Premio Roma 2018
Shortlisted for Premio Viareggio Rèpaci 2018
Furiously Mr Foscolo is a passionate and adventurous literary journey in the turbulent life of Ugo Foscolo. A poet, a writer and a patriot, active from the late years of the Eighteenth Century to the second decade of the Nineteenth, his life was as controversial and mysterious as his work is now acclaimed, recognised as one of the most brilliant examples of neoclassicism and pre-romanticism in Italian literature.
Luigi Guarnieri, with a fiercely ironic pen, vividly recreates the history of the man behind his art, starting from his latest difficult years in England, where the poet arrived in 1816 after his voluntary exile in Switzerland. Through his eyes, we enter the London literary society of the 1800s, also discovering its dark side, the pettiness, the triviality and the ruthless mechanisms that ruled it. Among the few splendours and many miseries of life in London, the reckless expenses and the time in prison, the strenuous defence of his dignity as a writer and the battles with the publishers, Foscolo’s life flows furiously. The great love for Quirina and the faded marriage with Caroline, the writing of the Ortis and of the Sepolcri, Byron and Mazzini, the appearance of his daughter Floriana and the insidious illness that will lead him to death: the incandescent portrait of a tormented man, inhabited by great passions and destined to generate just as many, fiercely adverse to the world and therefore repaid by the world with the same coin.
A novel about the unbridled life of one of the most beloved and least known authors of Italian literature, restless and damned like a hero of our times.
Luigi Guarnieri
Luigi Guarnieri was born and lives in Rome. Doctor of Human Letters at the University of Pisa and with a diploma from the Experimental Cinematography Centre in Rome, he wrote many theater and radio plays. He is the author of novels translated in many countries: L’atlante criminale. Vita scriteriata di Cesare Lombroso (2000), Tenebre sul Congo (2001), La doppia vita di Vermeer (2004), La sposa ebrea (2006), I sentieri del cielo (2008) and Una strana storia d’amore (2011), Il sosia di Hitler (2014), Forsennatamente Mr Foscolo (2018). His most recent novel is Il segreto di Lucia Joyce (2022).
- Il segreto di Lucia Joyce (Lucia Joyce’s Secret)
- Forsennatamente Mr Foscolo (Furiously Mr Foscolo)
- Il sosia di Hitler (Hitler’s Double)
- Una strana storia d’amore (A Strange Love Story)
Rights of previous novels sold to
France: Actes Sud
Germany: Antje Kunstmann
Russia: Colibrì
Poland: Rebis
Portugal: Editorial Presenca
Romania: Grupul Editorial RAO
Serbia: Laguna
South Korea: Dodream