Books

Things heard, things seen: these can be simultaneous. But not touch or taste. For those they must be translated into words.

A friend comes to visit. And what do we talk about? Books. We might have shared experiences, things heard, things seen. But it is books that connect us most.

Books we both have read, books only one of us has read. Books we have loved, and then there are those we never finished. How we see the characters, why we like this book or that.

At times our lists overlap. We both like Shakespeare, Judy Dench. Umberto Eco, Calvino. Gentleman in Moscow is one of our favorites. There’s also Aciman and his essays but, come to think of it, he is not someone she is drawn to but is beloved by another of my reading partners.

She has read Jane Austen, I haven’t. She doesn’t like Strout. On the other hand, I find it amazing how Strout can inhabit the minds of her characters even though some are in their eighties while Elizabeth Strout is still in her sixties.

My friend has read more novels than I have. I counter by a list of Italian writers, which led me to discover more about Italy in the twenties, Italy as it once was. Isn’t sharing at the basis of a friendship? Sharing or if you like disagreeing, but to disagree you have to share and analyse.

There was a period when I didn’t read much in the way of fiction, due in part to language and my profession involving translation and fact checking. What we do influences what we choose to read, in my case often archaeology. Now it doesn’t matter whether I am reading in Italian or English. Sometimes I find that the Italian writers have been beautifully translated into English. Which means I can share them. Practically all of Tabucchi exists in English. Virginia Woolf hasn’t always been successfully translated into Italian for it is sometimes difficult to catch the nuances, to jump from one language to another. And some, like Camilleri and his Montalbano series, refuse to inhabit both worlds, worlds whose vocabularies are often far apart.

What do all these books say about each of us? About a certain period in our lives?

What we have in a list like this is a life of reading. A life reflecting the life we have lived.

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A partial list of books. A few among many others.

Primo Levi

Sciascia

Baricco

Pavese

Tony Judt

Vasari

DeWaal

Gentleman in Moscow

Aciman

Tabucchi

Calvino

Little Prince

Umberto Eco

Alice in Wonderland, through the Looking Glass

books of poems, including Shakespeare and throughout the ages

Rubaiat

children’s books (both mine and those for my granddaughter)

mystery books (Camilleri, Simenon, Donna Leon)

Pirandello

R.L.Stevenson

Richard Holmes

Augustus Hare

Dennis

Simon Schama

Dino Buzzati

Elio Vittorini

Servignano

Strout

new books like North Woods and Judy Dench

and now Anne Michaels

Then there are art history books, cook books like Artusi, and Giacomo Castelvetro. although some of these are more for their illustrations than the text)

more recently also Percival Eliott