Blue Hunger

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Both protagonists find solace by teaching language: in Greenwell’s case, English to Bulgarian students, in Di Grado’s case, Italian to Chinese students.

Viola Di Grado’s charming prose romps through chthonic worlds of nibbling insects, ammoniac seepage, and shattering depression, using language that is both glib and scrumptious.An Irish Times Book of the YearAn electrifying descent from loneliness and grief into obsessive, all-consuming love, by an Italian literary star.

It also explores language, particularly the gaps in between Chinese and Italian (the novel is translated from Italian), and how language impacts self and identity, and the narrator's views of different cultures. I couldn’t really listen; I just wanted to follow the flow of those phrases, be struck by that sound coming from her throat, that emerged from her body just for me. It details the unglamorous side to loss; losing the will to live, nihilism and the gross parts in between.The hermits of Mount Tai would bury themselves alive in damp narrow caves until reality burst open like a rotting fruit releasing its pulp. She talked about clothes and lip gloss, respiratory ailments caused by pollution, so common in Shanghai, and how if you have one you should never eat seaweed.

Blue Hunger's is a disorientating world made strange by grief-a world where words have lost their meaning, and identity fragments. Non mi hanno convinta però alcuni elementi chiave come la lingua cinese, Shangai e la morte del fratello, Ruben: topoi trattati con eccessiva fretta e superficialità ma non senza motivo, anzi, semplicemente non c'è stato uno spazio adeguato per svilupparli e mostrare davvero il loro potenziale narrativo, allegorico e in generale espressivo. Di Grado’s prose is exhilaratingly dynamic, made up of fragmented paragraphs that look and sound like prose poetry and that use poetic language in surprising and edgy ways.They begin an affair, and Xu's treatment of the narrator becomes increasingly brutal over the long autumn and winter through which their relationship unfolds. Blue Hunger asks how we create our identities and how we escape them; it is a fever-dream of a novel, visionary and uncanny, that demolishes all taboos and wisely explores, in a wildly imaginative language, the twisted peaks of loss and desire. A danse macabre for the millenials … In Hollow Heart, Di Grado elegantly and playfully thematises the emptiness of unquestioned vessels of meaning (which is to say, words) with the story of a girl who has taken her own life before she has even really lived it.