For three days, the 18th edition of the Savignano Immagini Festival transforms a quiet Italian town near Rimini into a hive of cultural activity. The town plays host to free photography exhibitions with sixteen gallery spaces dedicated to broad themes of identity and perception. I visited on the final day, a sunny Sunday afternoon, and while I didn’t get to see everything, I saw enough to give this initiative a massive thumbs up.
Tag Archive: Bologna
The Broker by John Grisham
Joel Backman – the ex high flying, skirt chasing broker of the title is given a hard time of it by Grisham. Not only does he have to endure 6 years in solitary confinement, get chased by competing teams of hit men but he doesn’t even have the consolation of getting laid.
A half assed love interest with a mature but good looking language teacher only just gets past the warm handshake stage.
Joel Backman – the ex high flying, skirt chasing broker of the title is given a hard time of it by Grisham. Not only does he have to endure 6 years in solitary confinement, get chased by competing teams of hit men but he doesn’t even have the consolation of getting laid.
A half assed love interest with a mature but good looking language teacher only just gets past the warm handshake stage.
The MacGuffin is built around an unconvincing satellite software snatch which Grisham has the grace to concede as far fetched – in his author’s note he says “if something in this novel approaches accuracy, it’s probably a mistake”.
The main – and I would venture, the only – reason for reading it is for anyone wanting to learn a few key Italian phrases, ideally to be used in the city of Bologna where most of the action takes place.Grisham is clearly smitten with the city and there’s a fair bit about its history and an enthusiastic endorsement of the excellence of the food to be found there.
If you skip the boring bits on political double dealing and cover ups (yawn) the novel passes the time painlessly.
The main – and I would venture, the only – reason for reading it is for anyone wanting to learn a few key Italian phrases, ideally to be used in the city of Bologna where most of the action takes place.Grisham is clearly smitten with the city and there’s a fair bit about its history and an enthusiastic endorsement of the excellence of the food to be found there.
If you skip the boring bits on political double dealing and cover ups (yawn) the novel passes the time painlessly.
This is a debut novel by a Scottish author which was published in 2007 by independe
nt publishers Two Ravens Press.
The plot is set against the real events of the Bologna massacre (’strage di Bologna’ ) when a terrorist bomb exploded in the waiting room of the city’s train station on 2nd August 1980, claiming the lives of 85 people and injuring a further 200. As someone who has lived in Emilia Romagna for the past 11 years, I can vouch for the fact that the topic he has chosen to present in a work of fiction is still a highly sensitive one, akin perhaps to how the Irish would regard a novel set in Omagh in 1998 or the English if the backdrop were the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974.
The perpetrators of this atrocity have never been found but the BBC’s archives section reports that it is widely believed that the attack was carried out by right-wing extremists, probably with the motive of turning public opinion against the ‘Red Brigade’ (Brigate Rosse) . This theory is not one Dorward presents to the reader since it is the communists who are behind the attrocity using a seedy bar, the Usignol(the translation of which gives the novel its title) to plot their campaign.
Dorward says the idea for the novel came from a friend of a friend who was in Bologna at the time of the explosion, and significantly, when asked what he wanted to achieve with the novel, he does not comment on the political angle but instead says: “I wanted to explore ideas of responsibility: what happens when you have to face, in adulthood, the consequences of the actions of the youth that you have turned your back on, and the need, in adulthood, to stay loyal to the naïve, idealistic, selfish, plain stupid, youth, who made you what you are“.
