Giorgio Manganelli - Miniature psychodramas, prose poems, tall tales, sudden illuminations, malevolent sophistries, fabliaux, paranoiac excursions

Giorgio Manganelli, Centuria : One Hundred Ouroboric Novels, Trans. by Henry Martin (McPherson, 2007)

«Italo Calvino once remarked that in Giorgio Manganelli, "Italian literature has a writer who resembles no one else, unmistakable in each of his phrases, an inventor who is irresistible and inexhaustible in his games with language and ideas." Nowhere is this more true than in this Decameron of fictions, each composed on a single folio sheet of typing paper. Yet, what are they? Miniature psychodramas, prose poems, tall tales, sudden illuminations, malevolent sophistries, fabliaux, paranoiac excursions, existential oxymorons, or wondrous, baleful absurdities? Always provocative, insolent, sinister, and quite often funny, these 100 comic novels are populated by decidedly ordinary lovers, martyrs, killers, thieves, maniacs, emperors, bandits, sleepers, architects, hunters, prisoners, writers, hallucinations, ghosts, spheres, dragons, Doppelgängers, knights, fairies, angels, animal incarnations, and Dreamstuff. Each "novel" construes itself into a kind of Möbius strip, in which, as one critic has noted, "time turns in a circle and bites its tail" like the Ouroborous. In any event, Centuria provides 100 uncategorizable reasons to experience and celebrate an immeasurably wonderful writer. Brilliantly translated from the Italian by Henry Martin.»

«A friend once pointed out the fallacy of describing narratives as circular. A narrative can contain elements that are recurrent, but a truly circular narrative would be endlessly repetitive, with no beginning or end, pages around a central core like a novelistic Rolodex. (Joyce apparently envisioned something similar for Finnegans Wake.) This is worth keeping in mind while reading Centuria, whose subtitle, of course, promises 100 “ouroboric” novels (which average a page and a half and which could also be classified as short-shorts, exempla, fabliaux, or “novels from which all the air has been removed”). In precise and sometimes stiff prose (e.g., “the gentlemen’s deaths... confute this putative salubrity of the air”) most of the early novels describe “a gentleman” in dramatic if ordinary circumstances of love and indifference, of doubt and mistrust, of experiencing the relief that comes with romantic rejection. But soon, en masse, these gentlemen start dying at train stations, spontaneously crumbling to dust, and carrying their heads like saints. Then ghosts start to take center stage, and dragons, living spheres, and dinosaurs. Many of these figures recur in the other “novels,” but don’t strictly repeat, which brings us back to the ouroboros, the tail-biting snake of Centuria’s subtitle. The eternally circular ouroboros is generally accepted to symbolize life’s completion and renewal, but bear in mind that the ouroboros is actually a snake that’s eating itself in a nihilistic, autophagous felo-de-se, and it seems that Manganelli might have envisioned Centuria not as circular (which it’s not—its recurrent elements are more symphonic, like Curtis White’s Requiem or even Calvino’s Invisible Cities), but as ouroborically destructive. But it’s a particular kind of destruction: as fire is cleansing, Centuria is metadestructive, immolating itself (and, by extension, its traditions), but leaving in its place something new and pure and often spellbinding.» - Tim Feeney

"Taken by itself, each of these precious textual miniatures appears as a sophisticated and subtly disrespectful game with literary and philosophical tradition: from classical mythology to existentialist minimalism, from romantic fiction to the ghost story. Taken together, the 100 'ourobouric novels' give the impression of a vast and elaborate textual maze which lures readers into a never-ending search for hidden references and resemblances, but also forces them to face up to the themes that haunt Manganelli's book: illness, fear and existential despair, unhappy love and sporadic glimpses of the supernatural. The mixture may not appeal to those in search of easy reading, but Centuria earns its place among postmodern classics such as Calvino's Invisible Cities, Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar and Life, a User's Manual by Georges Perec." -Times Literary Supplement

"Manganelli's imagination is unfettered by considerations of plausibility, and his skewed viewpoint is ironic and gloomy, nicely balancing the fizz and frothiness of his ideas." - Jeff Bursey

