Ermanno Cavazzoni – författare

A fantastic evocation of life and learning in a dream sequence: Jerome, who has to sit an exam and suffers from toothache, enters a nighmarish library in which everything conspires to frustrate his desperate attempts to revise.

Ermanno Cavazzoni admits that his books push the novel to its very limits — “like outpourings of the maniacal”, he says. “That’s how they come to me, you must understand.”Here in The Nocturnal Library, we have the maniacal that we all know from our own dreams: a dreamer’s lack of control and a dreamer’s dogged acceptance of the absurd. Here we have the dream as paranoia and the vain struggle to understand the rules that govern life. Here we have the dream as a bizarre library in which the fragility of human knowledge is emphasised again and again.Jerome, who perhaps represents the archetypal man of learning, is bound up in his world of books and suffers from crippling insomnia. He has to study for an exam, and his troubles are compounded by bad toothache, or at least these are the dominating themes of his dream. The reality of wakefulness only appears in the last paragraph of the last chapter.But this is not primarily a book about dreams. Amongst other things, it is a book about the arrogance and illogicality of power and bureaucracy, and the relationship between the world of intellectual order and the chaos of nature, dominated as it is by mutual disregard and the latter’s inevitable victory in the long term.And above all, this is a book in which fantasy reigns for its own sake and goes wherever the author’s creative impulse takes it. That is how his novels come to him, and you have to understand that! If you do, you will enjoy this exotic book.

A blissful and baneful litany of human stupidity, from Italian fantastical absurdist Ermanno CavazzoniA parody of the medieval Lives of the Saints, Ermanno Cavazzoni’s Brief Lives of Idiots offers us a perfect month of portraits of idiots drawn from real life, from overly realist writers to fringe-belief obsessives, punctuated every seventh day with a litany of suicides—failed, foolish or fatal to others. This roll call extends the ridiculous to melancholic extremes, introducing us to such exemplary fools as the father and husband unable to recognize his own family, the Marxist convinced that Christ was an extraterrestrial, the would-be saint who finds a private martyrdom through the torturous confinement of a pair of ill-fitting leather oxfords and the man who failed to realize that he had spent two years in a concentration camp. This is a display of myriad idiocy, discovered and achieved by hook or by crook, be it through paranoia, misapplied methodology, religious hallucination or relentless diarrhea. But Cavazzoni engages in neither finger pointing nor celebration. If saints can be counted, idiots cannot: idiocy is ultimately the human condition.Ermanno Cavazzoni (born 1947) is the award-winning author of many fantastic and absurd tales. He is a professor at the University of Bologna and a member of the literary group OpLePo, an Italian spin-off of the OuLiPo.