Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell

Another wonderful book by Garth Greenwell. The writing is exquisitely beautiful, and he really can dig in our deepest feelings - of desire, shame, awkwardness, joy. I feel awed at his capacity to convey our deepest feelings, at how he probes our human nature, enacting them in short stories with no need of lecturing, the stories themselves and the way he tells them are quite enough. He's the best writer about desire since Proust. And he's also the best writer of sexual scenes I know of, better than D.H. Lawrence and Edmund White. It's not easy to depict sex, but he manages it beautifully. I highly recommend this book, as all writing by Garth.

The Professor's House, by Willa Cather

Willa Cather was a name I was familiar with for a long time, but I had never felt the wish to read anything by her; maybe because if her name, that somehow evoked in my mind an idea of light, "pink", literature, or because I really didn't know anything about her, being out of the major literary circles of her time.

And then I read a few Facebook posts by Garth Greenwell highly praising her books, and since I highly regard his literary taste (his opinions made me already discover several very good authors, like Iris Murdoch), I decided to give her a try, with The Professor's House.

Once again, I was not disappointed. It's an excellent book - the writing beautifully elegant, the characters engaging and real, the story somewhat melancholic but at the same time sweetly optimistic, dealing with life's achievements and what this notion really means. Always relevant issues, never out of date - and after all, human nature has not changed for centuries, or even millennia, so a really good author is always actual.

He had no more thought of suicide than he had thought of embezzling. He had always regarded it as a grave social misdemeanor – except when it occurred in very evil times, as a form of protest. Yet when he was confronted by accidental extinction, he had felt no will to resist, but had let chance take its way, as it had done with him so often.

He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry.

In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love – if once one has ever fallen in.

A man has got only so much in him; when it’s gone he slumps. Even the first Napoleon did.

So, it was a great find, and I'm sure I'll read more of her books.