TMO Tags: italian writing

Umberto Eco’s Cemetery of Prague creates controversy

Friday, November 5th, 2010

The publication of Umberto Eco’s latest novel (in Italian), Il cimitero di Praga(The Cemetery of Prague), has created no small amount of controversy in Italy, thanks largely to very public criticisms voiced by the Vatican backed Osservatore Romano newspaper, and the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni . Eco, who made his literary debut [...]

They Kill Us for Sport – Lear, Happy Endings, and Niccolò Ammaniti’s The Crossroads

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Daisy Godwin’s relatively recent (at least by our standards) lament about the lack of redmption in so many of today’s novels – made whilst chairing the Orange Prize judging panel – put her in good company. Samuel Johnson famously endorsed  Nahum Tate’s sugar coated revision of Shakespeare’s King Lear, commenting: “Cordelia, from the time of Tate, [...]

Domenico Starnone’s First Execution

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

It seems like a good year and a half since I’ve read a novel that didn’t involve a writer writing a novel, so I started Domenico Starnone’s First Execution wearily, almost out of duty – despite the fact that the original Italian version of the book comes highly recommended. It has though, thus far (I’m [...]

Paul Auster and David Grossman on Italian tv to support Roberto Saviano

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

Novelists Paul Auster and David Grossman appeared together last night on Italian television in a show of solidarity with author Roberto Saviano, who for the last three years has lived under police protection after receiving death threats from the Italian criminal organisation the camorra. They join a growing list, including Salman Rushdie, who have appeared [...]

Imagining Italy – A state of Denmark vs Steal You Away

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Derek Raymond, the English noir writer whom Interpol knew better as Robin Cook, could spell in at least two languages, as his dystopian novel A State of Denmark proves. Leave aside comparisons to Orwell, with the novel’s imagined totalitarian England run by a media-backed dictator called Jobling, and instead concentrate on the words frazione, presa, [...]

Roberto Saviano and the new Italian epic

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Regular readers of Three Monkeys will know that we have a soft-spot for the Italian literary collective Wu Ming, the people behind novels like Q and 54 (which is very much on our ‘to-review’ list). Wu Ming I (there are five of them) has just published a thoughtful piece where he attempts to define what [...]