What Shall I Read Today? Part 10

Night Film. Marisha Pessl, (2013)

I love when books keep you awake during the night, when you feel you have to read another page, finish another paragraph, then another chapter. Night Film plays with its readers exactly like this. It is built on many different layers which makes it accessible to every kind of reader. There's the detective story (which people who have loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy will adore), there are the film-experts quotes, there's New York as setting, there are mysterious places, and the book's format is modern and close to our reality which makes us get lost in it even more.
I am glad I found out a new writer whose words can be like knives, and who interplays with different media in her stories: Internet, newspapers, television, films in all their forms, blogs, everything.
Remember that when you are reading it almost nothing is as it seems, be ready to be surprised and puzzled until the very last page.

Favourite quotes:

"Will you curl up with your eyes closed and die? Or can you fight your way out of it and fly?"

"I looked like I wasn't at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off. Infinitely delayed."

"All of them walking around with holes where their hearts should be, wondering where they belong, what side they're fighting for."

"For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head."

"There might be a Starbucks on every corner, and an iPhone in every ear, but don't worry, people are still fucking crazy."

"Scientists look for aliens in the universe, but they're here. Aliens who pass for men. They've already invaded. For our own safety we should leave them be."

"It meant deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It's something you have to have before you die in order to have lived."

"She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you go hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain. She was always demanding of herself, Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe? From Prufrock. They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming away, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaid sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now. Ashley said it was the only way to live."

"We are nothing without our shadows. They give our otherwise pale, blinding world definition. They allow us to see what's right in front of us. Yet they'll haunt us until we're dead."

What Shall I Read Today? Part 9

Two, Irène Nemirovsky (1939)

Reading Irène Nemirovsky's novels is always like reading into myself, looking at myself in the mirror. One has to read her words seriously to understand how brutal her writing can be behind a surface of tenderness.
She wasn't afraid of words, and she wasn't afraid of life and death, she was fire in the blood.
Deux (Two), of which I couldn't unfortunately find any English translated quote, was published in 1939 and considered Nemirovsky's first romance novel.
The simplicity of the story leaves space to the extreme characterization and intensity of the protagonists. They are the reason why this is, in my opinion, one of the best stories about growing up ever written. It is a great study of the passage to adulthood, the passion of twenty-year-old people, the great love that can fade away with time and when a ring is put on your finger.
From these sketches of life we get to know Marianne, Solange, Antoine, Dominique, Gilbert and Evelyne.
I think this book hit me in particular way because, even though it is set in the post-First World War Paris, I am now twenty myself and I experiment their same feelings, the same hunger for life, to which the protagonists try to hold on to until the end.

"I met her in a kingstown bar

We fell in love I knew it had to end

We took what we had and we ripped it apart

Now here I am down in kingstone again

Everybodys got a hungry heart..."

(Bruce Springsteen, Hungry Heart)

She would have loved Springsteen's attitude towards the being young.

The opening quote is the only one I can rewrite in English, but I will write down some of my favourites in Italian anyways.

Favourite Quotes:

"We seek no more the tempest for delight,

We skirt no more tthe indraught and the shoal - 

We ask no more of any day or night

Than to come with least adventure to our goal..."

Rudyard Kipling, The Second Voyage

"Si baciavano. Erano giovani. I baci nascono in modo così naturale sulle labbra di una ragazza di vent'anni! Non è amore, è un gioco; non si insegue la felicità, ma un attimo di piacere. Il cuore non desidera ancora niente: è stato colmato d'amore durante l'infanzia, saziato di affetto. Che taccia, adesso. Che dorma! Che lo si dimentichi!"

"Niente può alterare lo splendore della gioventù."

"A volte prendeva un volume a caso, non lo leggeva ma lo apriva appena un po' e lo respirava, come si annusa il bouquet di un vino, poi lo rimetteva al suo posto, esattamente, e ne cercava un altro."

"Da giovani, in certi momenti in cui la felicità arriva al punto più alto, quasi doloroso, si è al tempo stesso attori e spettatori - spettatori inebriati, innamorati di se stessi."

"Solo la gioventù sa come vola il tempo. Più tardi, ci si abitua alla brevità della vita, come alla malattia, alla sfortuna, ma a vent'anni ogni istante che passa lo si vorrebbe trattenere, stringerlo a sè, come più avanti il bambino che cresce."

"Come sempre, quando si aspetta la morte di qualcuno che non è indispensabile alla nostra esistenza, al nostro stesso respiro, non si pensa tanto al morente quanto a noi stessi."

"Ogni essere umano si rassegna facilmente alla freddezza, all'indifferenza degli altri, a condizione di regnare in almeno uno o due cuori."

"Quando si cessava di tormentarsi l'un l'altro per volersi finalmente bene?"