Centuria : One Hundred Ouroboric Novels - Softcover

Giorgio Manganelli

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0929701852 ISBN 13: 9780929701851

Publisher: McPherson & Company, 2007

Synopsis

Italo Calvino once remarked that in Giorgio Manganelli, ''Italian literature has a writer who resembles no one else, unmistakable in each of his phrases, an inventor who is irresistible and inexhaustible in his games with language and ideas.'' Nowhere is this more true than in this Decameron of fictions, each composed on a single folio sheet of typing paper. Yet, what are they? Miniature psychodramas, prose poems, tall tales, sudden illuminations, malevolent sophistries, fabliaux, paranoiac excursions, existential oxymorons, or wondrous, baleful absurdities? Always provocative, insolent, sinister, and quite often funny, these 100 comic novels are populated by decidedly ordinary lovers, martyrs, killers, thieves, maniacs, emperors, bandits, sleepers, architects, hunters, prisoners, writers, hallucinations, ghosts, spheres, dragons, Doppelgängers, knights, fairies, angels, animal incarnations, and Dreamstuff. Each 'novel' construes itself into a kind of Möbius strip, in which, as one critic has noted, ''time turns in a circle and bites its tail'' like the Ouroborous. In any event, Centuria provides 100 uncategorizable reasons to experience and celebrate an immeasurably wonderful writer. Brilliantly translated from the Italian by Henry Martin.

About this title

About the Author

Giorgio Manganelli was born in Milan in 1922, but lived most of his adult life in Rome, where he died in 1990. In the early 1960s he was a member of the avant-garde group ''Gruppo '63,'' which included Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Gianfranco Baruchello, Antonio Porta, and others. After the appearance of Hilarotragoedia in 1964, he went on to publish a remarkable series of books - novels, essays, commentaries, anatomies, travel books, and short stories - in addition to becoming known to the general public as a prolific reviewer and commentator for newspapers and magazines. Centuria appeared in 1979 and was awarded that year's Viareggio Prize, generally held to be Italy's most prestigious literary award. His works have appeared in French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Polish, Bohemian, Serbo-Croatian, and Hungarian. Centuria, coming after McPherson's publication in 1990 of All the Errors, is only his second book to appear in English translation.

Review

Henry Martin...is an astute and imaginative translator, whose elegant and confident style gives us more than a flavour of the versatility and complexity of Manganelli's prose. Martin also allows us to appreciate Centuria's programmatically metafictional plot, based on a hundred page narrative: the 'ouroboric novels' of the subtitle. Taken by itself, each of these precious textual miniatures appears as a sophisticated and subtly disrespectful game with literary and philosophical tradition: from classical mythology to existentialist minimalism, from romantic fiction to the ghost story. Taken together, the 100 'ourobouric novels' give the impression of a vast and elaborate textual maze which lures readers into0 a never-ending search for hidden references and resemblances, but also forces them to face up to the themes that haunt Manganelli's book: illness, fear and existential despair, unhappy love and sporadic glimpses of the supernatural. The mixture may not appeal to those in search of easy reading, but Centuria earns its place among postmodern classics such as Calvino's Invisible Cities, Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar and Life, a User's Manual by Georges Perec. --Times Literary Supplement, November 11, 2005

The comparison to Calvino...may be inevitable, but it seems unfair. Calvino's later story-mosaics surprise us by depicting a world we recognize; his invisible city is late twentieth-century Rome. But Manganelli's terrific experiment elicits recognitions of another kind. It participates rather in the time-transcending gaiety that Yeats celebrates in his famous meditation on a carved scrap of blue lapis. Centuria brings together harmony and intensity, wringing creation out of closure; it can make us believe anything's possible. --John Domini, American Book Review, Nov.-Dec., 2005

When it was first published in 1979, this collection won that year's Viareggio Prize. Neither 25 years nor English translation has diminished this Absurdist jewel. Manganelli presents the reader with 100 two-page tableaux, each featuring one or more nameless characters living actively in an intense moment. Assassins, a public toilet attendant, several men in love or aware of their lovelessness, a greedy dreamer, and even a few trolls populate these tiny but fully fleshed-out tales. The final piece presents a mathematical model for book writing itself. While this work won't appeal to those looking for mass market fiction, it is accessible and should delight both those with experience with 20th-century absurdism and younger readers new to a now bygone movement. Manganelli (1922-90), to an astonishing extent, seems to have written with foreknowledge of our current world, one in which any of us might, en route home, be 'delayed by a disagreeable downpour, a slight earthquake, and rumors of an epidemic.' What to do in such a time? Consider these stories--and Manganelli's sardonic advice to smile. --Library Journal

Despite the short length of his 'novels,' Manganelli not only provides a great range of genres--ghost stories, love stories, tall tales, and so on--but also manages to end each story satisfyingly. His economic and essential use of language cuts to the heart of the matter, and, combined with his clever sense of humor, this makes Centuria an elegant and evocative book. --Harvey Pekar, Bookforum

"When it was first published in 1979, this collection won that year's Viareggio Prize. Neither 25 years nor English translation has diminished this Absurdist jewel. Manganelli presents the reader with 100 two-page tableaux, each featuring one or more nameless characters living actively in an intense moment. Assassins, a public toilet attendant, several men in love or aware of their lovelessness, a greedy dreamer, and even a few trolls populate these tiny but fully fleshed-out tales. The final piece presents a mathematical model for book writing itself. While this work won't appeal to those looking for mass market fiction, it is accessible and should delight both those with experience with 20th-century absurdism and younger readers new to a now bygone movement. Manganelli (1922-90), to an astonishing extent, seems to have written with foreknowledge of our current world, one in which any of us might, en route home, be 'delayed by a disagreeable downpour, a slight earthquake, and rumors of an epidemic.' What to do in such a time? Consider these stories--and Manganelli's sardonic advice to smile." --Library Journal

Edition details

• Publisher: McPherson & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0929701852
• ISBN 13: 9780929701851
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 212