The Beginnings
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- $229.00
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
The first book in Antonio Moresco's colossally disruptive Games of Eternity (Giochi dell’eternità) trilogy, translated into English for the first time.
Upon its publication in Italy, The Beginnings was exactly that: the dawning of a new era. Like a photo-negative of Franz Kafka, or Virginia Woolf, Moresco’s sweeping novel turns the stream-of-consciousness inside out, and offers nothing interior. Here, much like in real life, you will not be privy to the thoughts and feelings of others. Everything must be experienced as it happens.
From our narrator’s undergraduate years in seminary school, to his activities as a member of various Italian political factions, to his attempts to become a writer, The Beginnings is a shapeshifting journey across the 20th century, and across all of literature itself.
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In this towering absurdist work that is perhaps easier to admire than enjoy, Moresco (Clandestinity) chronicles a young man's successive affirmations of his religious, political, and artistic lives. Divided into three sections covering each phase, the novel opens as the unnamed narrator, a seminary student waking up in a dark dormitory, painstakingly and slowly polishes his shoes. He calls this exercise one of his "games of eternity." At the seminary, he meets a roguish older prefect named The Cat, who reappears in the third section as a Godot-like book publisher who endlessly defers meeting with the narrator to discuss his manuscript (presumably a novelization of his days as a seminarian and political operative). In the second section, the narrator joins a shadowy left-wing organization and tours Italy in a "plastic car" with a blind man, delivering political speeches to near-empty or deserted town squares. The narrator withholds emotional, spiritual, romantic, and intellectual reflections, and instead recounts his life like an impersonal and uncanny film reel. Moresco punctuates the narrative with hallucinatory set pieces, most memorably the nighttime incineration of a trash heap on the narrator's family estate, complete with a raucous crowd and brandy-drunk animals running wild. It's a bit exhausting, but there are plenty of marvels to be found.
