Antonio Forcellino's 3 favorite reads in 2024

The story narrated by Marías presents itself as incredibly complex and original. It turns around Jean de Vere, the young assistant of an old and famous Spanish director, Eduardo Muriel, who has a beautiful wife, Beatriz, who is heartbroken because of her husband's mistreatment and cruelty. Living in the couple's house, Juan will find himself involved in a series of scandalous secrets dating back to the years of the Franco dictatorship, when many of the filmmaker's entourage collaborated with the regime, carrying out abhorrent acts. The action takes place in 1980 at a time of appeasement in Spain, when no one had much interest in bringing up and remembering the atrocities committed by their fellow citizens. I was amazed by the book, as I appreciated the honesty through which the author touches this controversial theme, action that, we must recognize, has not been done with the same determination in Italy, where the collective memory of the dark ages of fascist dictatorship is still biased by the high level of institutional continuity that characterized the transition to democracy, thus distorting and sometimes shadowing the brutal responsibilities of the perpetrators, sometimes even accepting their re-integration in important public roles. Javier Marías, with the sole support of his intelligence and his writing, opposes this form of moral complicity of an entire society with fascist criminals. Convinced, as I am, that remembering and digging clearly into the past is the only defence against the repetition of history.

An eccentric book for my reading, which turned out to be very inspiring and paradoxically helped me a lot to understand modern-day America. Larry McMurtry tells the story of a ramshackle group of rangers who, around 1840, attempt to open a new trail from San Antonio to Santa Fe. In such a wild and tremendously hostile territory, the locals, the terrible Comanches, try to oppose the advance of these new settlers, who in turn are completely unprepared to govern these lands. Nature is no less hostile than the native Comanches, and so in the first pages we encounter the fury of the sudden sandstorms, the destructive power of the herds of bison that move by the millions in a territory that is not yet domesticated, and, naturally, the cruelty and greatness of the Comanche Indians, convinced that their ‘environmental’ superiority, their ability to move in a world in which the whites find it difficult to find their way, would have assured them of their own survival. Of course, we know how it will actually end, for the buffalos and for the Comanche. The interests of booming capitalism in the New World will not even leave traces of that wild and poetic world in which man and nature had achieved such an extraordinary balance that could have lasted for millennia without any harm to either. Like many others, perhaps like everyone else, I had my childhood approach to this ‘epic of the frontier’ through comic strips and the fanciful propaganda of Hollywood (Red Shadows marked me forever), but now McMurtry paints a scenario much less heroic than those films and comic strips, in which the misery of the colonisers and their hostility is a counterpoint to the savage pride of the natives, who do not seem to understand that those men, unable to cross a river in flood, can really become a threat…

I started reading McEwan without expecting any great surprises. He is a writer to whom I have devoted 20 years of worship and who has almost never disappointed my expectations. But this time he has outdone himself by bravely tackling some themes that have become intractable thanks to the intellectual conformism of progressive Anglo-European culture. The two themes are sexual abuse and creative narcissism. McEwan very courageously overturns and empties conformism by bringing the ‘abstract’ and thus ideological themes back to their simple but profound nature as human affairs, treating them with honesty and compassion to turn them into stories that will remain in our lives precisely because of their dramatic but not ideological character. The abuse is that carried out by a teacher on her young pupil and will show the devastating effects in the lives of both, even though McEwan in no way stands up as an accusing judge, but strives to understand the emotional dynamics of both protagonists, thus arriving at that ‘compassion’ that should always accompany the telling of such dramatic events. McEwan does not mingle with mainstream thinking by pronouncing easy, tabloid condemnations. His narrative takes us inside a Greek tragedy laden with truth and not inside a corporate ‘panel’ on the failures of sexual abuse on adolescents. This makes the story extraordinarily significant of what happens in a sick relationship to its protagonists. The second theme that the book deals with is the almost taboo one of a woman who abandons her family, her baby in swaddling clothes, to follow her instincts as a writer. An action that in literature almost always characterises men and never women, on whom the social stigma of abandoning one's offspring to follow one's ambition weighs heavily. In this case too, McEwan takes us into a drama that has no culprits but only complexity, because life is complex and all attempts to reduce it to standards and prejudice are doomed to failure. We cannot feel any hostility for this woman who abandons her newborn son to her husband, nor do we elect her as a heroine. We simply understand her motives thanks to McEwan's thoughtful, dense and hypnotic writing.