Premio Campiello 2020 finalist

If poetry, as someone has said, is the only possible science, this poet’s prose reveals figurative, speculative and satirical abilities

“In these pages, we find the parallel and backward moral story that has accompanied for decades the work of one of the greatest contemporary poets. Not exactly narrative nor non-fiction, the analytical, visionary, perceptive and syntactic genius which here surprises the reader, has no precedent in twentieth-century Italian literature, if not perhaps in the prose of Roberto Longhi, Elsa Morante, Goffredo Parise.
However, these are more partial affinities rather than derivations: because in each of its chapters – each in its own way and with a different style, in autobiographical fragments, anecdotal parables, portraits and micro-philosophies of love, envy or sensory ecstasy – Con passi giapponesi obeys a single commandment: “I must understand”.
From the first text that gives the volume its title, the reader finds himself contemplating a comic-tragic world, labyrinthine to the point of dizziness, in which passions without success and desperate, forced social mannerisms come on stage, while life bleeds out, faking it.” Alfonso Berardinelli