Alberto Savinio
THE LIVES OF THE GODS


£12.00

Out of print.

Translated by James Brook & Susan Etlinger.

The moments of personal mythology we create from the apprehensions and misapprehensions of everyday waking life are captured with bizarre charm and delicacy in this collection of stories from an author who is rapidly being recognised as one of the stars of the pre-war Italian literature. the collection is united by a common theme — the re-telling of the most famous stories of all time.

“The whole of the modern myth still in process of formation is founded on two bodies of work — Alberto Savinio’s and his brother Giorgio de Chirico’s — that are almost indistinguishable in spirit and that reached their zenith on the eve of the war of 1914.” (André Breton, Anthology of Black Humour)

This collection spans his entire career: the Songs of Half-Death were published by his friend Apollinaire in 1914 — half-death being a psychic state through which he attempted to attain a higher reality. Savinio lived in Italy from 1914 to 1933, when he returned to Paris; he continued to write in French as well as Italian, and was close to the Surrealists, publishing in their reviews as well as in Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour (a story included here). He developed a parallel career as a painter, and many of the same concerns of personal myth-making and dreaming are reflected in both his writing and his art. Psyche, and Mr. Münster, the two longest pieces in this book, date from the 1940s.

See reviews.

1991, ISBN: 0-947757-28-7, 138pp, paperback.
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SKU: 0-947757-28-7 Categories: ,

Additional information

Weight .24 kg
Dimensions 14.5 × 21 cm