Review: La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, translated by Michele Hutchison

La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison (Deep Vellum, 418 pages, March 15)

"La Superba"- an apt nickname for the labyrinthine, kaleidoscopic city of Genoa. As one of Pfeijffer's characters elaborates, this nickname has many meanings: "superb and reckless, beautiful and proud, alluring and unapproachable."

Thus are we thrown into the meta-novel that is La Superba, a work concerned with identity and reinvention, immigration, loss, language, writing, and the murky territory of love and sexuality. Pfejffer has made himself the narrator, and the novel we hold in our hands is, according to him, simply a compilation of letters that he writes to an unidentified friend back home in the Netherlands. He often says something like "if I wrote this novel, I would change x or y," which never fails to give the reader a very slight but noticeable case of literary vertigo.

In Italiano: Italian Lit in the News

I love Italy for many reasons: it has given us opera, a beautiful spoken language, pasta, some kick-ass literature, and many other things (I also married an Italian, so there’s that!). It should come as no surprise, then, that when I realized how much Italy was in the bookish headlines recently, I was molto eccitato!

(n.b. I audited Italian during grad school, but I don’t get much of a chance to use it, so I’m going to vocab-drop throughout this post- just lettin’ ya know).


Primo, if you haven’t heard the buzz around Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series (which will be adapted for tv soon, apparently), you’ve been living on Mars or something. This four-part story about friendship, love, and family has taken America by storm, and the obscurity of the writer’s identity makes the quartet even more tantalizing. How have I not read any Ferrante yet, you ask? Three reasons: twins and a baby.

ANYWAY. I’m feeling a bit warm these days, so Ferrante Fever is definitely getting a hold on me. Imma check these books out.

Reading Across Italy

Italy: the birthplace of opera and home of outrageously yummy food. But, of course, this country that is shaped like a boot kicking a ball also produces some fantastic literature. I mean, Dante and Boccaccio, am I right?!

But let’s fast-forward a few hundred years. Some modern Italian authors with name recognition in the United States include Umberto Eco and Elena Ferrante, but who else is taking the Italian reading public by storm? Who else has been translated into English recently and is burning up bookstore shelves? Well, it’s a good thing you decided to drop by:


Timeskipper by Stefano Benni, translated by Antony Shugaar (Europa Editions, 2008)

Many coming-of-age stories involve young people learning important life lessons from mistakes or new experiences. Timeskipper is not like these stories. Rather, Benni, known among Italian readers for his satirical style, imagines what would happen if a young boy was given the ability to see into the future/possible futures. This is a tale of innocence versus corruption and the joys of the past versus the anxieties of the present, and the title is pretty cool, too.