Arbasino. A-Z

Alberto Arbasino is the eighth author featured in Electa’s “Enciclopedie” series after Savinio, Rodari, Steinberg, Woolf, Cocteau, Scialoja and Calvino. In his quantitatively immense work, Arbasino set himself the gigantic task of archiving the “Memory of the World”. For this reason – explained the author – he had to periodically rewrite his books, even (if not especially) the most successful ones (such as the enchanting L’Anonimo lombardo, published for the first time in 1959, and the epochal Fratelli d’Italia, published in 1963; but also his admirable travel books such as the one set in the United States, which macroscopically proliferated into America amore). Rewriting was the way to update his judgments on the “things seen” each time.

The polyphonic portrait, curated by Andrea Cortellessa, with contributions from 34 authors including Marco Belpoliti, Antonio Gnoli, Raffaele Manica, Anna Ottani Cavina, Jacopo Pellegrini, Luca Scarlini and Walter Siti, presents the endless nuances of the figure of Arbasino, a writer capable, like few others, of expressing the cultural (but perhaps one should say moral) temperature of a given historical condition. The 80 entries in this encyclopaedia are a reflection of this: from America to Zombies, passing through Elephant. There are cultured and ironic interdisciplinary evocations: from Cazzeggio to Ekphrasis, Post-modern and Vaffanculo.

The rich appendix of documents comprises previously unpublished and rare texts by the author that reconstruct episodes that have become myth, such as his direction of Bizet’s Carmen at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna in 1967, with exceptional collaborators Giosetta Fioroni, Vittorio Gregotti and none other than Roland Barthes.

In other words, Arbasino from A to Z, in his extraordinary ability to bear witness post-mortem to the 19th century.