"The comparison to Calvino... may be inevitable, but it seems unfair. Calvino's later story-mosaics surprise us by depicting a world we recognize; his invisible city is late twentieth-century Rome. But Manganelli's terrific experiment elicits recognitions of another kind. It participates rather in the time-transcending gaiety that Yeats celebrates in his famous meditation on a carved scrap of blue lapis. Centuria brings together harmony and intensity, wringing creation out of closure; it can make us believe anything's possible." - John Domini

"A member of the Gruppo '63, a group of Italian writers of experimental literature in the mid-to-late 20th century, Manganelli has been called both avant-garde and surrealistic. In Centuria the work is accessible beyond the experiment of Manganelli's often dreamlike and existential style. Each of the 100 very short tales is all-inclusive, circling back to themselves in the space of a page; hence the Ouroboros in the title, the mythological snake who eats his own tail... Martin tells us in his translator's preface that the 100 stories are 'like novels from which all the air has been removed.' Indeed, the scope contained in but a few words forms a complete work in itself; at times each story feels like part of a grand list of the possible plots of all the novels that could be written. We find a man being followed, a fateful meeting, the themes of emptiness and absence, dying with purpose, depression, a murderer by choice, mythology, kings and knights, ghosts, love requited and not, religion and war, all covered in the 100 tales." - ForeWord Magazine

"Manganelli presents the reader with 100 two-page tableaux, each featuring one or more nameless characters living actively in an intense moment. Assassins, a public toilet attendant, several men in love or aware of their lovelessness, a greedy dreamer, and even a few trolls populate these tiny but fully fleshed-out tales. The final piece presents a mathematical model for book writing itself. While this work won't appeal to those looking for mass market fiction, it is accessible and should delight both those with experience with 20th-century absurdism and younger readers new to a now bygone movement. Manganelli (1922-90), to an astonishing extent, seems to have written with foreknowledge of our current world, one in which any of us might, en route home, be 'delayed by a disagreeable downpour, a slight earthquake, and rumors of an epidemic.' What to do in such a time? Consider these stories--and Manganelli's sardonic advice to smile." - Library Journal

"Despite the short length of his 'novels,' Manganelli not only provides a great range of genres - ghost stories, love stories, tall tales, and so on - but also manages to end each story satisfyingly. His economic and essential use of language cuts to the heart of the matter, and, combined with his clever sense of humor, this makes Centuria an elegant and evocative book." - Harvey Pekar

"Manganelli was a voracious reader [not only of Scott, Dumas, O. Henry, Dickens, Stevenson, and D. H. Lawrence, but] also of science fiction and comic books, and has been listed—along with Calvino and Eco—among Italy's post-modern writers. His nullification of plot, his general drift toward allegory and his sudden ability to make it coalesce, his visionary sense of biography, his appreciation of the coercive and symbolic power of number, the serial nature of Centuria's impossible worlds may finally indeed demand a Supreme no less that totally open reader who's always on the search for a great beyond: a reader, perhaps, who has learned to expect the unreliable." - Viola Papetti

"In 1965, at the meeting in Palermo of "Gruppo 63," Manganelli declared his repugnance for the novel, which by then he saw as a formula in decay, reduced to functioning as a vehicle for the diffusion of ideologies. Writers were always ready to convert it into an edifying message, to make it into a mirror, witness, and interpretation of the world. It's not by accident that the genre of the novel grew dominant in the nineteenth century, at a time that saw the demise of the notion of literature as artifice, and as well of the love of classical rhetoric. One attempted to force literature into a dimension—the dimension of history—that revealed itself to be inadequate, and impracticable. So, it was hardly surprising for literature to kick such traces, unredeemed. ...Manganelli was opposed to the myths of commitment: literature is only language, and thus an artificial construction, a game, a vice. It creates infinite universes since the word is fiction; and all of these worlds are equally impossible; but this connotation which all of them share also makes them alien to one another, impenetrable, without communication." - Maria Luisa Vecchi

