We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Dollars to donuts this book got optioned the second it rolled off the presses. One need only list the ingredients to visualize the dollar signs popping up in movie exec eyes: a Harvard-educated preppy kid named Michael Teak performs spy business in Africa, investigates a rebel leader named Hatashil, and witnesses the bombing of an entire village under mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, a Harvard professor who has won a Pulitzer Prize for a book heralding Hatashil as a renegade hero receives threats indicating that the freedom-fighter may be a terrorist. Plot threads intertwine. Kalashnikovs appear. Swahlili is spoken.

In other words, An Expensive Education is a book that combines suspense-novel hijinx with the interior world of a Holden Caulfield type (albeit a Holden who speaks Arabic and carries a handgun.) What’s not to love?

Reading may be a universally beloved pastime, but good books aren’t necessarily universal. Language takes care of that. Books available only in their native French or Spanish or Czech may be amazing, but for those limited to a different tongue, they may as well exist in a parallel universe.

That’s why it’s such a pleasure to find that Italian wordsmith Stefano Benni has seen his novel Margherita Dolce Vita freshly translated into English. Benni–– a hugely famous satirist in his native country––is long overdue for American adulation, and Margherita is a perfect place to start.

The title character is a spunky young girl prone to fantasizing and wordplay; a kid whose braces clash when she smooches her boyfriend “like a duel in the Illiad”. A skewed constellation of family members and a mysterious neighbor seal the premise, with Margherita cast as resourceful and unlikely savior. Best part of all? There’s no need to splurge on an Italian-English dictionary in order to read the novel. Molto sweet-o.