Books to read. The revenge of the males – iO Donna
THE four books to read have been conceived, written and created by women. They are emotionally charged, they are reflective. they are bold, provocative, they are feminine, but not necessarily feminine, reflections of our time.
Beyond the sexuality, beliefs, lifestyles. They are writers who take the moral and aesthetic time to write as they think.
An exploration between generations and cultures. The only exception: a fictionalized biography of the photographer Dorothea Lange. A myth that we can continue to admire.
1 / Books to read. The truth of an instant
Why read it
Even those who are fasting in photography cannot fail to have crossed paths in her life the most famous image of Dorothea Lange, the one known as the “Migrant Mother”, a woman surrounded by her children duringa Great Depression in the 1930s, taken during his report for the Farm Security Administration.
It was about Florence Leona Christine Thompson (1903 – 1983), an American worker with seven children caught by photographer in a pea field in California.
In 2002 the image was sold for the first time at Christie’s New York for $ 141,500. In October 2005, an anonymous man bought negatives about the Migrant mother for $ 296,000, almost six times their estimated value at the first offer.
The famous “migrant mother” (Photo by Dorothea Lange / Getty Images)
In The truth of an instant Elise Hooper retraces the life, dreams and then career of the future photographer who, in 1918, at the age of 22, moved from the northeastern United States to a bustling San Francisco, determined to build her own path as an independent woman.
And, in fact, in a short time not only marries the talented but unpredictable painter, Maynard Dixon, but becomes the owner of a famous photographic studio enough to create the stage name of Dorothea Lange.
But in the early days of the 1930s the American economy collapses and her marriage also crumbles and so Dorothea Lange must find a way to survive together to her two children, thanks to her profession as a photographer.
Here because ventures with his camera, determined to portray the true conditions in which the country finds itself. This is how the images that inspired, reformed and defined an entire era were born.
In a historical moment in which women were destined to take care of the house, Dorothea Lange, creator of the most iconic images of the twentieth century, she defies all conventions to be different… But everything has a price.
Info. Elise Hooper. The truth in an instant. HarperCollins. 19 euros.
2 / Books to read. Amorous conversations
Why read it
Reading Rossana Campo is a statement. The Ligurian author is in fact a teacher in translating the language spoken between the lines of a book: torments, emotions and feelings they find their cradle in dialogues without filters and without useless self-censorship. On the other hand she is among the most Italian writers progressive and iconic of our time.
This time he goes back to the bookstore with Amorous conversations. Between music, friends, nostalgia, memories of old loves, art, analysis, group therapy.
The plot
The life of Lily, an Italian in Paris, is full and dense, but when she arrives the man in the tie with the giraffes, Philippe, a doctor who loves her well makes room for him too.
And it invites on impulse the mother, the exuberant Teresa, spending Christmas together with the idea of resuming it in a video which is his next artistic project.
Mom arrives with a bag full of CDs, her back thoughts, the usual veiled reproaches. It takes Lily a moment to regret having allowed her to invade her life, her home.
But there are conversations that at a certain point can no longer be evaded. And so, anxious and reckless, Lily faces them, against the backdrop of a wintry Paris with its Cézanne-colored skies.
Info. Rossana Campo. Amorous conversations. Bompiani. 14 euros.
3 / Books to read. The revenge of the male
Why read it
In bookstores since 1 July one of the best known books by the Turin writer Amalia Guglielminetti, first published in 1923, in which love, betrayal and revenge are intertwined in the decadent and dissolute lives of the protagonists, to then explode in a crazy night in which the revenge of the male passes, once again, through the body of a woman.
Amalia Guglielminetti is a writer, poet and playwright who grew up in the troubled cultural environment of Turin in the early twentieth centurywas an illustrious victim of that short circuit that tends to confuse the two floorsthe biographical and the artistic, and that he made sure that his works – and his powerful female figures – were labeled “erotic literature” and there they were confined, without the possibility of emerging with their strength, their dynamism, their dazzling modernity.
The plot
Liguria, early twentieth century. Baron Ugo di Sant’Agabio is a man addicted to the game and committed to fully enjoying the pleasures that life seems to constantly reserve for him.
When he falls in love with the cabaret entertainer Reré Lajoie thinks he has found his muse.
Senses and mind are tickled by this modern, independent woman, who loves to seduce rather than be seduced, who smokes, drinks and gambles.
Reré is the new woman of the twentieth century, so Ugo represents only a momentary fun. Theirs is a passion that is not meant to last.
Nora, Ugo’s shy and naive cousin, takes care of giving her the coup de grace who immediately bewitches him with her sweetness and a docility to which he surrenders more than willingly.
But Reré’s revenge is not long in coming, triggering a series of consequences that will lead to an unexpected, ferocious twist.
Info. Amalia Guglielminetti. The revenge of the male. 8th editions. 19 euros.
4 / Books to read. Help yourself
Why read it
From the title it is clear that it is a book of those who will leave their mark. The author, Lillian Fishman, was born in 1994 and lives in New York. She graduated from New York University with a BA in English Literature, where Zadie Smith followed her as a thesis tutor.
He also worked closely with Jonathan Safran Foer, Jeffrey Eugenides, Darin Strauss and David Lipsky. She is currently a fiction editor for The New Yorker.
Help yourself is his first novel.
They said of her: «An explosive combination of Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh with the acumen of Joan Didion. Lillian Fishman is not only a brilliant writer: she is a great thinker with a rare intuition. “
“Serving yourself does not linger in foreplay – it goes straight to the point, investigating the liquid frequencies of power and desire with a ferocious and profound gaze.”
The plot
Eve is thirty years old and lives in New York with her partner Romi, with whom he has had a stable relationship for years.
But obsessed with her own body, and looking for answers on what her purpose is for her, sex, one evening she decides to share her nude photos online.
That’s how he knows Olivia, a young Brooklyn painter, and, through Olivia, the charismatic Nathan, initiating an electrifying and disturbing threesome.
While he sinks deeper and deeper into a double life – extreme nights with Nathan and Oliviain which he explores the dynamics of jealousy between women and male desire, and the security of existence next to Romi – Eve has to deal with questions that never cease to haunt her: who is in control, and what does it mean to be in control?
What does sex mean for us? How to reconcile what we want with what we should want? How to follow our desires, and to whom are we responsible?
For Eve, there are no simple answers – just a continuous path of discovery, dangerous and exciting.
Lillian Fishman dissects the concepts of desire, gender, attention, intimacy, vanity and power, incidendoli on the skin of its protagonists and enter the liquid territory of sex and sexuality with ruthless elegance.
Info. Help yourself. Lilian Fishman. Editions E / O. 17 euros.
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