"The pages of Centuria offer an almost visual presentation of the figures of Magritte or Delvaux, no less, here and there, than of scenes from the films of Charlie Chaplin." - Valerio Volpini

"A reader who addresses a book by Giorgio Manganelli will always be perplexed... So, the best thing to do is simply to surrender to the extravagant vagaries of a refined intelligence, to the provocations of a limitless imagination as it deconstructs ideas and plays out games with words. - M. Bernardi Guardi

"Manganelli's pessimism is metaphysical and enormous, but he offers the consolation of never being lachrymose. He gives us characters and voices that are nearly always incapable of ascribing meaning to their experience, or which do so bizarrely and at profligate cost, but the very fact of experience is insistently rendered as solid and undeniable, and one is allowed to suspect that its undeniability may finally hold more value than any other value one might have thought to search for. This world is gruesomely, contortedly comic. It's clear that Manganelli isn't the kind of writer with whom it is easy to relax, and he doesn't give us the kind of writing with which one instantly falls in love. He intrigues rather than seduces. His craft is considerable, but difficult to react to simply as craft, since it is always in the service of a voice that conveys and reflects and attempts to engage with an anguish that might be equivalent to the background radiation of the cosmos. One turns to his work for a kind of therapeutic exposure to the absolute seriousness of a mind that imagines its way into archetypes of confusion and pain and hilarity with never a forethought to contriving a way back out of them." - Henry Martin

«Centuria is a sort of anthropological almanac that aims to signal—but surely not to decipher—the ambiguous hieroglyphics of the modes of human behavior, and might also be read as the catalogue of an eccentric museum of characters whose common denominator is an anti-vitalism that always hangs suspended at the edge of the void of non-action. Its fantastic cosmology is the governing power of a bizarre narrative universe where artifice, rhetoric and literary "lies" are pressed into service for the exorcism of the painful awareness of the trajectory of life's descent toward nothingness.» - Francsco Roat

«Manganelli distills popular literary clichés as if he's just set the timer on a bomb meant to end the whole sorry business of novels... these 100 stories are all variations on one (not so contemporary) theme: how an author manipulates his characters in a landscape that seems governed by cliché. But despite a jacket photo of the jowly Manganelli facing down a Pinocchio doll, Centuria is a wonderful read for its endlessly inventive send-ups of narrative conventions. Manganelli's "novels" telescope time so that his characters end where they started, like the ouroborous of the subtitle—an ancient symbol of renewal showing a snake that bites its tail.
Each story inevitably begins with a CV-like assessment of the character: "a man who knows Latin but no longer Greek"; "a youthful-looking gentleman with the air of a person of median cultivation, a movie-goer with a love for film series." (After laughing at the first dozen of these summaries, you'll squirm at the thought of how Manganelli might sum up your life.) The action often turns on an anticipated meeting: a man who waits in a piazza for a woman he fears loves him, another man who's made a rendezvous with a woman he fears he loves, and a group of men waiting at a station for trains known not to arrive. Manganelli's characters always live at a calculated distance from one another. One couple, not in love, thrives on conversation: "They love each other's voices, they love their argumentations, the doubts, the perplexities, the exceptions, the objections, the paradoxes, the syllogisms, the metaphors. With a bizarre, mental desperation, they think about a life that does not include the other's voice. And then, briefly, they fall into silence, since they direly mistrust, and will always mistrust, the vocality of the voice, that vain custodian of the purity of concepts."
Much the same could be said about Manganelli's distrust of words. He claimed Centuria was an attempt to write novels with the air taken out of them. Read in sequence, the stories build on each other, growing increasingly hallucinatory. The men waiting in piazzas for their almost- lovers give way to solitary ghosts who wonder if they'd like company. A being known as the Maleficent Dreamstuff enjoys his job as the embodiment of evil in our dreams. Though he is not as respected as the Nightmares, "he's never short of work and his standard of living is quite respectable."
In his preface, Manganelli writes that for maximum effect, readers should be installed on separate landings of a building and made to read one line while the Supreme Reader, who has flung himself from the roof, passes each floor's window. Manganelli warns, "It is understood that the number of the building's floors must exactly correspond to the number of the lines and that there will be no ambiguity on the second floor and mezzanine, which might cause an embarrassing silence before the impact." Less gory but equally satisfying surprises fill the stories themselves. A "pensive and dispirited" man worries because he loves three women at once. "It must be added, however—though strictly speaking he cannot be said to know it—that two of these three women lived one and three centuries before his birth, and that the third will be born two centuries after his death." In story 63, Manganelli's predictions for the novel take a self-conscious turn when an atheist metal caster is asked to make a bell to announce Judgment Day. He's so impressed with his creation that he becomes a believer, certain of the world's end: "He pulled the cord, and the great bell swung and sounded, loud and strong, and, as it had to be, the Heavens opened."
It's not to say that today's fiction is any less self-conscious, but it's not suicidal. The old-fashioned story has survived, albeit tattooed with footnotes and photos. So the obvious, sorry danger: Who will read Centuria as anything more than a record of its time, in which a writer makes a 200-page attempt at self-immolation?» - Angela Starita

