An unforgettable gift
Geoffrey Eugenides notes in the introduction that the reader may find the novel “a big, happy mess, a heady farce”. Let me add the following: If one opens the Gift of Humboldt (ed. Gutenberg) on a random page, he will be carried away reading, not particularly interested in the episodes he has missed. This is […]
Histories of Symposiums
OUT OF CURIOSITY MORE and less than real interest, I like to leaf through the novels that attempt to approach the ancient Greek world, usually written by fascinated Hellenists, whose scholarly interest eventually ends up in fiction. The result is usually average. (As in the cinema, such attempts are usually bad.) No wonder. The ancient […]
Routes: The heart of Europe beats between Strasbourg and Basel
Girls on the Rhine. They spread the shimmering sunscreen on their bodies and their towels on the concrete, almost under the bridge. Boys on the Rhine. They take a long dive and surface a few meters away from where they dived. Rushing water. A white, furry pug worries, barks and dives. He shakes his hands […]
Sanctuary: An immersive series about the Japanese sport of sumo
Violence, discipline, sweat and adrenaline. These are the key ingredients of a series that aspires to show the rest of the world what really goes on behind the scenes of a 2,000-year-old Japanese sport that few of the rest of us really understand. In order to achieve this, Asylum respectfully “borrows” elements from both ancient […]
Navigation: The boats that “unite” the Aegean
This will not be an objective report… The bulletin said “unsettled weather on all seas”. I dug out of my closet the winter one, the thickest one. I remember my grandfather, who used to say “You can always take off your clothes, but you can’t get a capsule”, when he would start, in the early […]