La bontà in trionfo

Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction gets reviewed in literary journals, awarded literary prizes and included in Top 100 Best Novels lists. It means that – after Alexievich (documentary non-fiction) and Dylan (song lyrics) – we’re back to the world of novels and short stories, with an occasional drop of poetry.

A more interesting phenomenon than the Nobel committee’s return to business as usual is Haruki Murakami’s persistent candidateship. I read two or three of his numerous novels about fifteen years ago. It’s been a couple of years since I realized I didn’t remember anything from those novels, anything but three disjointed details. The title “Sheep Hunting,” a young lady stuck on an observation wheel on a cold night, and cooking pasta for breakfast to the sounds of Rossini’s prelude to La Cenerentola.

And even this I remembered incorrectly: the famous snare drums came from the overture to La gazza ladra, or La Pie voleuse, or The Thieving Magpie. Or, in Russian, Soroka-vorovka, which also happens to be the title of Alexander Herzen’s 1846 novella, a sad and hopeless story.

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