«Each of the 100 stories shows the trials a character’s life is under, his interactions with others, his moral struggles or his deep dark sin, all within this micro-tale. Because each one is so full of detail, it’s not a book one would want to sit down and slam through in the course of an evening, but rather digest over time. I’d recommend reading one when you have a few moments’ spare “brain absorption” time, to turn them over in your mind. Rushing through them would be a disservice... If you are a writer, whether aspiring or established, reading Centuria might be just the boost you need to get out a notebook and start your own short-short story collection. Or a collection of 1 1/2 page dialogues or character sketches. It would make a fantastic writer’s exercise – just don’t measure your progress to that of Manganelli. You’ll find his fine Italian shoes hard to fill.» - carp(e) libris reviews

«Giorgio Manganelli describes the contents of Centuria as "one hundred romans fleuves". They are a hundred stories, of roughly equal, one-page length, and while they can't offer the expansive detail and turning plots of real novels, Manganelli does compress a great deal into most of them.
Manganelli writes with great precision, and these stories are crafted like those by Borges or Monterroso, the wild imaginings contrasting with the exacting style. The stories are incredibly varied - indeed, far from growing stale or repetitious, the collection gains energy in its variations and echoes.
There are ghost-stories and there is the surreal (a woman gives birth to a twenty-centimetre sphere). There is the grand - stories describing the day before the Creation of the World, or, in one of the true stand-outs, the demise of the dinosaurs - and the mundane. Characters meet themselves or are condemned to non-existence. Temporal confusion is often an issue - so for the pensive and dispirited man faced with the conundrum of loving three women, two who lived long before he was born, another who won't be born for another two centuries. The possibility of death, of killing or being killed, are often at issue too.
The stories often touch upon the metaphysical, but always playfully. Some are very simple: the man who loves waiting and "detests the punctuality of others" (i.e. those who don't make - or rather: allow - him to wait), for whom: "Waiting becomes adventurous, restless, infantile." Or: an architect certain of the non-existence of God gets commissioned to build a church.
Other situations have more obvious profound implications:
Exiting a shop into which he had entered to purchase some aftershave lotion, a middle-aged gentleman, well-mannered and serious, saw that they had robbed him of the Universe. In place of the Universe, there was only a grayish dust, the city had disappeared, the sun was gone, no sound came out of that dust, which apparently was entirely accustomed to its métier as dust. Of calm disposition, the gentleman found no cause to make a scene; a theft had taken place, a larger than ordinary theft, but a theft nonetheless.
Another story posits a different world:
This is not a properly human place, in the sense that its inhabitants are not human beings, and that their notions concerning humans are vague, transmitted by ancient story-tellers, or invented by merchants, geographers, falsifiers of photographs. Many who possess a relatively higher level of culture do not believe in the existence of human beings. They say it is a question of an old and fairly silly superstition, and in truth the conviction that human beings exist is mainly current among the lower classes.
In the small space he allots himself for each piece, Manganelli nevertheless manages to offer a story that is complete and whole. Some cover years - large chunks of history or a person's lifetime - while others describe only a scene or few moments. Amazingly, there's practically no let-down across the hundred tales: Manganelli keeps coming up with the goods - and very, very good some of them are.
An incredibly rich collection, with some brilliant ideas, Centuria is both entertaining and thought-provoking. Thoughtful, elegant, and often very amusing, this collection is highly recommended.» - The Complete Review

