Butterfly of Dinard Butterfly of Dinard

Butterfly of Dinard

Eugenio Montale and Others
    • $11.99
    • $11.99

Publisher Description

Fifty autobiographical short stories about childhood, life in Italy before and after World War II, and growing old in Milan by the winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the most celebrated Italian poets of the twentieth century.

The great poet Eugenio Montale was also a remarkable writer of prose whose stories appeared regularly in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. Butterfly of Dinard is a collection of fifty of those stories, pieces about “silly and trivial things which are at the same time important,” whose sprightliness, subtle irony, and conversational ease defy the limits of traditional fiction. Taken together, they form a sort of autobiographical novel, evoking people, objects, and animals dear to the poet, while simultaneously shedding light on the social, cultural, and political events of the day. The book begins with Montale’s childhood in Liguria and goes on to explore his adult life in pre-Fascist Florence and the onset of Fascism. The last part of the book, focusing on his final years in Milan, forms what Jonathan Galassi in his introduction calls “a mosaic self-portrait of the writer himself, a bumbling yet proud, memory-obsessed Chaplinesque antihero, who sees himself as the only surviving, if unwilling, witness to a disappearing world.”

The stories were first published in book form in 1956; Montale added further stories to subsequent editions, culminating in the final 1973 edition. Butterfly of Dinard is the first complete translation of this edition and includes five stories never before translated into English.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2024
May 14
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
232
Pages
PUBLISHER
New York Review Books
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
1.3
MB
Le occasioni Le occasioni
2011
Auto da fé Auto da fé
2016
Quaderno di quattro anni Quaderno di quattro anni
2015
Tutte le poesie Tutte le poesie
2023
Fuori di casa Fuori di casa
2017
Ossi di seppia Ossi di seppia
2024