Tuesday 18 February 2014

Lizard

I am not very fond of short stories, they generally leave me with a feeling of incompleteness,  but they are very handy when you travel to go to work as you can finish one in the metro.
This was my first approach to Yoshimoto, and I did enjoy the reading. But somehow all the stories have some weird things happening inside, something supernatural and spiritual. I felt a bit like reading Murakami, and at the end you are not quite sure if you liked it or not. Will have to give Yoshimoto another try to decide if I like the writing.

Sunday 9 February 2014

The Housekeeper + The Professor

The Professor is a man who has been suffering from memory loss after a car accident. His short memory lasts 84 minutes, not one second more; whereas, he has a very clear memory of his past before the accident, when he was a Math professor, deeply in love with numbers, in particular prime numbers.
The Housekeeper, as you can guess, is the woman who takes care of him. Well, maybe it is better to say, the last (in chronological order) woman who tries to take care of him. 'Cause, can you imagine to take care of a person that in less than 2 hours doesn't remember who you are and what you are doing in his house?
In this book there are no names, as it is not necessary to spend time on talking about particulars that would be forgotten in 84 mins. Therefore, also the little son of the housekeeper will just have a nickname in the all story: Root, as the Math symbol 

The relationship among these 3 characters is of course made of numbers, and of the beauty that can be hidden behind a date of birth, or a shoes size. But, despite all, there is a true bond among them that is created during the reading. It is a very sweet book, silent, emotional.
 I highly recommend it!


"The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers."


Saturday 8 February 2014

Maybe in another life....

Do you remember the "red surprise bag"? Well, the bag itself broke filled with my grocery shopping on the road. I won't be here describing how I had to carry all in my hands till I found a shop to buy a provisional bag. I will, instead, tell you about another book that was in the surprise bag. This:


You are not seeing double, they are really two: one is the book, and the other is the CD that comes with the book. How amazing is this? How many of us read while listening to a particular song or how many of us think of a song that describe what is in the book? Well, me for sure. I like to associate books with nice music (and generally a tea), so for me this book was an amazing discovery.
The story in the book is quiet simple, nothing that won't make you sleep. I read it very quickly between the wait at the airport and the flight itself. But it is a nice reading. Of course what makes it good is the fact that  every chapter has his soundtrack, which I found very clever, even if I didn't have the possibility to listen to the songs while reading.

The book and the CD are both from a composer, a musician, that wanted to give "words" to his music. Here you could watch the video of the song that close the CD and give the title to the book Magari in un'altra vita