Alessandro Baricco Questa Storia Pdf Free
Emmaus is the first novel by Alessandro Baricco brought to this country by McSweeney's, although it is far from his debut. Translated from the original Spanish by Ann Goldstein, this version has been given a fresh coat of paint for a new audience with beautiful cover art from Robyn O'Neil.This scant novel will satisfy readers that appreciate some biblical imagery with their smut. While sex is central to much of the action of this novel, issues of class and faith form the thematic hea Emmaus is the first novel by Alessandro Baricco brought to this country by McSweeney's, although it is far from his debut. Translated from the original Spanish by Ann Goldstein, this version has been given a fresh coat of paint for a new audience with beautiful cover art from Robyn O'Neil.This scant novel will satisfy readers that appreciate some biblical imagery with their smut. While sex is central to much of the action of this novel, issues of class and faith form the thematic heart of the tight first person narrative. As you might expect from a novel that explores such fraught issues in a compact 140 pages, there isn't much time devoted to wrapping up. Readers that prefer to have their questions answered might find the last half of this book unsatisfying.The plot looks most like a tragedy, but the avoidable tragedy of Shakespeare rather than the inevitable tragedy of Sophocles.
If the death of Romeo and Juliet made your mouth water, you'll find the violent ends in this story delicious. I recommend this book with hesitation, because I feel it will appeal to a very specific audience. And while I am a part of this intended audience, not everyone has my high tolerance for sensless death, church lore and middle-class meditations. This story, set in modern Italy centers around five characters; four “good Catholic” lower-middle class boys and a young woman from the upper class described in the blurb as “hypersexual.” The young woman’s upper class status allows her to live in a different world and play by different rules, whereas for the boys, “it’s the only world we know: the swamp for us is normality. That’s why we’re able to metabolize incredible doses of unhappiness, mistaking it for the proper course of things.” But “ This story, set in modern Italy centers around five characters; four “good Catholic” lower-middle class boys and a young woman from the upper class described in the blurb as “hypersexual.” The young woman’s upper class status allows her to live in a different world and play by different rules, whereas for the boys, “it’s the only world we know: the swamp for us is normality. That’s why we’re able to metabolize incredible doses of unhappiness, mistaking it for the proper course of things.” But “she’s outside the boundary.”While they are still riding their bikes, the boys see her around town having sex in cars with older men. As they get older some of them have sex with her too.
When you consider the wide range of outcomes available to these young people ranging from going into the priesthood, committing suicide, committing murder, or getting addicted to drugs, let’s just say that their lives run the gamut and all are surprisingly unpredictable.A very short book (134 pages), translated from the Italian. There are religious overtones to the story, a kind of “what’s it all about?” theme, as flagged by the title: In the Gospel of Luke, Emmaus is a town where the resurrected Jesus appeared to two disciples. I'm definitely a fan of Baricco.
At one point, I read a review on the back of one of his books saying that he seems to be writing for a certain group of readers. He does, it's no doubt. His phrasing, the way he puts together ideas and stories at the limit of logic, even the choice of words: you either love it or hate it. So when I got Emaus.
You can say I was a little bit biased.Read it in a few days, as I did most of his books. And yes, I did like it very much.Without spoiling it I'm definitely a fan of Baricco. At one point, I read a review on the back of one of his books saying that he seems to be writing for a certain group of readers. He does, it's no doubt.
His phrasing, the way he puts together ideas and stories at the limit of logic, even the choice of words: you either love it or hate it. So when I got Emaus. You can say I was a little bit biased.Read it in a few days, as I did most of his books. And yes, I did like it very much.Without spoiling it for you, the story itself is about searching: oneself, the meaning of life and some kind of gentle way of evolving (a theme which I often found in Baricco's books).But it's not the story itself that's surprising, it's the tonality.
