Black September, by Sandro Veronesi (Florence, 1959), is a coming-of-age novel, but above all it is a novel about the traumatic end of childhood. For the protagonist, Gigio Bellandi, son of an archetypically Italian criminal lawyer (a good guy with worldly vitality) and an exuberant Irish mother (fair-skinned and red-haired) with a much stronger character than she appears, the summer of 1972, which like every year he spent in a small town on the Tuscan coast with his parents and younger sister, marked a before and after in his life. He was twelve years old then, and now that he is sixty he remembers it in great detail. Not until the last pages will we know exactly what happened to him, but from the beginning we will be clear that that decisive summer represented for Gigio the best and the worst of life: the beginning of becoming a man through the fullness of reciprocal love and seeing how his whole small paradise world was shattered by the selfishness and weaknesses of the adults.Considering the plot materials it is made of, Setembre negre, translated into Catalan by Pau Vidal with the very vivid rigor he has accustomed us to, could have been a short novel –quick, agile, condensed and intense–, but it is noticeable that, in addition to telling a story, the author has also wanted to reconstruct a world and an era, that of his pre-adolescent Italy (sports idols, summer routines, musical discoveries), and for this reason the novel is long, detailed, with meanders, always lively but, at times, narratively ceremonial. This narrative and formal option may be a bit wordy in some passages, but in the long run it adds dramatic force to the climax. It also gives the work as a whole that sediment of humble but transcendent wisdom that springs from deeply examined and meticulously distilled experience.A man who remembers, a voice that tells

Two are the main virtues of Black September. The first is the tone of the narrative voice, evocative without nostalgic complacency, reflective in a passionate and robust way. It is a persuasive and warm voice that makes everything it explains interesting, whether it invents pastimes and sun-and-beach routines or reproduces cataclysmic conversations spied on in secret. It is the immense power of literature when it is, purely and simply, a character who remembers and a voice that tells. The second virtue is a gallery of memorable supporting characters: the well-matched marriage of the parents; Astel Raimondi, the girl with whom Gigio discovers the complete happiness of first love; Astel's parents; the anarchist uncle and his example of dignity and resistance; Gigio's discreet and wonderful little sister... They are supporting characters who complement and enrich the protagonist without ever being subordinate to him.In a novel in which for almost three hundred pages the revelation of an exceptionally dramatic event is announced and postponed, there is a risk of not satisfying expectations. This is not the case with Black September: the final revelation and the mix of subtlety and explosiveness with which Veronesi recounts it are admirable and totally effective. The lesson – let's call it a lesson – of it all, moreover, is wise and resonates with great force, and speaks to us, implicitly, of the fatal error of resentment and the heroic feat of forgiveness.

]]>

The history of literature is full of phenomena that we could qualify as miraculous. One of my favorite literary miracles is that of that Polish sailor named Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski who, in English and under the pen name of Joseph Conrad, wrote some of the most vibrant, intelligent, and morally audacious novels of his time.Son of a noble Polish family, Conrad was born in 1857 in present-day Ukraine, then part of the Tsarist Russian empire. As a teenager, he already felt the call of the sea, and at sixteen, he embarked for the first time in Marseille. It was the beginning of a seafaring life that would span two decades and take him to navigate, enlisted in the British merchant fleet, all over the globe, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Far East, passing through Africa and India, first as a sailor, then as a first mate, and finally as captain.Now an English national, and nearing forty, Conrad replaced the helm, sails and oceans with pen, ink and paper, and wrote a series of novels and stories as exceptional as Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, or An Outpost of Progress. Masterpiece after masterpiece. It must be said, in any case, that Conrad's miracle is partly explained by the fact that his parents, very cultured Polish nationalists, motivated him to read from a young age, especially in French and English. All the miracles of talent are based on the solid foundation of many hours of dedication, passion, and work, and the writer Conrad knew this because the sailor Conrad had learned it.A tribute "to the imperishable sea"

