frumiousb

The distance between government and its people and the them-and-us mentality it breeds, is central to any understanding of Italy. Everyone feels so badly treated, everything is so legalistic, that people feel justified in being a little lawless.
pg. 17

As mentioned before, this book was suggested by the excellent rhythmaning as a good read after our trip to Sicily this last year. It also came highly recommended by several Italian friends of mine here in the Netherlands. "Although," one of them remarked, "you could summarize the book neatly by saying that Jones hates Berlusconi."

"Is that a problem?" I asked.

She thought about it. "I hate him too, but it would be nice sometime to try to see an explanation about why people vote for him that doesn't make all Italians sound like idiots."

She may have a point. In any case, this book is quite critical of the Italian then and now Prime Minister, and that criticism informs a great deal of the text.

What I like best about The Dark Heart of Italy is that it doesn't spend its time waxing poetic about the history of art or the food. Jones combines short chapters about various episodes in Italian political and public life to build his larger arguments about modern Italy as a whole. The subjects range widely: from football to Padre Pio, he sketches scenes of dissent and corruption that stretch through the country.

It isn't a perfect book. I wasn't happy at all with the way that he (the editors?) used italics to switch between his previously published material (parts of the book initially appeared in The London Review of Books and Prospect and the text that was created for the book. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding completely what the italics were for, but I found it quite distracting and really very strange.

Still, I'd recommend the book pretty highly. It should be a particularly nice counterpoint to all the Italian travel books out there that wax poetic about the Tuscan sun and the history of pasta. I had many moments of amused recognition (particularly as he discusses traffic and Palermo) and it also helped me explain a lot what I see on my vacations in Italy.

( notes )

"I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other God."
pg. 43

( more )

Subtitle: Travels through the Hidden Villages of Sicily.

I picked this book up while traveling in Sicily.

I enjoyed reading this once back. I was close to many of these locations, and even if I didn't see the specific village or area mentioned, it was familiar enough for me to enjoy the descriptions. The book brought back a lot of impressions of the island, both good and bad. Maggio has a keen eye for capturing the moment of travel, and I enjoyed her anecdotes. I was particularly taken with how she sketched people and personality.

Unfortunately, I did not find her quite as skilled in terms of structure. Particularly towards the end I found that the chapters failed to flow well. The timelines seemed confused and at one point it seemed to me that we were being introduced to the same character for a second time (the American contortionist). It made it distracting, and was too bad for the reading experience.

I would recommend it as a light and quiet read, particularly if you enjoy travel essays or have Sicilian roots yourself. Good, but not brilliant.

I would be willing to bet that many of you have old books that come from your parents or grandparents sitting around that you have never read. I have a bunch of those, and every once in a while I take one out and decide to read it.

Village Work in India is part travel writing, part missionary writing. It tells about efforts of the writers to create a Christian community in British India. It isn't a very challenging book. Considering the age and the subject, it is also (relatively) inoffensive.

What was interesting for me was that the writer showed a reasonably high degree of self-awareness about the ethical uncertainty of their actions. He acknowledged the high level of Indian culture, and expressed their own unease at interfering in a civilization that had so much history. The logic for why they were needed goes like this: He argued that the caste system had degraded the lower castes to the point where they were incapable of coming to salvation from within the country's religion. He seemed to feel that it was possible for non-Christians to be saved, but not in situations where poverty and lack of education had caused people to revert to simple animism. Since the country's religion supported caste, they argued that the situation would have no possibility to reform on their own.

They must have been from a relatively liberal church (it is not specified from which variety of Christianity they come) because they also spend an awful lot of time on the rights of Women, particularly for a book written in 1902.

The descriptions of India were relatively interesting, but the writer left his own views of spirituality opaque, more about being a missionary than anything else. But still worth the time to finally read. I believe that this came from my grandmother's collection.

( read more )