«Manganelli’s Centuria is the kind of fiction novelists had been threatening to write since Poststructuralist thought drastically altered the landscape of literature. But if this English-language translation of an Italian text comes to readers fifteen years after the author’s death in 1990, the book’s affiliation with the aesthetic and historical mores of its time, as well as its common association with absurdist literature, are easily transcended by its rigorous intelligence and sustained structural ingenuity.
The formal design of Centuria is at once original and straightforward: the book is comprised of 100 two-page narratives that serve—for lack of a better term—as digests of full-blown fictions. Each narrative, then, is ostensibly a novel. It’s the sort of trick one might expect from Manganelli’s peer, Italo Calvino—and certainly the sheer rapidity of these stories, plus the overwhelming fullness they achieve as each stacks against the others, resembles a highly-caffeinated version of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The linkage is not accidental. Like Calvino, Manganelli’s concern with language and, more precisely, matters of signification, is examined through slippages in formerly-secure dualisms, such as the hunter and the hunted, lover and beloved—slippages which are often exposed by tensions between a novelist’s struggle to render his story as originally as possible while simultaneously relying on the conventions of narrative discourse. Consider the dilemma in novel seven: a “gentleman dressed in a dark suit” (like all the characters in these fictions he is unnamed) knows he is, at all times, the subject of another’s pursuit. In Manganelli’s own words,
The gentleman also knows that the chase is very fast, and that since his gait is slow, he will inevitably overtaken... He does know, however, that the pursuer will never reach him, not even if he sits down on a bench, pretending to read the newspaper... [the pursued man also realizes that] The pursuer knows that on reaching him he would cease to be pursuer and the scheme of creation holds no possible place for him except as pursuer... [Thus] The target asks himself whether the pursuer is unhappy, since the horror of their mutual condition lies in an unperformable task. He wonders if there’s a way to turn around, and to begin to pursue the pursuer.
Structurally, this passage betrays a circular motion that—like the ouroborus who swallows its own tail—demonstrates how initial extensions in narrative ultimately fold back on themselves in a gesture of self-conscious revelation. In other words, all time and space assertions can be deconstructed through the very means by which they were asserted. It is a testament to Manganelli’s originality and intellectual rigor that this persistent structure does not get tiresome; rather, the inevitable arc of the narrative serves as a thematic thread that unites all the “novels” as one under a single title. Moreover, the author’s fondness for absurdity and paradox place him in direct descent of Kafka and Borges—two writers whose influence on Calvino and Manganelli was enormous. Like his mentors, Manganelli is furthermore concerned with matters of history; at times, his wry and expansive allusions to myth, folklore, epic literature, and various subgenres of fiction enable Centuria to function as an intriguing commentary on this history of narrative as it has evolved in Europe over the last several-hundred years.
As an armchair historian of the novel, I was titillated by Manganelli’s playful variations on well-established conventions for fiction. I was, moreover, impressed that the sheer energy of his prose survives beautifully in Henry Martin’s translation. Nonetheless, I find the author’s insistence on calling each micro-narrative a “novel” problematic; unlike most novels—and certainly unlike some of the genres Manganelli slyly parodies—none of these fictions employ sub-plots; instead, each story proceeds with an unwavering focus one associates with short fiction, prose meditations, and fables. Even run-of-the-mill plot summaries of novels will include mention of peripheral narratives, thus “novel” here seems more a gimmick than a well-earned epithet.
This aside, English-language readers have much to celebrate in this fresh translation of a classic fiction. After all, Manganelli’s Centuria does more than dramatize some of the prevailing aesthetic and intellectual concerns of its time, it provides a remarkably innovative shape for those very problems.» - Tony Leuzzi

