For a Handful of Books - Season 22

First aired: 1/19/2019 12 episodes

Episodes

1. Fahrenheit 451 (di Ray Bradbury)

Aired: 1/19/2019

In this first episode, the two competing are the Liceo Scientifico "N. Copernico" of Verona and the Liceo Scientifico "V. De Capraris" of Atripalda (AV). The text they will be competing on is a true classic of the so-called dystopian science fiction genre: Fahrenheit 451 by the American writer Ray Bradbury. Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 is a still current reflection on the role of reading and mass media and on the freedom of the individual in contemporary society. Leading the game is Geppi Cucciari with Professor Piero Dorfles, who recommends, in this episode, "Furland" by Tullio Avoledo (Chiarelettere, 2018) and "Mrs. Caliban" by Rachel Ingalls (Narrativa Nottetempo, 2018).

2. Family Lexicon (by Natalia Ginzburg)

Aired: 1/26/2019

The second episode of the new edition of "Per Un Pugno di Libri" sees the Liceo Classico "Rinaldo Corso" of Correggio and the Liceo Classico "Pilo Albertelli" of Rome compete this Saturday. To commemorate the Day of Remembrance, the classes were asked to read "Lessico famigliare" by the Italian writer Natalia Ginsburg. Written in 1963 and winner of the Strega Prize, "Lessico famigliare" has as its main theme the memory that has always characterized Ginsburg's narrative. Memories as a heritage of shared bonds and passions. But alongside private memory and family relationships, the writer does not forget the dramatic history of those years: fascism, racial persecution, the war, the post-war period.

3. Naked and Raw (by Alan Bennett)

Aired: 2/2/2019

In this episode, the most famous book game on Italian television sees the Liceo Scientifico "F. Enriques" of Lissone (MB) and the Liceo Classico "G. Palmieri" of Lecce compete on the short novel "Naked and Raw" by contemporary English writer Alan Bennett. Published in Italy in 2001, "Naked and Raw" tells the paradoxical story of the Ransomes who, returning home from a Mozartian evening, discover their apartment completely ransacked. As often happens in Bennett's stories, the surreal incident becomes the pretext for this boring and habitual bourgeois couple to try to change their lifestyle, so as to be able to express that side of their personality that had remained hidden until that moment. The prize, as always, is not money, but works of genius (i.e. many books) and the possibility of accessing the final between the two classes that ranked best during the program.

4. A Day in the Life of a Scrutineer (by Italo Calvino)

Aired: 2/9/2019

In this episode of "Per Un Pugno di Libri", the "Vittorio Alfieri" classical high school in Turin and the "Giuseppe Mercalli" scientific high school in Naples discuss the novel "La giornata di uno scrutatore" by Italo Calvino. Published in 1963, the book is inspired by a personal experience of the writer, who, as a candidate for the PCI, found himself visiting the polling station set up at the Cottolengo in Turin. There, the sick were induced to vote for the then majority party: the Christian Democracy. In the novel, in fact, the young protagonist, Amerigo Ormea, is a communist pollster sent by the party to the Cottolengo precisely to monitor the consolidated habit of manipulating the votes of the sick. But faced with that "world" and that pain, and above all faced with the self-denial with which the patients are cared for by a nun, the Marxist faith of the protagonist enters into crisis.

5. Death Rites (by Alicia Giménez Bartlett)

Aired: 2/16/2019

This Saturday, the European Classical High School "Setti Carraro" of Milan and the Technical Institute "Stendhal-Baccelli" of Civitavecchia will compete to the last book. The two classes will compete on the book Rites of Death by the contemporary Spanish writer Alicia Giménez Bartlett. Published in 1996 and set in Barcelona, the writer tells the story of the first investigative adventure of Petra Delicado, a police inspector. A young girl has been raped and has a flower-shaped tattoo on her wrist. In this task, the protagonist is supported by Fermín Garzón. He is a man no longer young who at times seems excessively moralistic and misogynistic. As time passes, the rapes increase and the two police officers see the case taken away, then see it returned to them, but they continue to investigate with tenacity, even when the victims, their relatives and the press seem to row against them and put spokes in their wheels.

6. Memoirs of Hadrian (by Marguerite Yourcenar)

Aired: 2/23/2019

The twentieth edition of "Per Un Pugno di Libri" is proceeding unstoppably, with this Saturday's debate between the Liceo Scientifico "Galileo Galilei" of Erba and the Liceo Classico "Marco Minghetti" of Bologna on the masterpiece of the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar: "Memoirs of Hadrian". Published for the first time in 1951, Yourcenar herself wrote that the book is anything but a history essay, much less a novel, but rather a long letter (divided into six parts) that the emperor Hadrian, now old and ill, writes to his adoptive nephew, also a future emperor, Marcus Aurelius. The great intellectual sensitivity and intensity of Marguerite Yourcenar's analysis have made Memoirs of Hadrian an absolutely modern book, despite the fact that it addresses and speaks of the mentality of a man who lived two thousand years ago.

