This combination of two key works by the Italian avant-garde writer
Giorgio Manganelli (1922-90) is a major addition to the small number of
his works available in English. In the 1960s Manganelli was a member,
along with Umberto Eco and Eduardo Sanguinetti, of the Gruppo 63
movement, and a close friend of Italo Calvino, who provides an
enthusiastic foreword that describes "To Those Gods Beyond" (1972) as a
"heraldic bestiary" that "launches into a crescendo of variations on its
main theme, the self-aggrandisement of a lucid megalomaniac." Perhaps
the best known of his works included here, "An Impossible Love,"
comprises an epistolary exchange between Hamlet and the Princess of
Cleves conducted with a "verbal catapult" as the universes about them
descend into oblivion. All is overseen by gods beyond whom an endless
array of other gods lie in wait, intent on torment. Everything seemingly
finite or known in our world becomes infinite and unknown.
The book is prefaced by Manganelli's notorious manifesto "Literature as
Deception" (1967), in which he describes the "literary object" as
something cynical, corrupt and devoted only to turning human suffering
into exquisite figures of speech. This is a major new offering of work
by this important writer, heralded by Calvino as an "erudite acrobat who
twirls around the trapeze of rhetoric above the timeless void of
meaning."