Less lyrical than usual, less intricate, his writing does create here a feeling of depth and maturity. The language has the same sophistication, but it's not as metaphoric, leaving more room for meaning than form.While most of Baricco's other novels end with a positive note, this one left me with a bitter aftertaste and the strange sensation of walking through mud: you know you're going to get on the other side, you know how, walking is not such a strange thing to do - it's just that something draws you back and you suddenly find it difficult. It's not the suffocating sadness as in Silk; here the end is open and can be hopeful. Far away.I highly recommend this book, but take my recommendation carefully - it's not an easy story and the writing of Baricco seems to be anything but classic. Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein is a coming-of-age novel. It features an anonymous teenaged narrator and his three friends, Luke, Bobby and the Saint. The fears, impulses, confusion and anxiety characteristic of adolescence are complicated for these boys by their thorough entrenchment into Catholicism with all its repression, sin and the terror of punishment.
The four come into contact with a world vastly different from theirs when they meet Andre, an exotic, ero Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein is a coming-of-age novel. It features an anonymous teenaged narrator and his three friends, Luke, Bobby and the Saint. The fears, impulses, confusion and anxiety characteristic of adolescence are complicated for these boys by their thorough entrenchment into Catholicism with all its repression, sin and the terror of punishment. The four come into contact with a world vastly different from theirs when they meet Andre, an exotic, erotic and troubled girl who upsets their lives. Using simple and often incomplete, declarative sentences, Baricco explores the divisions of rich/poor, young/old, secular/pious and Apollonian/Dionysian, often blurring the lines between faith, psychosis and fear. Reading adolescent coming-of-age novels when one is hopelessly mature, can be humbling, nostalgic and revelatory.
Is that how I got to be who I am? Baricco is a wonderful writer.
He has insight, wisdom, compassion, and sheer genius. Unfortunately, it is not to be found in this book. It starts well, promisingly, even. But begins to snowball downhill very quickly after.Written originally in Italian, this has been translated by Ann Goldstein and in all fairness, it is a neat job as far as translations tend to go. For context, in the Gospel of Luke, Emmaus is a town where the resurrected Jesus appeared to two disciples. Biblical ove Baricco is a wonderful writer.
He has insight, wisdom, compassion, and sheer genius. Unfortunately, it is not to be found in this book. It starts well, promisingly, even. But begins to snowball downhill very quickly after.Written originally in Italian, this has been translated by Ann Goldstein and in all fairness, it is a neat job as far as translations tend to go. For context, in the Gospel of Luke, Emmaus is a town where the resurrected Jesus appeared to two disciples. Biblical overtones and undertones resound throughout the book almost inescapably.This could be loosely described as a coming-of-age novel and revolves around, Andre, the mysterious, supersexual woman that is the stuff of teen dreams. Set in contemporary Italy, four male friends (Luca, Saint, Bobby - because he looks like he could be JFK's younger brother - and the narrator) in their teens -are obsessed at varying degrees with Andre who is beautiful, wealthy, and seemingly out of reach.
What is more enticing than that to a 17-year old boy-man? Especially ones that are neck deep in Catholicism replete with rich subtext of sin, punishment, oppressiveness, hellfire, and fear.While they cruise the town riding their bicycles, they see Andre in various compromising positions with several men. It's only a matter of time before they have sex with Andre too. An inevitability and somewhat predictable.
It is a collision of two worlds when the boys meet Andre who represents the erotic and mysterious. Andre herself is a troubled young woman whose introduction into the boys' lives spirals their unraveling.The novel's axis is the ancient trope of Biblical ideas of right and wrong with a healthy sprinkle of your regular neighbourhood sex scandal. Sex, smut, what have you, are the focal points of this slim novel. And that is where it is inherently flawed. This is a big subject, the vagaries of which have been debated for millennia and more.
Trying to Ziploc it into a compact -140 page novel(la) is going to leave you thirsting, hungry, and annoyed. If you are among those who are perfectly okay with open-endedness, this might please you just fine.The language is pithy, neat and quick to hit home. It is typical of Baricco's style which he will go on to hone and perfect in the novels to come (think Silk, the Iliad, Ocean Sea, and City).
I admit, reading coming-of-age novels when you're in your forties can mean anything. I never quite know what is going to hit me. How soft or hard it's going to feel. And if I will emerge the better for it, or not. Sometimes it is a glance over your shoulder at your own experience. Sometimes, it can bring a sense of dismay at what you lost out on.
