📗 "My Ten Years' Imprisonment" or "My Prisons" by Silvio Pellico, translated from Italian into English by Thomas Roscoe
This book had no right being as fun as it was. I read this through the Serial Reader app and looked forward to reading my daily issue.
Pellico, a poet and writer of plays, was imprisoned during 1820-1830 for being active in the movement for Italian unification. This is a memoir about some of his time in various prisons. Oddly enough, there's barely anything about politics or his reasons for being there.
I admit, his religious rants were quite boring. But I enjoyed reading about all the people he met and the way things were run in the early 19th century. I was surprised about there being female guards, and about guards bringing their family or children to work and letting them roam around. Also, apparently there was no anesthesia for amputations yet, ooffff.
He teaches a kid for while, gets a crush on a visitor, makes some friends. He has a lot of good insights, I saved quite a lot of quotes. But I also laughed out loud with his escalating letter exchange with a fellow prisoner, a sassy atheist. When I gleefully summarized these letters to my partner, he stared at me blankly. I'm starting to think I might be the only one having a blast with some overly dramatic musings from 200 years ago.
Later on Pellico is sentenced to jail in hard conditions, and the tone becomes more somber. There's lots of illness and suffering for him and his co-prisoners. Although this rough phase is the longest part of his imprisonment, he writes the least amount about it. Fortunately we get to see him getting released in the end.
I thought this was great in its own weird way. I have no clue who to recommend this to. Give it a go if anything at all sounds good to you, it's in the public domain anyway.
[#]AmReading #memoir #NonFiction #books #PublicDomain #SerialReader
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