Sacha Naspini

He was a humble cobbler in a small Italian village, missing three fingers. He knew everything about the village people, reading their lives in the wear and tear of the shoes they brought to him for repair.

He was secretly in love with his neighbor Anna, whose son, to whom Rene had been like a surrogate father, had joined the Partisans and was killed by the Wehrmacht.

The bishop had a villa near the town and allowed the Nazis to house prisoners there before they were shipped to concentration camps.

“Everywhere there was fear, poverty, rationing,” starvation making people desperate.

There’s only one way to get over grief.
Which is?
Finding purpose.
from The Bishop’s Villa by Scha Naspini

Rene was an unlikely hero. He badly repairs the Nazi’s boots, sharpening nails and misplacing them to cause pain. But it is his covering for Anna’s absence after she joins the Partisans that leads to his arrest and imprisonment in the Villa. It becomes a place of horror, but also where he discovers a soldier forced to serve the Fascists he hates, and a sense of purpose.

Twenty years later, the town had collective amnesia about what had taken place in the Villa. His friend tells him, “You need to find a way to look at yourself in the mirror. So, you make a silent pact with the others and decide that nothing happened.”

The novel is based on history. “Between 1953 and 1944, a hundred or so Italian and non-Italian Jews destined for the extermination camps were held prisoner in the Roccatederighi seminary,” the author informs in the Author’s Note. The government covered it up and it wasn’t until 2008 that a commemorative plaque noted the villa’s history.

We are reminded again how atrocities committed are too easily swept aside and forgotten, for we are loathe to recall our own worst acts.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through Edelweiss.… (more)

*3.5

”I would've cut my veins to wake up in the morning, find you in my bed, and say, 'Good morning, my love.' But no. For you, I was a pastime."

Books like this keep me sane. I really thought I was getting a story about a woman and her disabled chicken, but instead got handed a fable of two former lovers on an extended phone call over four decades after the affair. I think we all have people that we can imagine in that scenario—Reading about women able to stand up for themselves (and then navigate relationships) with the people that have hurt them makes me feel good. I love Nives.

❤️ ❤️ ❤️… (more)

A noted professor of anthropology - a widowed father of a young son- has a dark other life. He's captured and imprisoned an 8 year old girl in a shipping container. Fourteen years on, she's discovered alive..
In different strands, the fallout of the event is described.
The professor's son, struggling to understand and reconcile the caring parent with the monster...his fixation on the girl now, and the guilt...
The girl's mother, with issues of her own, learning to cope with the traumatized adult who's returned to her life.
Laura herself...cast out of the womb-like container into a bright swarming world.
And one further character...
Cleverly constructed, packs a punch.… (more)

Nives by Sacha Naspini was first published in 2020, and is now being issued by Europa Editions in a translation from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford with the title Tell Me About It. It is a wicked little novella which can be read in one sitting, but which packs a punch and leaves a bittersweet aftertaste, not unlike a shot of grappa.

The book starts off quite wackily. On the very first page, Nives’s husband Anteo Raulli dies in a rather macabre accident on their farm in rural Tuscany. Once the funeral is over, and her daughter Laura goes back to Languedoc where she lives with her French husband and children, Nives tries to ward off loneliness by bringing her favourite hen Giacomina to live with her inside. Nives is surprised to notice that the hen’s company makes up more than adequately for Anteo. One night, however, Giacomina seems to fall into a trance. Panicked, Nives phones Loriano Bottai, the local vet who has cured the Raulli’s farm animals for decades. As the phone call proceeds, we realise that that Nives and Loriano share a colourful history beyond a pure professional relationship. It will be a night of shocking revelations, nostalgic reveries, painful discoveries and brief moments of unexpected tenderness.

To be honest, none of the characters come across as particularly endearing – certainly not, to my mind, the acidic Nives or the spineless Loriano. But I’m not one who believes that a story needs “lovable” leads to be engrossing. Indeed, the dark humour of the barb-filled dialogue between Nives and Loriano is what gives this novella its particular flavour.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2022/04/Tell-Me-About-It-Nives-Sacha-Naspini....… (more)