7. The Man in the High Castle (by Philip K. Dick)

Aired: 3/2/2019

In this episode of "Per Un Pugno di Libri" the Liceo Classico "Ugo Foscolo" of Pavia and the Liceo Classico "Emanuele Duni" of Matera discuss the science fiction novel "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick. Published for the first time in 1962, the novel won the Hugo Award, considered the highest recognition for a science fiction book. The plot of "The Man in the High Castle" is a reversal of what the outcome of the Second World War actually was. Philip K. Dick seems to ask himself - and the reader - what the world might have been like if the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) had won the war. The answer that the writer seems to suggest is that, although the war was won by the Allies, in reality the wicked and obscurantist forces of Nazism were not truly defeated, manifesting themselves in all their violence in capitalism and communist dictatorships.

8. The Plague (by Albert Camus)

Aired: 3/9/2019

The most famous book game on Italian television this Saturday sees the Liceo Scientifico dell'Istituto "Vittorino-Bernini" in Genoa and the Liceo Artistico Musicale "Foiso Fois" in Cagliari compete on one of the most important and well-known novels of twentieth-century French literature: "The Plague" by Albert Camus. Published in 1947, just two years after the end of the Second World War, "The Plague" is a novel that must be read as an allegory of evil and the recent trauma of war, which still weigh on European consciences: like evil, the plague is never completely defeated, but remains latent waiting for the environment favorable to the manifestation of a new epidemic. At stake, as always, not money, but works of genius (i.e. many books) and the possibility of accessing the final between the two classes ranked best during the program.

9. The Government Inspector (by Nikolai Gogol)

Aired: 3/16/2019

In this episode of "Per Un Pugno di Libri", the "Giuseppe Berto" Scientific High School of Mogliano Veneto confronts the "Leonardo" Scientific High School of Brescia on the theatrical work of one of the most important Russian writers of the 19th century: Nikolaj Gogol', "The Government Inspector". Written in 1836, the work is a satire on hypocrisy, bad habits, and corruption in a small Russian town where the Mayor is frightened by the arrival of an inspector general, coming from Petersburg. In reality, the inspector, the young Chlestakov, is not a real inspector, but a layabout who through a series of misunderstandings has become the most feared man in the town. As often happens in his works, Gogol' proves extraordinary in representing the pettiness and moral baseness of certain human types who continue to be present in the ranks of today's bureaucracy.

10. Group Photo with Lady (by Heinrich Böll)

Aired: 3/23/2019

The tenth episode of "Per Un Pugno di libri" sees the "Manfredo Fanti" Scientific High School of Carpi (Mo) and the "Niccolò Copernico" Scientific High School of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (ME) compete on the novel by the German writer Heinrich Böll "Group Photo with Lady". Published in 1971, most critics consider it Böll's best book, the "summa of his narrative work". A wide-ranging novel in which the writer recounts half a century of German history: from the Weimar Republic to 1968. But, as in the past, also in this novel Heinrich Böll focuses on his "obsession": the war, the Second World War and its devastating effects on people's lives. The prize, as always, is not money, but works of genius (i.e. many books) and the possibility of accessing the final between the two classes that ranked best during the program.

11. Heart of Darkness (by Joseph Conrad)

Aired: 3/30/2019

In this episode, the challenge to the last book is between the Liceo Classico "Giacomo Leopardi" of Recanati (MC) and the Liceo Classico "Ivo Oliveti" of Locri (RC) on the novel Heart of Darkness by the British writer Joseph Conrad. Published in 1899, it is considered one of the masterpieces of European literature between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Conrad tells us about the expedition of the European Charles Marlow into the heart of black Africa to track down, on behalf of a company involved in ivory trafficking, the mysterious Kurtz, of whom there is no further news. Marlow's journey, in reality, is a true descent into hell and, above all, into the abyss of the human psyche. In 1979, the great American director Francis Ford Coppola made a famous film adaptation, "Apocalypse Now", setting the story during the Vietnam War.

12. The Truce (by Primo Levi)

Aired: 4/6/2019

Last appointment of the season for the twentieth edition of the most famous book game on Italian television. At the helm, for the grand finale of "Per Un Pugno di libri", Geppi Cucciari who, with his usual mastery and irresistible irony, together with Professor Piero Dorfles leads the challenge between the European Classical High School of the "Emanuela Setti Carraro dalla Chiesa" boarding school and the "Foiso Fois" Art and Music High School of Cagliari. The two finalist classes compete on a fundamental novel of the Italian twentieth century, "La tregua" by Primo Levi. Published in 1963 and winner of the first edition of the Campiello prize that same year, the novel is the sequel to "Se questo è un uomo". After the deadly Iliad of the Lager, Levi tells us the Odyssey of the return after the liberation of Auschwitz.