Alberto Savinio, The Lives of the Gods, Trans. by James Brook & Susan Etlinger (Atlas Press, 1991)"A selection of Savinio’s early stories, many of which appeared in Surrealist magazines in the thirties. Savinio was the brother of the artist Giorgio de Chirico and an associate of Apollinaire.
The moments of personal mythology we create from the apprehensions and misapprehensions of everyday waking life are captured with bizarre charm and delicacy in this collection of stories from an author who is rapidly being recognised as one of the stars of the pre-war Italian literature. The collection is united by a common theme - the re-telling of the most famous stories of all time."
"The whole of the modern myth still in process of formation is founded on two bodies of work - Alberto Savinio’s and his brother Giorgio de Chirico’s - that are almost indistinguishable in spirit and that reached their zenith on the eve of the war of 1914." - André Breton
"Alberto Savinio was born in Greece from Italian aristocratic lineage, and studied music in Berlin before moving to Paris in 1910 with his brother Giorgio de Chirico, the painter. This collection spans his entire career: his Songs of Half-Death were published by his friend Apollinaire in 1914 - half-death being a psychic state through which he attempted to attain a higher reality. Savinio lived in Italy from 1914 to 1933, when he returned to Paris; he continued to write in French as well as Italian, and was close to the Surrealists, publishing in their reviews as well as in Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour (a story included here). He developed a parallel career as a painter, and many of the same concerns of personal myth-making and dreaming are reflected in both his writing and his art. Psyche, and Mr. Münster, the two longest pieces in this book, date from the 1940s. He died in Rome in 1952."
"...this sampling of Savinio’s fantastic tales amply confirms his skill as an amused manipulator of propositions, absurd, incongruous and surreal." - Times Literary Supplement
Alberto Savinio, Tragedy of Childhood, Trans. by John Shepley (Marlboro Press, 1991)"Alberto Savinio is the pseudonym of Andrea de Chirico, brother of the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, and this work, written in 1945, exemplifies the word surrealist. With the perspective of a child, Savinio recalls incidents that are on the border between reality and fantasy. Moments of illness, of trying to elicit satisfying answers from grownups, the joy of caring for an injured bird matched by the frustration of having it fly away, the desolation of being ignored by grownup friends, and the absurdities he saw at the theater - all are lyrically portrayed but juxtaposed against elements of the grotesque."
Alberto Savinio, The Childhood of Nivasio Dolcemare (Eridanos Press, 1988)"As explained in the foreword by art critic Ashton, Savinio is the pseudonym of Giorgio de Chirico's brother Andreas. Multitalented Savinio was also a musician and painter who created a minor stir in the surrealist circle. This quasi-autobiographical novel, set in Athens, a cultural backwater Savinio perceives with ambivalent feelings, follows the protagonist, Nivasio Dolcemare from his birth through adolescence. He experiences the rites of passage of an upperclass boytutored by a German governess, seduced by a maid in his early teensand finally enlists in the Italian army as a foot soldier in 1915. Many of the anecdotes about eccentric turn-of-the-century aristocrats are amusing, and the frequent surrealistic images of mirrors, hands and mannequins interestingly reflect themes from the de Chiricos' visual art. Savinio, however, presents his material with a maddening discontinuity. The aloof, ironical style Ashton refers to as "paraphrases... an ongoing prose poem" may disengage some contemporary readers. More appealing is the quasi-essay included on the development of the Olympic games."
Read also:
"Attila"
http://exploringfictions.blogspot.com/2009/05/alberto-savinio-attila.html
