Coming weeks

I'll be both travelling and working hard in the next couple of weeks. Not sure I'll be able to update the blog so I'm afraid I'll be in touch with you no sooner than end of month.

Ps. I must confess that Rembember me is not a crap book! It's been a pleasant reading so far, light, funny but not stupid. I'll bring it with me along with this one.

Karenina for dummies

I found out (page 236, Italian version) that Anna is pregnant. She tells V.(her lover and the baby's father) who politely discusses with her the opportunity of leaving her husband. However, she is even more tormented now as she is torned between two different and intense kinds of love: her first son who is more likely to stay with her husband and V. who makes her immensely happy. She is also trapped in the social restraints imposed by the culture and the society she lives is and does't know what to do.  Is the quest for happiness worth it? Can she live without her son? How can she deal with the conventions of the Russian society?

to be continued

Reading ...

And yet her soul was tortured, exposed. Even walking up the path to the church, confident as she was that in every respect she stood beyond all vulgar judgment, knowing perfectly that her appearance was complete and perfect, according to the first standards, yet she sufered a torture, under her confidence and her pride, feeling herself exposed to wounds and to mockery and to despite. She always felt vulnerable, vulnerable, there was a secret chink in her armour. She did not know herself what it was. It was a lack of robutst self, she had no natural sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her.

I pretend to be rigid

but in fact I'm not. I can't stick with "rules" not even with plans except for things/people I really care. In my dreams I'm a really strict goal setter, in reality I'm like everybody else, rigid and soft at the same time. So I have decided to "break the blog vacation rule" because honestly it doesn't make any sense if I miss writing! I miss writing and reading in English even though I'd made up another rule: reading in Italian for a little while. I'll have to write a book in Italian in the near future so... it's better to warm up! No way. I read a book in Italian and then yesterday night I switched back to my Lolita that is wonderful, disturbing and written in an amazing English (I always feel like crap when I read Nabokov knowing that he wasn't mother tongue!). Oh my, what a marvellous prose!

Nabokov is my uncle's favourite writer. I don't think I've touched "my uncle" issue here. In any case, he is one of the most important person in my life and did have an impact on my cultural background. I see him everyday (more than my dad who would be mad if he comes across this post!) and I can't even imagine my life without this brilliant, strange, amazing man. It's difficult to describe such a person, he is just my zio and I love him the way he is. All this to say that Nabokov is dear to me because of my uncle even though I haven't read all his books. Like Tolkien. The first book my uncle gave me when I was a child was The Hobbit and I still have that book.

More writing to come...