For a Handful of Books

In this first episode, the two competing are the Liceo Classico "Giacomo Leopardi" of Macerata and the Liceo Classico "Galileo Galilei" of Nardò (LE). The book they are competing on has been defined as one of "the angry books of American literature": Martin Eden" by Jack London published in 1909. The novel, most often read as a fictionalized autobiography of its author, instead reflects the anxieties and contradictions of American society at the end of the nineteenth century.

The episode pits the "Guglielmo Marconi" Scientific High School of Carrara against the "Giuseppe Garibaldi" Classical High School of Castrovillari (CS). To commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, the classes were asked to read "Natural Histories" by the Turin writer and chemist Primo Levi. They are 15 scientific and science fiction stories published by Einaudi in 1966. Pages in which, not infrequently, the writer uses the register of irony and satire to tell us about a future increasingly conditioned by technological progress, by disturbing and utopian experiments in which extraordinary and unpredictable machines operate. Levi himself explains the reason for these stories: "I wrote them... trying to tell an intuition that is not rare today: the perception of a flaw in the world we live in, of a small or large flaw, of 'a defect of form' that nullifies one or another aspect of our civilization or our moral universe".

The third episode of "Per un Pugno di libri", the most famous book-game on Italian television, sees the Liceo Scientifico "Nicolò Copernico" of Brescia (BS) and the Liceo Classico "Filippo A. Gualterio" of Orvieto (TR) compete this Saturday on one of the most revolutionary texts of twentieth-century theatre: Waiting for Godot by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, published in 1952. A work without a real plot in which the characters, Vladimir and Estragon, live a life of fulfillment in the vain wait for Godot, for his arrival. Everyone waits for him even though they know he will never arrive. A work, this one by Samuel Beckett, very current, that speaks to us of the absurdity of life, of its nonsense, of the absence of values ​​and points of reference and of the loneliness of modern man.

The fourth episode sees the Liceo Classico "Giulio Cesare" of Rome and the Liceo Classico "Renato Cartesio" of Villaricca (NA) compete on the novel "The Gambler", written in 1866 by one of the most important novelists of all time: the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. Set in a German spa town, Roulettenburg, whose casino attracts numerous tourists, the main theme of "The Gambler" is gambling that infects and besieges the book's protagonist, Aleksej Ivànovic, who narrates his story and that of the other characters in the book in the first person. Dostoevsky, with his unparalleled capacity for analysis and introspection, tells us in this novel the downward spiral of a man who is a victim of his own vice. "A self-conscious and unredeemed free fall, waiting for the last, definitive, rien ne va plus!".

In this episode, the "Marie Curie" Scientific High School of Meda (MB) and the "Antonio Pacinotti" Scientific High School of Cagliari compete on the famous "Gothic" novel Frankenstein by the British writer Mary Shelley, published in 1818. Hosted, as always, by Geppi Cucciari and Piero Dorfles. Written in epistolary form, the book tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young and brilliant scientist who, driven by an immoderate, unstoppable ambition, creates a living being assembled with body parts from cadavers. The scientist thus gives life to a being that is anything but perfect: a deformed, monstrous, terrifying creature. With Frankenstein, Mary Shelley not only questions the limits of modern science, but above all investigates the folds, the deepest and most disturbing fears of the human soul, its unconscious.

The episode is tinged with mystery with the novel "Poirot at Styles Court" by the British writer Agatha Christie, published in 1920. We are in England during the First World War and Captain Arthur Hastings, wounded on the front, is invited to spend his convalescence at the country estate of a friend of his, in Essex, at Styles Court. Here, however, the quiet existence of the Cavendish family and their friends is shattered by a terrible murder. It is at this point in the story that the character of Hercule Poirot appears for the first time in Christie's pages, "an extraordinary little dandy, with exceptional gray cells". It will be him, the most famous and eccentric investigator in European literature, to deliver the real murderer to justice and to unmask the blackmail and pettiness that hide in that corner of old England.

The seventh episode features a comparison between the Liceo Scientifico "Antonio Rosmini" of Rovereto and the Liceo Scientifico "Benedetti-Tommaseo" of Venice on a highly successful novel: "The Life Ahead" by the French writer of Lithuanian origin Romain Gary. Published in 1975, the book won the most important French literary prize in the same year: the Goncourt. Set in the immediate post-war period, in the multi-ethnic Parisian suburb of Belleville, Romain Gary's novel tells the story of Momo, a 10-year-old Arab boy, and Madame Rose, an elderly Jewish ex-prostitute who miraculously escaped the Holocaust, to whom the child was entrusted. Alongside them is a whole crowd of "miserables", outcasts of society. Despite the harshness, crude and even violent tones of the story, the book has moments of humor and authentic poetry.

For a Fistful of Books, sees the "Saluzzo- Plana" Linguistic High School of Alessandria and the "Giuseppe Torno" Scientific High School of Castano Primo (MI) compete. The two classes will compete on the short novel The Rediscovered Friend by the German writer Fred Uhlman, published in 1971. Set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and inspired by the writer's life, the book tells the story of the friendship between a Jewish boy from a bourgeois family, Hans Schwarz, and his classmate, the aristocrat Kostantin von Hohenfels. Soon, however, the strong bond that unites them is seriously compromised when Hans learns about the anti-Semitic ideas of Konradin's family and the admiration that the latter feels for Adolf Hitler. Only after the end of the war and the horrors of Nazism, far from Germany, Hans discovers the truth about his best friend, thus rediscovering the authenticity and value of that friendship.