A Book To Heal: When Reading Cures The Soul

By Anna Ferrari

At first I only wrote these notes for myself. It was a difficult moment in my life, I was reborn after a period of darkness, where I had lost contact with reality to the point that I could no longer think or read, an activity that was, and is, the cornerstone of my life: I did not decipher the symbols on the page, they had lost their meaning, I did not remember, everything had been swallowed in the womb of suffering, and the more I tried, the more I failed, to the point of being terrified of picking up a book; every day the malaise plunged me deeper. It was chilling, sad, tormenting. Then I met a specialist who, like a good fairy, brought me back to the surface with love and intelligence; the first thing I did as soon as I felt better was reading. To prove to myself that my head was working again, at the end of each novel I wrote, at first with desperation, then with increasing pleasure, my comments to see if I could finally understand and remember what I was reading. I have two whole thick chunks of these comments, written straight away, with no other concern than talking to myself and reassuring myself.I was and am an avid reader, I have worked with books all my life, for this reason death and rebirth have passed through words. A few years after that period, I reread those comments and found in them both hasty, almost anxious writings, and others more stimulating. Over time, they revealed an inherent power to me; commenting on those books, I commented on myself, the myself that was found now in this, now in that story or novel. It is in this perspective that the analyzes contained in A book to heal are special: they are not the usual reading advice, perhaps thrown down for editorial needs, they are much more, they are confessions and therefore sincere appreciation or slashing of those books that have marked my path to healing. This exceptional character of theirs reveals to the reader a good book to read, and also marks the path that can be taken in difficult moments of life, because we are what we say, and what we read penetrates our depths and remains there until it gives its fruits that nourish the hope and the desire to succeed. Anyone therefore can retrace my path, and later can also add his own. In this way A book to heal was born, whose origin is therefore an act of love, and the words that compose it were written with love. Even the title gradually arose from the feelings I felt in reworking these texts, and I immediately adopted it as soon as it appeared. Inside the volume you will find a section in English, the result of another birth. A bit like everyone else, different personalities coexist within me: Anna, the writer, the Teacher, and so on. A few years ago another one was born: Aileen, who thinks, speaks and writes in English. In this capacity the writing becomes freer somehow, protecting Aileen's feelings and fears with a foreign language. Antonia S. Byatt, Jane Austen, Clarice Lispector, Nicola Lagioia are some of the authors I speak of, each of them has delicately shown me an unusual and surprising aspect of life, they have made me learn that life never ends, but it is always a harbinger of surprises and revelations. In conclusion, that phase of my life, which gave me A book to heal, taught me that nothing more than a book can give us back the love for ourselves and for the world, nothing more than a book helps us to build. our way and therefore our life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tektime
• Release date: Jun 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9788835437260

Book preview

A BOOK TO HEAL:

When reading cures the soul

by Anna Ferrari

©Anna Ferrari 2022, Un libro per guarire. Quando leggere cura l’anima

Traduzione dall’italiano all’inglese di brusco Elena

Books are a unique, portable magic *

*Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, page 104, Scribner, 2000

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FAMILY TIES, CLARICE LISPECTOR

JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS

THE FEROCITY, NICOLA LAGIOIA

POSSESSION: A ROMANCE, ANTONIA S. BYATT

OBLOMOV, IVAN ALEKSANDROVIČ GONČAROV

THE WILD PALMS, WILLIAM FAULKNER

INVISIBLE, PAUL AUSTER

XY, SANDRO VERONESI

THE COUNTERLIFE, PHILIP ROTH

SANCTUARY, WILLIAM FAULKNER

MUSIC OF CHANCE, PAUL AUSTER

THE CELESTIAL OMNIBUS, E. M. FORSTER

SUNSET PARK, PAUL AUSTER

INTRODUCTION

Sometimes life goes where it wants and overwhelms us, making us spin in the same way that waves can catch us close to the shore, wrapping us in their scrolls, before returning us to the beach a little wounded, in pain.

