“It's hard to know what to do with all this”

Daniele Del Giudice, A Fictional Inquiry, trans. from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel (New York: New Vessel Press, 2025).

This novel, first published as Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983) recounts an unnamed narrator’s travels in Trieste and London to puzzle out the life of an Italian writer who chose not to publish a word in his lifetime. The novel reminds me of both Leonardo Sciascia and W.G. Sebald, especially Sebald. If you are attuned to either of those writers, you might like A Fictional Inquiry .

Credit this reading choice to the folks who display the books at the Seminary Co-op. I saw a copy of the novel on one of the banded ledges that adjoin the bookshelves. I bought that copy, started looking at it more closely, told Elaine about it, and bought a second copy from the shelves. And so it became an official pick of the Four Seasons Reading Club (Elaine and me, reading).

[Banded ledges? Think of a shallow version of a supermarket endcap, with bands holding the merchandise on little ledges.]