Viareggio Prize (Premio Viareggio / Premio Letterario Viareggio-Rèpaci)
Centuria: One Hundred Ourobic Novels
An experimental book of one hundred short novels, linked by dreamlike invention and highly concentrated prose.
Work Information
One hundred fragments reassemble the novel at a different speed.
Very short narratives accumulate while constantly slipping out of alignment, rearranging the sense of reality itself. Language play, black humor, and fable-like invention come together in one of Manganelli's signature works.
Book Information
- Publisher
- McPherson & Co
- Published
- 2005-02-28
- Pages
- 214 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.19 x 2.16 x 22.05 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780929701721
- ISBN-10
- 0929701720
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Short Stories/Single Author
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, Doppelgngers, knights, fairies, angels, animal incarnations, and Dreamstuff. Each "novel" construes itself into a kind of Mbius strip, in which, as one crit
Reviews
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I like the book,
but it's not quite what I was expecting. I think that the book will probably grow on me as time goes on. It is very well written. The short works are well thought out and at time can keep the reader off balance. It is a work of a writer that is a master of his craft. I think, personal opinion, that the stories could have come together in a larger, shall we say, plot. It is a book worth reading.
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Great Italian writer
I'm really enjoying this book. I'm into Italian, Spanish and French writers. Manganelli and Tabucchi are terrific Italian writers. The themes expressed in ultra-short format are still interesting and engrossing.