«Giorgio Manganelli is that rara avis: a genius of Imagination. Centuria offers quasi-stories reminiscent of themes to be found in popular fiction — with a difference: refracted through the prism of Manganelli’s very Italian intelligence, they are concentrated into essences.
Born in 1922, Manganelli lived in Rome during the Fascist period, through WW II and the decades of its chaotic aftermath. No stranger to ruin, he distills that terrible half-century, revealing the facets of its soul, quasi-incarnate in amorphous lucidly-cogitant characters. His “gentleman,” his “lady,” his “young man” materialize in an opening sentence or two, when we find them in whatever hour of a commonplace, eventless life, hopeful as our own, if endured in quiet despair. Could we gaze into the mirror through Manganelli’s eyes, we’d see them, nameless and solitary, longing for what might or could or should be an event — perhaps the event of our lives.
Americans in this therapy-mad epoch tend to take, rather mistake, an “experience” for that fateful “event.” Perusing Centuria, we may come to understand that the myriad catastrophes blazoned in newspapers and splashed over our screens — love, celebrity, athletic prowess, failure or fame, marriage, illness, crisis, smashup — do not concern the soul; nor can they illuminate whatever meaning life might propose. Whereas what happens in Manganelli’s stories dooms like destiny, and separates one both from “before,” a time that no longer exists, and “after,” time that is not yet... a time that may never be, leaving one suspended in a vanishing “present” of consciousness.
Having defined the novel merely as “forty lines plus two cubic meters of air,” and having “settled for simply the forty lines,” Manganelli writes a hundred of them inhabited by characters whose inner life is excruciated for us. If that life resembles an epitaph, one would be grateful to have it — instead of a name and two numbers: year born, year deceased. By turns satiric, sardonic, whimsical, arbitrary, melancholic, fantastical, grim, humorous, this author locates and reveals the absolute essential, from which neither evasion nor escape is possible.
In one charming “novel,” an absent-minded Fairy takes a day trip, boards the wrong train and finds herself lost in a city she doesn’t recognize; worse, she’s forgotten how she got there. Confused and anxious, she lights on a mature “gentleman,” and to ask for directions makes herself visible. Happy to help, he escorts her to the terminal, routing her way home and advising where to transfer, when to get down. Naturally, he’s exhilarated by his good deed and her promise to pay him another visit. Being absent-minded, she just as naturally forgets him. And of course her sweet memory, vivid in a now forever-pedestrian world, leads him to commence his vain quest, hopefully riding trains hither and yon, as if that unexpected hour of poignant delight could be his once more.
Like the best poets of the 20th Century, Manganelli’s genius spares no one. Wherever we come upon one of his people walking about a park, standing in a city square, or inhabiting a vacant building in a vacant city, we understand what his persons do not or cannot perceive: the solitude of one’s own being cannot be overcome. When they glimpse some saving grace, they choke it in the embrace of self-doubt.
Subtle wisdom permeates Centuria. Its 100 “novels” provoke one to laughter and exaltation, and also dismay, sadness, terror, for they suggest that what happens or could happen doesn’t; what’s probable is not; what is possible cannot be so. Consider the opening of “novel” Sixty-Two: “Exiting a shop into which he had entered to purchase an aftershave lotion, a middle-aged gentleman, well-mannered and serious, saw that they had robbed him of the Universe.” What next? one wonders in curiosity and dread. His is indeed a ruthless imagination.
This book ought not to be read at one sitting; rereading will open a hundred windows upon vistas of the soul. Manganelli’s advice: “…Read it in the outer shadows, better if at absolute zero, in a capsule lost in space.”» - Jascha Kessler
Giorgio Manganelli, All the Errors, Trans. by Henry Martin (McPherson,l 1990)

"As in Beckett, there's also something a bit monstrous in Manganelli's meticulously dispassionate gaze. All the Errors is remarkable for the cold glint of Manganelli's eloquence and the surrealistic precision of his imagination." - New York Press

"These stories surprise us with their dreamlike quality, while being extrememly geometric, calculated, and systematic... But authentic narration emerges, almost inadvertently, from an uninterrupted verbal elegance, and one state of mind transforms into another as discourse again assumes the dimension of a genuine tale." - Giornale di Sicilia