Or it can just bore you to tears. I am caught somewhere between the three.To conclude, I quote fellow Goodread's member, Gjurgica whose review had me pointing at the screen exclaiming, 'Yes! That's exactly it! She says:'Emaus and Questa Storia are my least favourite books by Baricco.
Alessandro Baricco Written Works
They give me the soury and distasteful feeling as if I've eaten a lot of chocolate and come back for more because of its sweet taste, but all I get is heartburn.' The central problem is wish fulfillment. Imagination only takes you so far.
We’ve built a fascinating culture of images, literature and movies around this razor edge. A very illuminating work on this matter is Alessandro Baricco’s Emmaus. It is a short novel set within the very rigid, iconic present of Catholic Italy. The characters continually inscribe the outlines of their existence through monotonous daily ritual. Four boys– a teenage narrator with the hindsight of an adult, Luca, Bobby and t The central problem is wish fulfillment. Imagination only takes you so far.
We’ve built a fascinating culture of images, literature and movies around this razor edge. A very illuminating work on this matter is Alessandro Baricco’s Emmaus. It is a short novel set within the very rigid, iconic present of Catholic Italy. The characters continually inscribe the outlines of their existence through monotonous daily ritual.
Four boys– a teenage narrator with the hindsight of an adult, Luca, Bobby and the Saint are best friends. Their working, middle class parents cannot afford tragic destinies. Their grandfathers live forever, buying pastries every Sunday at the same shop.
As their story unfolds, the routine of school, church, work and family meals is exposed as a carefully scripted performance. “In the distance, beyond the habitual, in a hyperspace they know almost nothing about, there are others, figures on the horizon.” These others are the rich and amoral—a girl named Andre’s people. Her attempted suicide, as well as her family’s tragic history, has transformed Andre into an icon above reproach. It has also enabled her to renounce the rules and restrictions of Catholicism for an alternate world that gravitates around Andre’s own bizarre and magnetic performance as sexual muse and martyr. When a carefully scripted Catholic world clashes with the improvised and amoral world, the four boys find that they cannot exist in either.Bound by their faith, as much as their parents’ working class status, the boys emerge from innocence. Unaware of the hypocrisy of their own performances, as well as that of their carefully enacted home life, they’ve stumbled along with the promise that their right actions sustain what the narrator calls the Kingdom. With exposure to parental depression, attempted suicide, prostitution, and debauchery, the carefully inscribed parameters of their boyhood become warped.
Emptying the urine bags of impoverished men they call “the larvae” in the local hospital; taking improvised hikes into the mountains without enough water or food; and playing anodyne music with their band at mass does not alleviate their increasing hopelessness. “So it’s not good action, Bobby said, it’s an action and that’s all.
It has nothing to do with doing something good.” Feeling impotent with this realization, all the boys eventually give up their rituals of penitence. One by one the boys are awakened to this fallacy. They flirt like butterflies riding their bikes around the town whores and transvestites, eventually befriending them but never going all the way. They cannot reconcile their emerging adulthood with their increasingly small and unsuitable Catholic identities.(for more, read my essay here.
Alessandro Baricco’s short, intense tale of an obsession shared and nurtured by four Catholic schoolboys is a book which brooks inevitable comparison with Jeffrey Eugenides’ ‘The Virgin Suicides’.Equally inevitably, perhaps, it comes off worst. While Eugenides’ extraordinary work provided a rich, warm, tragic peaen to adolescence and its countless torments, ‘Emmaus’ is deeply philosophical, acutely religious and a more difficult work to love.The object of the boys’ obsession is a loc Alessandro Baricco’s short, intense tale of an obsession shared and nurtured by four Catholic schoolboys is a book which brooks inevitable comparison with Jeffrey Eugenides’ ‘The Virgin Suicides’.Equally inevitably, perhaps, it comes off worst. While Eugenides’ extraordinary work provided a rich, warm, tragic peaen to adolescence and its countless torments, ‘Emmaus’ is deeply philosophical, acutely religious and a more difficult work to love.The object of the boys’ obsession is a local girl called Andre, who has tried to kill herself and is reknowned for going with local men. Unlike the six tragic figures in Eugenides’ epic, Andre is far from off limits, at least in a physical sense.The boys, led by The Saint, who intends one day to be a priest, have rendered themselves outcasts by the strength of their faith: they play in a church band and volunteer in the urology ward of a local hospital where they change the catheter bags of dying old men. Yet this is a faith which Andre’s very availability forces them to question.As you would expect from one of Italy’s top novelists, Emmaus is a fine, sharply written story, scattered with moments of devastating simplicity. But it lays on the religious quandary a little too thick, saddling these boys with an often barely believable burden.
