Valerio Magrelli
La vicevita (The Vice-Life)
Einaudi, April 2019, 114 pages

Encounters with commuters at dawn, berthmates, card players, acquaintances, strangers, controllers or squatters without a ticket, regional trains rattling across the Ciociaria or very fast Japanese convoys: these micro-stories invite us to meditate on destination errors, delays or on those moments of emptiness that open up during certain mysterious stops in the countryside. Valerio Magrelli reconstructs a ramified series of adventures, without forgetting the memories of the toy trains, or the most tragic implications of the railway world like the Bologna massacre in 1980. In doing so, he manages to give us a sort of “vice-autobiography”, or perhaps a small encyclopedia of the journey, capable of revealing the tragicomic aspects of human existence and civil coexistence.

 

 

Valerio Magrelli

Valerio Magrelli (born in Rome) is a tenured professor of French literature at the University of Cassino. He has published four monographs: Profilo del dada (1990), La casa del pensiero. Introduzione all’opera di Joseph Joubert (1995), Vedersi vedersi. Modelli e circuiti visivi nell’opera di Paul Valéry (2002, Prix Littéraire de Francesistica des Thermes de Saint-Vincent, l’Harmattan 2005) and Nero sonetto solubile. Dieci autori riscrivono una poesia di Baudelaire (2010). Some of his most recent works are Geologia di un padre (2013), Il sangue amaro (2014), La lingua restaurata e una polemica. Otto sonetti a Londra (2014), Millennium poetry. Viaggio sentimentale nella poesia italiana (2015), Lo sciamano di famiglia. Omeopatia, pornografia, regia in 77 disegni di Fellini (2015), Le cavie. Poesie 1980-2018 (2018), Il commissario Magrelli (2018, Premio Nazionale Elio Pagliarani 2019), La vicevita (2009; 2019) Sopruso: istruzioni per l’uso (2019), Exfanzia (2022), Proust e Céline (2022). He had a short story featured in the collection Contro Roma (2018). He directed the trilingual series Writers Translated by Writers (National Award for Translation 1996). In 2019 he won the Premio Mauro Maconi for poetry, in 2022 Premio Cilento Poesia.

 

 

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