“The Nothomb style”

During a conversation at the home of mutual acquaintances, a man tells the protagonist Baptiste Bordave a kind of macabre anecdote, and advises him to pretend, in case someone dies accidentally in his house, that he was missing during the transport to the hospital, to avoid legal complications. . The next day a stranger shows up at his house and asks him for permission to call because the car stopped due to a breakdown; but suddenly dies while on the phone. Struck by the coincidence with the conversation of the previous day, Baptiste does not ask for help, indeed from the documents of the dead man he discovers that his name is Olaf Sildur, he is Swedish and lives in Versailles. He takes possession of his Jaguar and reaches a luxury villa that gives him the idea of ​​abandoning his insignificant life and assuming the identity of the deceased. The house is inhabited by Sildur’s wife, who gradually turns out to be a Frenchwoman whom the man saved from drug addiction. The wedding seems to be the cover for a job of welcoming guests passing through, probably secret agents, who alternate between one mission and another. Baptiste soon falls in love with the beautiful woman, who lives in an artificial intoxication caused by the large reserves of champagne in the villa. But Baptiste’s curiosity drives him to try to identify to whom Olaf Sildur made the last call from his home, attracting the attention of someone who perhaps wanted the landlord dead.

Through The Mirror

There she is, staring at me. Mocks me. “You are a reader of a hundred novels a year and yet you have never opened a book of mine”. I hear her whisper. And maybe someone could take me for crazy but I have always talked to books with books. I always thought that as they passed them they would call me to them. And often this is how I choose them.

Since I started working in the bookstore, imagine how many items …

Before you call a shrink and send me to recovery, know that books are my only addiction, so be cute and cuddly and indulge me.

Nothomb’s books have been changed shelves several times since I’ve been in the bookstore, one of my bosses suggested me over and over again to get one, but when I walked past I didn’t feel the right vibrations.

Until two days ago.

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Classics: “Pride & Prejudice”

Austen is considered one of the first to tell about the condition of women and the difficulties she encounters in wanting to be free from the usual patterns, the first to incriminate the fact that knowledge was exclusively male prerogative and how marriage was the only beach assigned to women to have respect and a certain self-sufficiency.

Through The Mirror

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”[1]

I have never been a big fan of love stories, but when, for school reasons, I had to read “Pride & Prejudice”, I changed my mind, not all the “pink” genre is to be discarded. There are stories that go far beyond simple sentimentality, that get inside, that transmit us so much that we want to reread them.

And so, it was with Austen’s novel, which I reread over and over until I could almost recite it from memory. Love stories are usually almost always the afflictions of little girls, attempts at emotional pornography when compared to the social anthropology that Austen develops novel after novel.

For two hundred years…

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“Wind, Violin And Spices”

  <<Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.>>[1]     The wind …

“The &phemeral necessity”

  Dear reader, people like me who come out from the humanities faculties prepare themselves to jobs defined USELESS from 98% of the population: we do not save lives as doctors, nor build houses such as architects or engineers, we don’t remove criminals from the streets as the lawyers do (should do). We take care …