to another, all of them with the same names and with no particularly interesting stories.

There was two points that I liked a little: one was the lies that a banana company tells to the people of Macondo and everybody believes, and the other was the end of the book, which I liked not only because it was the end at last, but because it is quite surprising.

Well, I would like to point out that I haven’t been alone in this little torture: Melinda has read the book with me and we have been commenting how stupid the characters were, complaining about how boring the story was and encouraging each other to keep on reading (she has put the book down for a while to pick up other – more interesting – reading).

As you may be thinking, this is a book I don’t recommend.

The classics club: 3/50

Family sagas challenge: 5/10

authors whose mother language is Spanish challenge: 14/25

Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen

I have always had the idea that this book was a love story between two Europeans who move to Africa. I haven’t watched the film, but I know it is a love story, and the book is included in collections of romantic novels year after year, so I was really surprised when I realized that Out of Africa was very far from the story that I had expected.

In the book, the author narrates her experience on her farm in Kenya, especially the issues that came from living together with the local people. People from two tribes, the Kikuyu and the Masai, worked for her in the coffee plantation and baroness Blixen (Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of baroness Karen Blixen) talks a lot about their different points of view about almost everything, so difficult but so necessary to understand for Europeans if they wanted to make things work and succeed there on the farms.

She also talks about the visitors on the farm: people from every European country who went to that part of the world and couldn’t go back because they fell in love with Africa. They organized expeditions into the wild and I was astonished when I discovered that a woman from Danish high society could hunt lions with her rifle as well as any man.

The Ngong Hills (picture)

The only thing missing in this book is just the narrator and author’s personal life. She never gives her opinion about the troubles she is involved in, both with the local people and with the farm; she just tells us what happened and how she dealt with it and this makes you experience that strange country more vividly because you are reading the conversations with the indigenous and you just feel as lost as the author must have felt there. She neither talks about her husband nor about her lover, the Englishmen Denys Finch-Hatton, who is addressed in the book as one of the visitors on the farm without giving away anything else that makes you think they were more than friends. I knew the whole personal story when I read my edition’s prologue – I read the prologues at the end because sometimes it turns out that the prologue tells you the whole story, and then what are you reading the book for? – and I wondered why she didn’t write about anything but the facts of the farm.

The narrative style is very descriptive and the author spends a lot of pages telling you how the scenery or the people were. That makes the book slow but enjoyable if you have enough time to sit down and imagine those hills.

Summarizing, this is more or less an autobiography of Karen Blixen in which you can discover the beautiful landscapes of Africa, where you can have a gazelle as a pet but you also have to take care because a leopard is living in a forest next to your house, and learn about the difficulties of living on a plantation with people who are very different from you.

To be read pile challenge: 2/12

The classics club: 2/50