Beautiful sequence of thought and feeling wrapped delicately in the folds of sweet, drifting, sentimentality. Very very wonderful.

Italy is remembered for many historically significant points, most notably perhaps for the renaissance revival of arts and humanities in Europe. Now we have this new voice from Italy, an authoress named Elisabetta Benedetti, who has embarked on a writing career with her groundbreaking debutant work Train of Thought (Lulu Press, October 2006). It is a short book that offers a radically different and unique literary experience when weighed against thousands of other books coming out these days.

Benedetti’s book is a first person experimental narrative of a person who lets his thinking on a ride away from the mundane reality and deep inside the fathom of the ‘Self’. His encounters with personifications of different stages of ‘being’ direct his focus of thinking to some fundamental questions relating life and the essence of existence. The flow of thought operates in a cycle whose revolutions bring in more openness and new insights into the meaning of life.

Train of Thought is an excellent piece of an experimental literary style that is rich with the true beauty of language and a touching combination of the ease of expression and depth of meaning. We can compare Benedetti to William James as both are highly successful in making philosophy an interesting story, at once amusing and enlightening. When Benedetti speaks of consciousness, she has the prodigy of luring her reader into introspection. Her nameless character represents everyone. She deprives us all of our set destinations in the rotten predictability of this world. For the first time, we realize how tender is our life and yet how very often we miss its true face. Benedetti’s book is a glimpse of what it means to be human and more than that, how helplessly we are tied to the threads of our life-threads we miss to value.

With an opening like Train of Thought, we can anticipate with confidence that Elisabetta Benedetti will initiate another renaissance in the literary culture of our times. Readers of Train of Thought will impatiently await her next work.

(The above review which appeared on BookPleasures.com was contributed by: Ernest Dempsey, pen name of Karim Khan from Pakistan is a Research Associate in Geology writes fiction, nonfiction, and book reviews.)