"Each of the seven stories is an exploration of the voyage we embark upon at birth. When an about-to-be-born child bids farewell to the life he has led in the womb ('Leave-taking'), birth is seen as an ending of life, for it begins the journey toward death - but the child will not be exempted, as it wishes, 'from its task of existing.' In 'Lovers,' a man and a woman, in separate soliloquies, explore the ties that bind them. 'Travel Notes' and 'The Betrothal,' both superficially more conventional, are accounts of men who venture out on journeys, which begin unexceptionally: a hiker in the mountains seeks shelter for a night, and a bridegroom takes a walk around the town before the wedding. But both end in a surreal world, where time and the usual rules play no part. The narrator of 'The Self-awareness of the Labyrinth' ponders on the identity of the labyrinth in which he finds himself: it is both life in the abstract and his own creation. Perhaps the most abstract story is 'System,' in which essences of fire and water and other life forms are confounded by the reality of the Figure and the Non-figure, both intent on their game, and indifferent to all other forms. Reading at its most demanding and thought-provoking: Manganelli insists that we explore fundamental questions in the most rigorous and intellectually challenging way. There are no short cuts, but the effort has its rewards..." - Kirkus Reviews

"There is a kind of compelling and hypnotic magic in his writing, but it is not of the dreamlike or the trancelike kind. The reader has to read. The reader has to think through, indeed, live through, sentences that seem to be as heavy as ancient, condensed stars. One might try a thousand ways to characterize the experiencing of Giorgio Manganelli; none of them will convey the pleasures of simply sitting down, an hour at a time, a day here and a day there, and reading him, a sentence, a paragraph, a page at a time... Henry Martin's translation into English is a superlative one, and while being crystal clear it somehow conveys as well the strange plangency of its original." - Jascha Kessler

«All the Errors isn't your usual story collection. Manganelli isn't concerned with simple narrative or naturalism here, his story-telling sometimes focussed on episodes and events but generally adopting a tone and perspective that is alienating even as it promises closer understanding. The stories are exhaustive: carefully crafted, precise, calculated. They are also, frequently, bewildering. Manganelli describes, for example, The Self-awareness of the Labyrinth - metaphysical speculation from the point of view of a labyrinth. System defines and constructs an entire world-view, beginning:
The system consists firstly of the Fires, which, numbering from two to seven, inhabit, pervade, and characterize the central space; hence, they are also known as Essences.
These and some of the others read like Borges-constructs grown wild - and without a foundation in the literary or historical (as defines practically all of Borges' fictions). These are purer - and generally more expansive - thought-games, delineated by precise language but utterly fantastical.
Some of the stories are, in part, more conventional, with at least the appearance of a narrative arc: Leave-taking is a farewell speech by someone about to embark on a specific journey (amusing enough in the twist of what that journey is, though it comes as no great surprise). Travelling is fundamental to many of the stories, including Betrothal (a man describing his wedding day) and, most obviously, Travel Notes. Often as not, these are as much voyages of the mind as anything else - and not merely idle daydream-trips, but serious metaphysical voyages.
Lovers, in which both sides try to explain their relationship (each section beginning with a variation on: "What ties me to this man..." (or woman)), is only the most obvious in its methodology, highlighting dichotomy and symmetry, but all the stories are similarly deeply introspective and analytic, trying to get at the root of what is often ungraspable (and generally ultimately acknowledged as such). It's no surprise to find an ending - if not quite conclusion - such as (here to Travel Notes):
I am a project and equally the groundplan of myself. I know that if I lie upon the ground I will in no way be distinct from these mnemonic, projectural signs. I am dreaming myself: as happens in dreams, I am infinitely past and infinitely future. Dead since the beginning, I am always being born. I am the project.
These meditations and speculations are often fascinating, in particular because Manganelli is so thorough. Clearly, however, such stories are of limited appeal: readers should be well aware of what they're getting themselves into here. Fascinating worlds, but not easy to get into.» - The Complete Review