I remember that time for me as pain without interruption: I felt confused, rejected, isolated; then it passed and I suddenly found myself in the blinding light of day, unprepared and incredulous. To give me strength, I held on to what had been a consolation all my life: books. For months I was no longer able to read, I no longer understood the words, I did not remember them.

To assuage the thought that I was lost forever, I bought The Children's Book by Byatt and started reading it with the hunger of the undernourished. It was only when I realized that my mind still obeyed me that I found peace and read again with love. Later, I reread the notes I had written so as not to allow the mind to fly away: some were anxious, hasty, others more thoughtful. I collected them in this volume, made up of impressions, intuitions, comments born because of those enthusiastic and vibrant readings of new life.

The authors are not chosen in chronological or alphabetical order, but exclusively by meeting, that is, in the order in which I have read them, except for the English section which I have grouped separately.

This section exists because that is how these notes came about, and I have not found a reason to change them. If anyone wants to, find the translation here, but reading these texts should be an easy exercise for everyone.

The writers present are quite different from each other: there is the 2015 Strega Prize winner Lagioia, as well as Clarice Lispector, Jane Austen, A. S. Byatt, E. M. Forster, Paul Auster. What unites them are purely my own personal affiliations. They are all writers with whom I feel a deep bond and whom I gladly reread.

Lispector, the author of caustic and pungent short stories, taught me how much you can personally expand, how it is possible to turn a corner on the set perspective from which we look at the world. In particular, she showed me the potency that even small feelings caused by small events can have, so much so that they become disruptive and leave the reader with such an intimate sense of sadness and lack.

As for the pages on Jane Austen, they are a short rundown of her novels, because I love them very much, each of them, and I am amazed every time by how a woman who lived in solitude and rarely left the Country she lived in, had such an intense knowledge of the human soul. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, are the protagonists of this chapter.

Persuasion, the last that the writer gave birth to, is, I believe, particularly remarkable because of the way that Austen's narrative and themes evolve. They unfold with more depth and nuance compared to previous exploits, so that, in addition to the thousand times repeated theme of the marriage of love, in Persuasion there is something more, and that is the persuasion of oneself.

It is not just a matter of growth towards affective and emotional independence, but of a process that is at first the result of the persuasion of others, of self-conviction, of an incorrect interpretation of reality. In the unfolding of the story, however, those gestures, those words themselves are seen and heard in a mirror image. If the heroine (and the reader with her) had been persuaded that he was not her love, now it is she who persuades herself, after carefully looking at her true and natural behaviour, that he is her love, and therefore this belief, born from the depths, from a painful form of self-persuasion, will be steadfast and immutable, deeply lived, even if the two actors, Anne and Frederick, are no longer quite young, another characteristic that differentiates this from other Austenian novels.

Then there is Antonia S. Byatt. She would need no other introduction, much has been written about her, but the fascination that this writer works on me is such that I could not help but write about it, to comment on her most popular novel: Possession: A Romance.

What to say? Only that it is a novel that is hard to put down. The characters are complete and complex, all of them, but what most impresses is Byatt's extraordinary ability to meticulously describe a natural scene, a thought, an object, with richness and abundance of detail. Overabundance and verbalism are never present, there are all the essential details for that fraction of the world to become concrete, so much so that we could swear we saw with our own eyes that bush with all the strange shoots, flowers and berries, which there the author has outlined and named. The miracle of creation takes place on the page: naming a certain thing, describing it, it becomes real.

Byatt knows how to blend fiction and reality to the point that the reader is almost convinced that the characters she is reading about have really lived, going to seek further news to get to know them better. Unfortunately, of course, the research is fruitless. The charm, therefore, arises precisely from the fact that by flipping through the pages one builds, graphic sign after graphic sign, the architecture of a perfect, defined world in which we live in as long as we leaf through the pages of the volume.

The English section follows.

The first book with commentary is The Music of Chance by Paul Auster, a well-known American writer. A short novel written in 1990, belonging to absurdist fiction it has incongruent features, but they are not its distinctive component. At the heart of the narrative is one of the most beloved Austerian themes: chance, the accident that changes life unexpectedly and unpredictably. And the music that accompanies this turning point is real in the end, as if to announce