Blue Hunger

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Tales about delicate, submissive women who pretended to want love but actually wanted something darker. A 2021 NEA fellowship recipient, Richards has translated works by Roberto Saviano, Igiaba Scego, and others. No m'agrada que ningú s'arribi a anul·lar o deixar de banda per la dependència que té cap a algú altre. The book presents an interesting, uncanny view of a grieving person in a foreign country, seeing both place and language through their own lens, and someone looking for an all-consuming kind of pleasure to erase the past.

A 2021 NEA fellow, she holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. It was also longlisted for the Strega Award and for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014. The narrator experiences China as “the country of philosophy and sex dolls” and Shanghai as a feverish dreamscape, a place of “water the color of arsenic. 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.

Una història d'amor, odi, frustració i solitud on la protagonista canalitza el dol per la mort del seu germà cap a un amor irracional. To read Blue Hunger is to enter a dreamlike state, guided by irresistible, evocative writing, immaculate details, and vivid emotions dripping with desire. Both protagonists find solace by teaching language: in Greenwell’s case, English to Bulgarian students, in Di Grado’s case, Italian to Chinese students.

Still, it’s worth indulging in this visceral story about a woman’s difficulty with finding satisfaction, sexual and otherwise. It details the unglamorous side to loss; losing the will to live, nihilism and the gross parts in between.

Now the buildings contained newspaper offices, multinational corporations, TV stations – economic paradise. Throughout the novel we explore their twisted relationship as in unfolds with the glimmering description of Shanghai as the backdrop.

Maybe something got lost in translation since this book was originally written in Italian… but I was not a fan of this one. Blue Hunger is a most vibrant novel about lust: beautifully written and full of sensuous images, Viola Di Grado’s book is a powerful literary journey into food and sex and the city. No m'agrada que una persona estigui disposada a fer coses que d'una altra manera no faria per complaure a algú altre. As you'd expect from the premise, it isn't really a book with much of a plot, but more moves through scenes in an artistic way, more surreal than engaging with the realities of their lives. And yet there’s tenderness here too, a gentle personal reckoning brewing even as Xu simultaneously pushes Ruben away and draws her further in.Mostly alone, she wanders the streets and adopts her brother’s name, Ruben, subsuming her own identity. Every morning, the old women cried in the bath like little girls and the old men unbuttoned their pants and said obscene things to me. This novella is a deliriously compelling look at the feeling of otherness, the ways that language and emotion shape how we view ourselves and those around us; how we will go to any lengths to feel a part of someone, something.