Memories From The Twentieth Century

In these three short booksServabo A Fin De Siècle Memoir Miss Kirchgessner and The Medlar Tree collected in one volume in English for the first timeLuigi Pintor retraces a life marked often in spite of itself by politics. At once intransigent and ironic these autobiographical texts are written to reorder in the imagination things that dont add up in reality. From the idyll of his Sardinian childhood to the transformative experience of the antiFascist resistance and from postwar militancy to the dismal regression of Italian culture Pintor captures memories that are intensely personal and inseparable from political and intellectual experience. Episodes and observations recur across all three books but the tropes of autobiography are insistently displaced. Sparse and evocative prose borrowing from the aphorism and fable struggles to give form to personal and political despair while Pintor never relents on the attachments and convictions that shape a life.