In 1906, when he had already gained prestige as a fiction author, Conrad published The Mirror of the Sea, a beautiful and moving maritime memoir that Veles i vents has now published in Catalan in a translation, as sound and rich as ever, by Ferran Ràfols Gesa. In this book, Conrad does not aim to make a linear and complete autobiographical reconstruction of his professional career as a merchant sailor, but rather to evoke the world, the human fauna, the adventures, the ethical and existential lessons, the knowledge and skills, the duties and demands, and the professional and community codes that made him the man he was. In the initial note, Conrad says the book is a tribute “to the imperishable sea, to ships that no longer exist and to the simple men of a time that has passed”. The tone of the passage, epic and poetic, pragmatic and moved, is what permeates the entire book.Conceived and structured as a mosaic in which the chapters follow each other more by thematic association than by narrative logic or chronological imperative, there are two great themes in El mirall de la mar: the evocation of the world of navigation before the radical transformation brought about by mechanization, and the explanation of ways of working (“the boat is not a slave, you have to make it feel comfortable at sea, it has to be the center of your thoughts”) essential to successfully carry out such an important and risky task. This, along with all sorts of anecdotes, reflections, and characters, is cemented thanks to a vision and diction that are pure Conrad. They are a vision and diction that see and tell the world in a lucid and emotional way, with all its endeavors and dangers, with all its glories and storms.

]]>

In How to Write About Africa and Other Texts, a collection of articles and chronicles available in Catalan from Eumo Editorial, translated by Martí Sales, the Kenyan journalist and writer Binyavanga Wainaina (Nakuru, 1971–Nairobi, 2019) offered a long list of recommendations to white Western authors on how to write about the African continent. The list was sarcastic: it caricatured the ignorant clichés, the biased reductionism, and the hypocritical, redemptorist paternalism with which we white Westerners tend to approach the so-called "black continent". Furthermore, the list served Wainaina to implicitly assert the vast and immensely rich complexity of authentic Africa. Some of Wainaina's phrases: After reading Wainaina's text, it is impossible not to consider it as a yardstick to measure the ethical and moral credibility and the cultural and intellectual insight of books set in Africa written by white authors. Such as, for example, the novel The Trophy, by the Belgian author Gaea Schoeters (1976). From a plot point of view, the materials Schoeters handles are extremely risky, cliché-ridden, Hemingway revisited and subtly infused with Joseph Conrad: an American white hunter, who has made a fortune by investing in the stock market, has bought the permit to hunt a black rhinoceros, the missing piece in his extensive collection of trophies and the gift he wants to give his beloved wife, who awaits him in New York while he is in Africa. Extremely risky and cliché-ridden, as I said. But Schoeters, aware of the pitfalls she can fall into – crude and condescending simplifications, but also the Manichean and self-punitive romanticization of the guilty white person – overcomes the test with flying colors. That Schoeters is a bold author is demonstrated by the fact that her white hunter protagonist's name is Hunter White, which in English means "white hunter". A thriller unfolding in a progressively ominous way

There are two reasons that explain why El trofeu is not only not a mediocre novel about Africa (touristified fiction, postcard literature) but is also an excellent novel. The first reason is that the properly novelistic elements function like a gear in which everything is in place and works in a resounding and fluid way: the plot, a thriller, unfolds in a progressively ominous manner; the characters, both white and African, have a dense psychological and moral background, are loaded with reasons for being as they are and for doing what they do, and also have a representative weight of the civilizations and worlds to which they belong without ceasing to be unique individuals; and, finally, the prose, agile and muscular, concrete and atmospheric, is a suitable vehicle both for the exploration of serious moral dilemmas and for the narration of action and adventure situations and scenes.The second reason is more difficult to summarize, but it is even more decisive: it is the essayistic dimension that, in a settled, always astutely incorporated way, is present in El trofeu and makes it more than a novel. This essayistic dimension, which never erupts in the form of an excursus but always appears integrated into dialogues, actions, and thoughts, gives an exhaustive and plural vision of the contradictory and often tragic African reality: ecosystems, business forms, animal and human predators, languages, rites, cultures, history, gods, struggles and coexistence, what is ancestral and what is geopolitical... In El trofeu, hunting is the axis around which memorable experiences (in the best sense of the word, and also in the worst) and a fascinating world are articulated.

