Bruno Blog

This week I am writing from New York. What a breathtaking city, it’s beauty hardly matched. Every time I come back I fall in love with everything and discover so many new things that I cannot stop thinking about how fortunate I am for being able to travel here.

I love that, this week and from this beautiful place, I am recommending a novel about cinema and that will be published on the 17th of May. We all think that America is one of the pillars of cinema, with Hollywood and its myths. That’s why recommending ADIÓS A CINECITTÀ from America feels like a very special opportunity, because it welcomes us in a time when Rome, the European city, not American, had its own factory of dreams. More than three thousand films were filmed there; more than fifty of them won Oscars. Julian Comas, Jordi Solé’s pseudonym, writes a tribute to cinema and those studios, which are a marker of the Italian golden years of cinema.

Through Gino, an old man who meets Jerry, a reporter who wishes to write a piece about the studios, we will travel to the Rome of 1957 and will meet the soul of cinema during the shooting of A Farwell to Arms, starring Rock Judson and Jennifer Jones, with all the ups and downs of a business that seems to be always idyllic, but in which nothing is always truly perfect.

At the same time we will share a girl’s aspirations to get a starring role, like many others in her place, but she ends up becoming a costume design assistant. She is pure beauty, but she is shadowed behind the cameras. Gino will be the only one to notice her true beauty. As Guino starts to fall for her, he will face his toughest decision yet: does he want love, or does he want a career in the film business?

CINECITTÀ can still be visited in Rome, although there are constant threats of shutting it down. With this novel we try to pay tribute to it and to pass on to our reader the essence of all the dreams that were locked in that place, and those that managed to fly and that are, today, part of film history.

Summer has already started but, for most of us, we still have to wait a month and a little bit more in order to really enjoy holidays. We can’t wait for them to start and to bring us some free time and the chance to rest, above all so that we can forget schedules and a bit of our work. Dreaming doesn’t cost any money and perhaps novels are also a way to escape, that helps us to enjoy our resting days even more. Who wouldn’t like to be the main character of one of our readings? I’m sure that many of you would be able to choose a protagonist of one of your favourite novels, am I right?

This time, I would recommend OPERACIÓ JUDES, Jordi Solé’s novel, who has other two books published in the market. In that particular novel, the main character, Pol Vidal, turns out not to be the ideal inspector neither the one we would like to be, but living another of his adventures might be a perfect plan for those who like to solve mysteries. This is the ideal novel for these holidays, it is a detective story that takes us back to the year 1938, to the moment Pol Vidal receives an assignment from a faithful friend of Lluís Companys, president of the Catalan autonomous government (called la Generalitat de Catalunya) because a senior official has been murdered and they need the inspector’s help in order to investigate the case. They would never have imagined that this detective, who considers himself mediocre, would discover the most important secret of the Spanish civil war.

I don’t know if any of you is already a Pol Vidal’s follower but that novel has all the ingredients to captivate all lovers of good crime novels. And I’m sure that these mysteries won’t disappoint you. Of course, may be you would rather follow James Bond than Pol Vidal, if you’re given the choice, but OPERACIÓ JUDES would overcome many spies movies, trust me! So don’t even doubt it and pick that book for a good summer, and if it’s not enough for you, don’t forget there are two other adventures: BARCELONA FAR WEST and CIUTAT D’ESPIES.