Ermanno Cavazzoni

A blissful and baneful litany of human stupidity, from Italian fantastical absurdist Ermanno Cavazzoni A parody of the medieval Lives of the Saints, Ermanno Cavazzoni’s Brief Lives of Idiots offers us a perfect month of portraits of idiots drawn from real life, from overly realist writers to fringe-belief obsessives, punctuated every seventh day with a litany of suicides—failed, foolish or fatal to others. This roll call extends the ridiculous to melancholic extremes, introducing us to such exemplary fools as the father and husband unable to recognize his own family, the Marxist convinced that Christ was an extraterrestrial, the would-be saint who finds a private martyrdom through the torturous confinement of a pair of ill-fitting leather oxfords and the man who failed to realize that he had spent two years in a concentration camp. This is a display of myriad idiocy, discovered and achieved by hook or by crook, be it through paranoia, misapplied methodology, religious hallucination or relentless diarrhea. But Cavazzoni engages in neither finger pointing nor celebration. If saints can be counted, idiots cannot: idiocy is ultimately the human condition. Ermanno Cavazzoni (born 1947) is the award-winning author of many fantastic and absurd tales. He is a professor at the University of Bologna and a member of the literary group OpLePo, an Italian spin-off of the OuLiPo.

"Lo slittamento proverbiale il modo pi rettilineo, economico e meccanizzabile di produrre, da un romanzo noto e in via d'usura o da un romanzo ignoto e ormai senza speranza, un secondo romanzo modernissimo, ami prima udito e passibile di fama inaspettata".

"Molteplici sono le modalit e le regole con le quali questi 'affezionati perecchiani' hanno voluto celebrare i trent'anni trascorsi dal 1982 che segna la disparition di quel singolare artificiere e manipolatore del linguaggio che fu Perec. Pungolati dalla fantasiosa spericolatezza dello scrittore francese, lo hanno fatto da un lato con testi contrainte che ripetono alcuni dei suoi molteplici generi e dall'altro con testi basati su contraintes originali".

A fantastic evocation of life and learning in a dream sequence: Jerome, who has to sit an exam and suffers from toothache, enters a nighmarish library in which everything conspires to frustrate his desperate attempts to revise. Cavazzoni creates an entire world in this dream, whose absurd perhaps comments on the more muted absurdity of reality. The library contains geological and natural realities that plague the organic matter of which the books are made, demonstrating or at least suggesting the futility of human learning. In some parts of the building the books have turned into peat. Cavazzoni admits that his books pushe the novel to its very limits - "like outpourings of the maniacal," he says. "That's how they come to me, you must understand."