We don’t know his name; he introduces himself thus: “I am XX’s brother. I am the child she spoke of. And I am the writer she never spoke of.” The first story in the book presents a voice that defines itself in relation to that sister: while she speaks, he prefers to be silent; if she wants attention, he would prefer to be invisible. Once they asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. “When I grow up, I want to die,” he said. His parents died very young, but of them, the narrator says, “I don’t want to speak, because this is the story of a brother, rather my story, and of a sister, rather hers, that of a spy.” In some way, the story that opens this collection of 20 tales is a sample of the unsettling, strange, and powerfully magnetic universe of Fleur Jaeggy, the Swiss writer who writes in Italian: a universe of broken families, cold rooms, lonely children, animals, the fascination with death. The volume includes tributes, among others, to her friend Oliver Sacks, during a lunch with Roberto Calasso in a New York restaurant, where the narrator’s gaze turns and focuses on a fish in an aquarium, which knows or senses that it will end up in the kitchen. A contained, delicate, elegant, and often disturbing prose.
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“Prejudices serve to die, not to live,” the philosopher Alejandro Rossi told his friend Christopher Domínguez Michael. An intelligent and cultured critic, Domínguez Michael held a poor image of Pier Paolo Pasolini: that of a hysterical communist who died as a result of a common crime among male prostitution clients. But once he delved into his work, the evidence appeared, he says. “He was an extraordinary philologist,” he writes, “as well as a penetrating and universal literary critic.” Expelled from the Italian Communist Party for being homosexual, he was a conflicted fellow traveler of the communists and “a scourge” of corrupt politicians. Poet and novelist, “it was in cinema where his poetic narrative prospered.” A complex personality, a critic of the Church, he was nevertheless an opponent of abortion, a puritanical homosexual who waged an indefatigable and obstinate struggle against the signs of fascism. Pasolini is one of the three biographical profiles that the author offers with sharpness and depth, completed by Gabriele d’Annunzio and Curzio Malaparte, all with controversial relationships with fascism. Originally published in Mexico, the Chilean edition adds texts on Marinetti and Mussolini’s biography by Antonio Scurati.
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Sam is a naive, witty, and funny pug. Of course, he doesn’t know it; rather, he thinks he’s a human. He calls people naked-monkeys, and is convinced his name is No, Sam! After running away from an unconcerned owner, Sam was adopted by the Peterson family. With them, he discovered for the first time how good cuddles feel. Upon arriving at his new home, Sam felt so happy that he saw the rug, thought it was laid out for him, and, not wanting to embarrass them, hurried to poop. “No, Sam!” they told him, and he felt pleased. He slept with Justin, the family’s son, and felt very happy: he discovered that naked-monkeys were warm. But he didn’t understand when the next day Justin took him to the garden and told him “Do it, Sam.” Rather, he just stared at him, waiting to go back to his rug to use it again. Of course, Sam starts causing headaches in the house, but he will have the opportunity to become a hero. Written by Drew Daywalt, the author of The Day the Crayons Quit, this novel illustrated by Mike Lowry is a funny story, a comedy of errors that combines narration, vignettes, and drawings and looks at the human world from a puppy’s perspective.
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