Customer Reviews

Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels

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This book was one of those little indie bookstore surprises, courtesy of Malaprop's in Asheville, where it was a staff recommendation. I'd never heard of Manganelli but, as is mentioned on the back cover, he was a contemporary of Calvino and Eco, which seemed to be a good indication that Centuria would contain the type of writing I enjoy. While Manganelli calls the 100 forty-line stories in this collection "novels," I think of them as thought experiments. They deal less with character and emotion (though frequently about emotion they seldom contain much emotional weight) and more with an exploration of concept. For example, the first sentence of #84 introduces us to the entry's topic: "He awakens in the middle of the night with the clear, sudden awareness of never having understood the Allegories of his own life." The rest of this entry expands on the meaning of that statement, elucidating (brilliantly) the concept of human life as allegory for itself, and while there is motion of the orobouric sort, it isn't really a story.

I greatly enjoyed Centuria, and if there is one criticism I'd make, it's really external to the book itself, which would probably make it internal to me. I think almost all of the entries succeed at what they set out to do. I just wish that they had a little touch of the human in them. Sometimes, to me, the ideas existed entirely in abstraction, and I wanted a knowable, physical grounding element. It's a small criticism of a brilliant work, but one I make to point out that in the end Centuria is more stimulating than entertaining, and I think it could have been both. Still, I recommend it, especially to those who, like me, love an excursion into the postmodern now and again.