]]>

One of the most controversial aspects of both the articles and the television and radio appearances of Empar Moliner (Santa Eulàlia de Ronçana, 1966) are her criticisms of certain discourses and positions of feminism, discourses that, according to the writer, reinforce clichés (that of the strong male and that of the helpless and weak female), erase nuances and ignore differences and similarities between men and women. It is known, however, that preconceived ideas, personal convictions, or the clarity with which journalistic collaborations are made are never exactly the same as those with which literature is written. Bearing this in mind, it should not surprise us that Moliner's new novel, Instructions for Living Without Her, takes an element or motif that feminism always places at the center of its discourses – that of the woman burdened with duties and responsibilities who deforms, violates, and enslaves herself to the extreme in order to care for hers – and makes it its dramatic core.The plot premise of the novel is a bit convoluted, but it offers a lot of possibilities both from a narrative and formal point of view, as well as regarding the explanation of social codes and the psychological exploration of characters. The protagonist, Clàudia Pruna, is an author in her late fifties who has enjoyed considerable professional success for years: she writes novels that sell well, collaborates with TV and radio, publishes a daily newspaper article, has loyal readers... The common points with Moliner herself are quite evident, but they end there and, in reality, the question of whether the character is or is not a transcript of the author is of no importance.What is important is that the protagonist has just received a terminal medical diagnosis, knows that she will die in a few months, and suffers from the double economic and logistical hardship her family will face when she, the caregiver who changes her grandson's and grandmother's diapers and the provider who pays the bills and the mortgage, can no longer care for or provide. In what would be a particularly grim and harsh version of the mental load that many women have to manage in their daily routine, Clàudia Pruna makes an extravagant and radical decision: to continue acting as a caregiver and provider posthumously. This is why she spends her final months of life writing articles to be published after her death, this is why she instructs an admiring reader to learn to write like her (so she can continue producing and sending articles when she is no longer there), and this is why she devises a very complicated plan for her to be buried without the news of her death becoming public.A dysfunctional family

From these materials, Moliner constructs a convoluted but plausible artifact, dense yet agile, self-aware yet alive, in which the narrator's voice of the admiring reader, who is the one telling the story, overlaps with Pruna's voice, in which reflections on language go hand in hand with observations about society, in which the fragile and tormented male personality of the admiring reader contrasts with the decisive and hedonistic personality of the writer Pruna, and in which concerns for the family's well-being coexist with the description of an absolutely dysfunctional family life and, even, in an unstoppable process of degradation: the apathetic and neglectful husband, the very young and irresponsible daughter, the already very decrepit grandparents... The general picture is grotesque, and Moliner does not hesitate to emphasize it with details full of malice (the admiring reader's almost vaginal micropenis, the husband's tractor accident while picking his nose), but at the same time compensates for it with the protagonist's vitality and with gestures of unsentimental but profound tenderness. Moliner's elastic and concise prose, refined yet substantial, helps to shape and express a novel that is deeper and more ambitious than the title and editorial design might suggest.

]]>

The criteria and decisions of the Nobel Prize in Literature are always quite unpredictable, but seen with the perspective that a century has given us, the Nobel awarded to Grazia Deledda in 1926 is still somewhat incomprehensible. Not because she was not literarily deserving, but because it seems that her condition as a Sardinian woman who wrote about the harsh and brutal reality of her native island was far removed from the committee of Swedish readers who had awarded George Bernard Shaw in 1925 and would award Henri Bergson in 1927. The prize only makes sense if we understand that Deledda was a peripheral writer who earned a place at the center of the Italian and European cultural landscape thanks to three merits and one concession: the merits of having talent, of doing a lot of work (she was the author of about thirty novels and four hundred short stories) and of achieving great international success, and the concession of renouncing her mother tongue, Sardinian, to write in the language, Tuscan-based Italian, that the reunification of Italy (1861) made official and imposed.The novel Cendra, originally published in 1903 and now presented in Catalan by Mercè Ubach in a translation that seems rigorous and with a prologue that contextualizes the work and the author, is a good entry point to Deledda's literary universe. A novel of passions and unshakeable community social codes, a story of primary characters and imposing landscapes, Cendra combines two literary traditions: that of popular storytelling and that of the nineteenth-century naturalist novel. We are closer, in any case, to the vivid anthropological drama of Giovanni Verga's verismo than to the analytical positivism, with its scientific gaze and socio-ideological background, ofÉmile Zola.Compensate for the brutality of a miserable world

