Monday, January 16, 2017

Good commentary

I suppose every writer hopes to have readers, people who will take the time to go page after page unraveling the mystery of language and its ability to communicate in reading what was created in writing.

Like a music score in front of the interpreter, the literary text waits for the reader to play its melody and recreate with it the world of concepts, actions and emotions, impressions and images every literary work composes with only words, the words of our everyday language.  

Good interpreters, enthusiastic readers are what every writer hopes to have. Few are the ones who know of their readers or hear from them; none can be sure that someone has not only read, but enjoyed the experience as a personal enrichment, as an added wonder to their lives.

I should consider myself lucky to have received the following comment from someone who actually took my Under the Walnut Tree and for a few hours revived on her own mind the characters and their actions and desires. Someone who belonged for a short while to the world of my fantasy.

"I really enjoyed your novel--wrote this reader--, and have talked to NN, who was at your book reading the same evening I attended and we had a nice discussion over your novel. Have you started at least thinking of your second novel?… I sure hope so."

And, to be truthful, I also hope for the same.

Monday, January 9, 2017

Hopeful Fantasy












Reading should be fun and a source of joy. The intellect and sentiments should be engaged with ideas and emotions.

Both are very much present in my  novel Under the Walnut Tree, together with exhilarating flights of hopeful fantasy and an impressive geography.


Monday, January 2, 2017

A Novel of Youth

My novel, Under the Walnut Tree, was published some years ago.

I wrote it a year or so before as an exercise in evocation of an age most people remember as much better than what it was: the fleeting age of early youth.

In the novel reality is reproduced slightly differently as our everyday reality. The fictional characters, actions and places are more than representations of reality, the figurations of fantasy, as memory of the past has also transformed what it was in a dreamlike world of an ideal age, untouched by time.

In this, the novel follows a long tradition of narratives of youth.