Alessandro Baricco Questa Storia Pdf Free Youtube
Where Eugenides let emotions do the talking, Baricco wades deep into issues of faith and dogma which in my view somehow misses the point, bleeding it of the youthfulness which made ‘The Virgin Suicides’ so great.It’s a shame, because the book’s prologue promises something all together more alluring:The red sports car made a U-turn and pulled over in front of the boy. The man in the driver’s seat maneuvered calmly; he seemed to be in no hurry, to have no thoughts. He wore a stylish cap, the car’s top was down. He stopped, and with a graceful smile said to the boy, Have you seen Andre?Andre was a girl.The boy misunderstood, he thought the man wanted to know if he had seen her in general, in life – if he had seen how marvelous she was. Have you seen Andre?
Like a thing between men.So the boy said yes.Where? The man asked.Given that the man continued to smile, in a way, the boy continued to misunderstand the questions. So he answered, Everywhere. Then it occurred to him to be more precise, and he added, From a distance.Frankly, if 'The Virgin Suicides' didn’t exist, I think I would have admired this book a lot more. It’s readable, thought-provoking and relatively satisfying.
But I would still have finished with the nagging feeling that ‘Emmaus’ had not made the most of its opportunity. In Andre, Baricco has created a fantastic character who deserved a much greater chance to shine. On the back cover there's a blurb by Chris Adrian calling 'Emmaus' a 'Virgin Suicides' about adolescent boys, and I think that's a great description. There's definitely a surface similarity between the two books, but whereas the communal 'we' narrators of Eugenides' book were the town kids viewing the Lisbon sisters from afar, the four teenage boys in 'Emmaus' fixate on a single girl, Andre, a free spirit who seems to have a destructive effect on the men (and boys) she meets. This seems more a c On the back cover there's a blurb by Chris Adrian calling 'Emmaus' a 'Virgin Suicides' about adolescent boys, and I think that's a great description. There's definitely a surface similarity between the two books, but whereas the communal 'we' narrators of Eugenides' book were the town kids viewing the Lisbon sisters from afar, the four teenage boys in 'Emmaus' fixate on a single girl, Andre, a free spirit who seems to have a destructive effect on the men (and boys) she meets. This seems more a collateral damage, as Andre doesn't intentionally try to be malicious.
If anything, she's kind and generous. She's one of those rare, captivating teenagers who is equal parts beautiful, carefree, and indifferent to what others think of her. But this is exactly the problem. Andre seems to have no real sense of her hold over others. In Baricco's book, the boys, rather than the object of their interest, become the focus. The narrative is ostensibly told by a single unnamed teen, but the 'we' pronoun is used throughout, which struck me as entirely appropriate.
At this age, more than any other, boys do form tight-knit collectives, going everywhere together, bound up in each other's lives. This seems to be the premise of 'Emmaus,' this bond of innocence. There's a point where adulthood splits off from childhood, splintering such groups. Andre in this case (and everything she represents-lust, sex) is the triggering event. The book is set in Italy, and these are good Catholic boys, which only adds to the misery of their infatuation.
Morality and hypocrisy all play a part, deepening the conflict. The boys even do self-inflicted penance by climbing mountains or changing catheters at the nursing home. Despite the teens being a single, cohesive unit, Baricco manages to give each of them-Luca, The Saint, Bobby, and the unnamed narrator-distinct personalities. The book's eventual tragedies touch us and seem very real, this despite a beautifully lyrical, nearly Biblical prose that gives the story a dreamlike quality.
I don't know if full credit goes to Baricco or if the translator deserves part, but the writing at the sentence-level was stunning, comparable to Denis Johnson or Cormac McCarthy. 'Emmaus' is one of those books where you can turn to any page at random and be wowed by the prose. Baricco makes each word count in this slim novel that merits repeated reads.