In Cendra, Grazia Deledda demonstrates that she is an agile and vigorous storyteller and that she knows how to create a gallery of characters that border on the archetypal without falling into typological folklorization. She also demonstrates that she is a virtuoso of precise and exuberantly sensory descriptions. The paragraphs in which she describes the Sardinian landscapes bring to mind the untamed talent of a painter with a strong, imaginative, wild, and symbolic stroke. Deledda's verism, in this sense, has a poetic breath that compensates for the brutality of an often miserable world populated by characters who fight, insult each other, drink, curse, and commit suicide.The dramatic core of the plot is a classic of 19th-century literature, and it attempts to answer the following question: how can a child of guilt, a bastard son of an already married father and a mother who abandons him as a child, make himself worthy of a respectable life? The protagonist's adventure, Annania, who through the blows of fortune and thanks to a benefactor goes from rural Sardinia to the city of Cagliari and, afterwards, to the continent and Rome, resonates with Balzacian and Stendhalian echoes. Deledda, however, ensures that he never fully sheds either Sardinian reality or his Sardinian condition: the weight of inherited guilt, the sense of honor and dishonor, primal passions, the present as a projection of old atavisms, life as fate... Reading Deledda reminds us that true literature can spring from European capitals as well as from small villages on the most remote islands.

]]>

There are no infallible formulas, but it could be said that a good short story is one that, by showing us only a piece of the lives of its characters, is capable of telling us about their entire lives and personalities. This is true, at least, for short stories of realistic conception, tone, and perspective, let's say of the Flaubertian and Chekhovian tradition, a tradition that 20th-century American short story writers (Hemingway, O’Connor, Cheever, Updike, Carver, Munro, and an endless etcetera) developed and explored in a way as brilliant as it was influential. Eider Rodríguez (Errenteria, 1977) fits within this tradition.The six medium-length stories that make up his new book, Everything was the same hole, translated with the usual skill by Pau Joan Hernàndez, all share the same narrative mechanisms and address very similar human materials. With a clear prose, of contained intensity and with a devastating expressive precision – more sober and wise than showy and exuberant –, always within the coordinates of the everyday, with narrators in the first or third person, Rodríguez focuses his attention on brief sections – an evening, a few days, a few weeks, a little over a year – of his protagonists' biographies. They are biographical sections in which everything is about to change or go off the rails, moments in which the uncertain possibility or the exciting hope of another life is glimpsed.Rodríguez shows us her protagonists by touching upon the touchstone of a husband, a lover, a friend, a lifelong (lesbian) partner, neighbors, a group of strangers, or her own family, and is capable of explaining these relationships in a rich, suggestive, subtle, complex way. They are relationships crossed by changing moods, agitated by long-sedimented contradictory feelings, overwhelmed by incompatible emotions that nevertheless must be reconciled.Unbalance the reader's expectations

Perhaps the story that best defines Rodríguez's literary proposal is Canícula, which opens the book. The protagonist, Ixabel, is a woman in her fifties, existentially tired and bored, married to a husband with whom they talk more about his dental problems than about anything more or less pleasant, adventurous or loving. One day Ixabel goes to a nudist beach, meets a slightly younger man there, gets excited, and falls in love with him. From here, Rodríguez could build a melodramatic, passionate story, full of debasing secrets, the typical revival of adolescence in adulthood, but he does the opposite and builds a mature marital love story, in which adultery is nothing more than a fleeting and ultimately unimportant circumstance.The ability to break or at least significantly unbalance or relocate the reader's expectations is the house's trademark. Rodríguez is very good at concluding her stories with small, disconcerting but meaningful details: the girl who has said goodbye to her best friend and gets into her father's bed and hugs him with a beautiful and purest love (in "Mars and ruins"), the nocturnal caress that betrays a very deep crack in a supposed marital paradise (in "Duck Heart"), the small terminal push that casts a shadow of doubt over a lifelong love affair (in "The Crater"). Another of Eider Rodríguez's virtues is her skill in creating secondary characters with little narrative presence but great substance. Rodríguez knows the mechanisms of the short story genre as well as the mechanisms of the human heart.

]]>

The drawback of literary classics that have become universal cultural icons is that we already know them by heart. The virtue of literary classics that have become universal cultural icons is that they are so significant and fascinating that you never tire of them and can return to them again and again, which transforms the inconvenience of knowing them by heart into a blessing, an incentive, and an advantage.

