Blind Argus or the Fables of the Memory [Paperback]

Gesualdo Bufalino (Author), Patrick Creagh (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1993

An old man, haunted by the imminence of death, harks back to the loves of his youth in a small Sicilian town where he was a schoolteacher. As he breathes life into his memoirs, a whole world of laughter and pain is evoked. Gesualdo Bufalino also wrote "Night's Lies".

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

From Italian writer Bufalino (Lies of the Night, 1991): a rich feast of a novel that--with just the right mix of poignancy and comedy--details one golden summer's gift of love to a man whose youth had been spent amidst mud and blood. The narrator decides, now that he's old, to write a ``happy book'' about the summer he spent as a 30-ish high-school teacher in a town on the Sicilian coast--a time when he was ``twenty reborn'' and ``convalescent in the sun,'' enjoying that summer's gift to him, a gift owed him because of the war. Eager to love and forget, even if only for a month or two, he describes how he first falls in love with tempestuous Maria Venera, granddaughter of Don Alvise Salibba, one of the town's last aristocrats, who lives in a crumbling palazzo. Nonagenarian Don Alvise is a ``splendour of a fellow with the gift of the gab'' who loves to tell ``cynical, titillating yarns.'' The narrator's love is briefly shaken when Maria tells him she's pregnant by another man and asks him to help her get an abortion. Still obsessed with her beauty, he has a brief but intense affair with the discarded mistress of a local magnate, flirts with former pupils, and daydreams. But when his close friend becomes betrothed and Maria runs off with a French filmmaker, he realizes that all he's done is ``play-act love.'' The summer ends with his transfer, and now, years later, dying in Rome, he wonders whether ``memory behaves as the body does when confronted with an onslaught of microbes--a defence force isolates the most dangerous, and leaves them immortal but inert within us.'' These ``golden moments'' we resuscitate later in writing--that ``prosthesis of living.'' Witty, wise, and ebulliently literate: a modern fable about the tricks that love and memory play on us. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins (June 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 000271048X
• ISBN-13: 978-0002710480
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,004,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars for those who think that imagination is a value, May 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Blind Argus or the Fables of the Memory (Paperback)

I am an Italian College student and browsing on the Internet I find out that one of my favourite book has been translated in enghlish. That is a really pleasant surprise for me, for I think that Bufalino is a really good writer. Moreover when I read this book I found myself living in another place and time and I could feel the warmth of the Sicilian sun even when lying on my bed in a cold winter night. The style of the author is certainly admirable since he uses words in such a way that this book sounds more like a poem than the narration of a period of the author's life. I believe that Bufalino's "Blind Argus" is a fantastic book! If you know how to fly with your imagination and read it, believe me, you will think the same!

Anna Ferigo