Brief lives of idiots / Ermanno Cavazzoni ; translated by Jamie Richards.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cavazzoni, Ermanno, author.

Standardized Title:

Vite brevi di idioti. English

Language:

English

Italian

Genre:

Short stories.

Physical Description:

xii, 167 pages ; 18 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Wakefield Press, 2020.

Language Note:

Translated from the Italian.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. The Aeronautical Expert

2. The Three Wise Men

3. The Scalabrini Family

4. The Pyromaniacs

5. Luigi Pierini, Calculating Prodigy

6. The Enemy Of Speed

7. Working Suicides

8. The Pressure Taker

9. The Albanians

10. Pezzenti The Nobleman

11. Cimetta The Painter

12. Victims Of The Revolution

13. The Carnival Of '56

14. Collateral Suicides

15. Primo Apparuti

16. The Republic Of Born Idiots

17. The Woman, Or The Whale

18. The Martyr To Feet

19. Cesare Lombroso

20. Inconclusive Apparition Of The Madonna

21. Near Suicides

22. Sunday Drives

23. The Failed Whore

24. Memories Of Concentration Camp Survivors

25. The Poet Dino Campana

26. Doubles And Dwarves

27. The Devil And The Idiot

28. Star-Crossed Suicides

29. Battista The Pinhead

30. The Realist Writer

31. The Use Of Magnets To Treat Morbid Fixations.

Notes:

Originally published as Vite brevi di idioti in 1994.

Includes bibliographical references (page xii).

ISBN:

1939663539

9781939663535

OCLC:

1232018786

Publisher Number:

99987025690