]]>

From birth, Isor has been a different child. She doesn't speak, she doesn't hear, she shows almost no interest in anything around her. Is she autistic? Not exactly, the doctors say. Her parents love her, but they don't understand anything and are exhausted. Fed up with vague diagnoses and useless treatments, unable to manage her socially, they haven't enrolled their daughter in school. Now thirteen, she seems to only like foreign television channels and animal documentaries. Furthermore, Isor occasionally has terrible fits of rage, which cause chaos and leave her parents—Maude, a firefighter, and Camillio, a window cleaner for tall buildings—devastated. With such a unique protagonist, Alice Renard (Paris, 2002) could have crafted a story of extravagant, poetic, and non-normative sentimentality, but one rife with mawkishness. Anger and desire That's not it. It's a strangely emotional little novel about a girl who isn't normal.

]]>

Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​1965) is a novelist who possesses the virtues of audacity and a keen sense of timing. This, I believe, is undeniable, regardless of whether you like his novels or not. When I say he has the virtue of audacity, I mean that he conceives narrative projects that are grand in both ambition and capacity to surprise, and that he dares to attempt to execute them without resorting to specious precautions or reining in his imagination. And when I say he has the virtue of a keen sense of timing, I mean that he knows how to read the signs and interests of each historical moment and, with a threefold literary, political, and anthropological perspective, knows how to incorporate them into his novels. He demonstrated this with Victus and the commemoration of the tercentenary of the fall of Barcelona against the Bourbon troops in the War of the Spanish Succession. He demonstrated this with The monster of Saint Helena and the desire to reinterpret reality through the lens of feminist justice that sparked the Me Too movementAnd he proves it again now with After the shipwreck and the vengeful resentment and the miasma of disappointment and shame that the failure of the independence process has instilled in Catalan society.

]]>

At least during its very long first part, The Black Prince, ofIris Murdoch (Dublin, 1919-Oxford, 1999), suggests a reversal of the premise of Waiting for Godot of Samuel BeckettJust as Vladimir and Estrago spend the entire play without moving from where they are because they wait in vain for someone who never arrives, Bradley Pearson, the protagonist of Murdoch's novel, a retired tax inspector, an ambitious writer but full of quirks, complexes, and frustrations, spends more than three hundred pages wanting to escape—a teacher who has wanted to write for years, but can't leave because a chain of incidents involving friends and family prevents her. Godot No one ever arrives; here, on the other hand, everyone arrives. All of this gives the novel the feel and rhythm of a frenetic tragicomic vaudeville or a sophisticated farce, with constant comings and goings, dramatic situations handled with both seriousness and humor (domestic violence, adultery, suicide attempts or announcements, drunken binges). Murdoch is a virtuoso of profound and transcendent philosophical reflection as well as of comical and absurdist sensationalism, and she is even more virtuosic at combining them. She couldn't be more British.

]]>

With FarewellsJulian Barnes (Leicester, 1946) does not say goodbye to literature, because he is supposed to continue reading until his death or until his eyes and brain allow it, but he does say goodbye to writing books and to his readers. When I say he's saying goodbye, I mean it literally.And he also makes this explicit in the final paragraphs, directly addressing those who are reading it: "I hope you have enjoyed our relationship over the years. I certainly have. Your presence has pleased me (when you think about it, I would be nothing without you)."

]]>

In literature, there is often a disdain for genres considered commercial or popular that has never existed in film, not even among pedantic snobs and sophisticated specialists. There are quite a few critics, academics, and journalists who specialize in literature, however, who adopt a somewhat condescending attitude whenever they read a detective novel, an adventure novel, a horror novel, or one with supernatural or thriller elements. As if Dumas and Stevenson weren't creators of incredible characters and worlds, as if Raymond Chandler's prose weren't among the best in 20th-century English, as if the terrifying Shirley Jackson and the visionary Stanislaw Lem weren't first-rate writers—in style and ideas. I mention these names, and I could mention so many others. These condescending readers are unaware that writing a genre novel is incredibly difficult.

]]>

In the scholarly introduction he has written for this reissue of The life and death of Jordi Fraginals, the professor Josep Murgades It makes a kind of genealogy or inventory of many of the descriptions, interpretations and analyses that, more or less insightful, more or less reductionist, have been made over the decades of the very studious novel by Josep Pous i Pagès (Figueres, 1873–Barcelona, ​​1952): ruralist, history of a self-made-man, "the last modernist novel", a concretization of that precept of Albert Camus according to which the novel is a "universe where action finds its form"... Murgades' introduction, instructive in its nature as a hermeneutic sampler, is pertinent as a presentation of a classic of the Catalan novel of the 20th century because, written up to now, our duty as readers is to try to read the book from what we are today and here, without anachronisms or a priori assumptions.

