Originally published as Vite brevi di idioti in 1994. Includes bibliographical references (page xii).
Contents:
Machine generated contents note: 31. The Use Of Magnets To Treat Morbid Fixations. 2. The Three Wise Men -- 3. The Scalabrini Family -- 4. The Pyromaniacs -- 5. Luigi Pierini, Calculating Prodigy -- 6. The Enemy Of Speed -- 7. Working Suicides -- 8. The Pressure Taker -- 9. The Albanians -- 10. Pezzenti The Nobleman -- 11. Cimetta The Painter -- 12. Victims Of The Revolution -- 13. The Carnival Of '56 -- 14. Collateral Suicides -- 15. Primo Apparuti -- 16. The Republic Of Born Idiots -- 17. The Woman, Or The Whale -- 18. The Martyr To Feet -- 19. Cesare Lombroso -- 20. Inconclusive Apparition Of The Madonna -- 21. Near Suicides -- 22. Sunday Drives -- 23. The Failed Whore -- 24. Memories Of Concentration Camp Survivors -- 25. The Poet Dino Campana -- 26. Doubles And Dwarves -- 27. The Devil And The Idiot -- 28. Star-Crossed Suicides -- 29. Battista The Pinhead -- 30. The Realist Writer -- 31. The Use Of Magnets To Treat Morbid Fixations.
Summary:
A 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.
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