The 3 best books by Andrea Bajani

Generational distances are not an impediment to establishing other types of parallelisms such as those created between Erri de Luca and Andrea Bajani. Because then there is the idiosyncrasy of each country or region. A bottomless pit where these two authors find ground for their plots that range from detail to the transcendental, from the anecdotal to the universal. A prose that tunes in that search from the inside out but that later, in each author, describes different scenarios and disparate intentions from very personal rhythms and cadences. That is where the grace of the most authentic literature lies.

Ultimately, Andrea Bajani insists on not leaving us impassive in the face of the experiences of some characters who lead life in its diversity of possibilities probed with a tenacious intention of existential research. All the inhabitants of Bajani's stories bare their souls with that pleasant feeling of distance compared to the mediocrity marked from the commitment to uniformity of our times.

When a writer acquires that commitment to enter (and enter) the skin of his characters, the result is a lucidity that comes from the empathetic. The issue is also to cover everything with a lively plot capable of convincing readers from all walks of life. The result is a bibliography that makes its way little by little with the forcefulness of the creations that point to classics due to their humanistic nature.

Top 3 recommended books by Andrea Bajani

Map of an absence

Absence as an extension of a more than common alienation in a current world that inspires vain hopes or guides towards impossible happiness due to the mere fact of its material essence or its unattainable trail.

A novel of great maturity that confronts, with a melancholy sweetness but not without ferocity, serious and universal themes. It is the story of an abandonment and, at the same time, of an initiation, of a loss of illusions and of a sentimental education.

It tells the vicissitudes of a character, but also those of two countries, Italy and Romania, where Italian businessmen have moved their factories for convenience. It speaks to us, then, of the strange Europe of today, which presents itself as the beacon of the West, even though iniquity reigns everywhere. I have also appreciated the narrative talent and love of language in this work. This language of ours, so noble and so ancient, is currently besieged by a crude media and political idiolect that is devouring it. That is why writing like this makes me happy and consoles me, because in its own way it is also a form of resistance».

Map of an absence

Best regards

Formalisms that invite disaster. Notices of defeat by burofax or certified letter. Neither love nor good wishes come through channels that require acknowledgment of receipt. What happens next is an invitation to despair and dislocation.

After the almighty sales director leaves the company, a gray employee takes up one of his most reviled tasks: writing dismissal letters, supposedly humane and inspiring, to his colleagues, who call him El Matarife in the corridors while he receives praise from a management insanely bent on purifying, trimming and producing.

But he not only resumes his role as liquidator from the former director…, but also that of the father of his young children Martina and Federico, who disrupt his customs and convictions by teaching him the tender and somewhat anarchic rituals of a painful emergency paternity. In this way he will also discover that a few moments of happiness can change the logic of performance, quality controls, productivity rewards and human resource management.

Best regards

the book of houses

The story of a man through the houses in which he has lived. A character whose name we do not get to know –it is simply Me–, but we do know all the details of his life. That is reconstructed in a succession of fragments: the complex relationship with his violent father, the presence of the frightened mother, the turtle that lives in the patio, the family's emigration to the north, the stays in foreign cities, the marriage, social ascent, the relationship with a lover, the intimate space in which he takes refuge to write... Each one of these stages, each one of the emotions of that character – the sentimental education, the desires, the disappointments, the love, the betrayals, loneliness…–, are related to a house.

In the background, two historical events, two bloody events, provide the context: the kidnapping and murder of El Prisionero and the murder of El Poeta, who are none other than Aldo Moro and Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose violent deaths define the lead years of Italy. And it is that if the novel is above all the story of a man throughout his life, it is also, in a way, the history of Italy in the last fifty years, because the fragments that make up this novel are framed between the seventy of the last century and a more or less distant future in which only the turtle will continue to live.

Andrea Bajani has written a unique and fascinating novel, in which, through the spaces we inhabit, the story of a human being is reconstructed with all its contradictions, fears and desires. It is not a simple pirouette: it is the portrait of a soul through the houses in which he has lived.

the book of houses
5/5 - (9 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.