]]>

Being reborn after an accident: it sounds like a cliché, but we can't forget that clichés are often deeply ingrained truths. Or, at least, rhetorical fossils with a kernel of truth at their core. Just ask economist and writer Fernando Trias de Bes, who about a year and a half ago suffered a serious car accident that could have killed him, but from which he emerged reborn and creatively liberated.

]]>

Jezebela novel that Irène Némirovsky (kyiv, 1903-Auschwitz, 1942), published in 1936, begins with the trial of an older, "extremely wealthy" and pretentious woman, Gladys Eysenach, accused of murdering her lover of twenty years. Throughout the first chapter, which essentially serves as a prologue, we witness the reconstruction of the crime scene through the interrogation of the accused and a large gallery of witnesses. Written almost like a Hollywood screenplay—with sharp, snappy dialogue, secrets revealed, worldliness, mystery, and drama—this prologue unfolds before the reader all the ingredients of what appears to be a passionate melodrama. We discover, because she herself has confessed, that the wealthy, elegant, and cosmopolitan Eysenach did indeed commit the crime. And we believe we also know her motivations: jealousy, spite, and mad love. However, after the prologue, the novel flashes back and proceeds to reconstruct the protagonist's life from her earliest youth. What we end up discovering is far worse than we imagined.

]]>

The novels of a man whose convictions have wavered are often better than those of a man with dogmatically unwavering convictions. In dissent, in divided passion, in ambivalent or bifurcated commitments, literature grows more powerful and lucid than in absolute certainty and militancy.

]]>

Some books are written to create literature, while others are written because they simply cannot be left unwritten, because the author needs to confront some ghost that haunts them or exorcise some demon that torments them. This doesn't mean, however, that these latter books aren't also written with literary intent. Such is the case of... Hunger, a mixture of personal memoir, medical chronicle, and desperate cry by the translator, narrator, and poet Núria Busquet Molist (Cardedeu, 1974). It is not true that honesty doesn't exist in literature. It does. It just so happens that honesty also requires the strategies of formalization and artifice. Literary screams and vomiting—Busquet uses both similes to describe her book—are also a matter of style.

]]>

The definition of painting offered by Maurice Dennis, artist and art critic, a practitioner and theorist of the Nabis's colorful symbolism in the effervescent France of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is quite famous: "Painting, before being a horse, a female nude, or any other motif, is essentially a flat surface with colors." The poems of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Worcester, 1911–Boston, 1979) have made me think of Dennis's definition. They are words upon words, verses upon verses, unfolding across the page with such a scrupulous blend of meticulousness and density that it is often difficult even to see or understand the poems' themes. We see the colors, not the horse or the female nude.

]]>

The great epic journey that forms the foundation of American political and cultural mythology is the one that, during the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, brought the pioneers and settlers from the east of the country westward. It was a journey, both concrete and symbolic, from the hierarchical, teeming, and unjust civilization of the first cities—Philadelphia, New York, Boston—to the deserts, plains, forests, rivers, and mountains of a vast territory where the promise of a free, equal, and prosperous life lay. The comfort of the open airIn Gretel Ehrlich's (1946) autofiction, originally published in 1985 and now appearing for the first time in Catalan in a reliable translation by Yannick Garcia, we are told of an individual journey that is the reverse of that foundational collective journey.

]]>

Given the current situation, it makes perfect sense to revisit the chronicles and articles that Josep Pla wrote about Israel for Destinationwhich he later turned into the book Israel in 1957Furthermore, after the Hamas attacks of October 2023 and the war of extermination against the Palestinians waged by the Netanyahu government ever since, presenting Pla's book today is no easy task. The journalist Andreu Barnils wrote the prologue, and it has been well done: he provides historical perspective and compares past and present—before, Israel was David, he says, and now it is Goliath—; he strives to be guided by a coherent but not didactic ethical compass; he criticizes the exaggerated paternalism with which Europeans approach the Arab-Israeli conflict and judge Jews and Muslims; he combines general reflection with personal experiences...

]]>