Tail Swallowing

Tail Swallowing John Domini Centuria: 100 Ouroboric Novels Giorgio Manganelli Translated by Henry Martin McPherson http://www.mcphersonco.com 214 pages; cloth, $24.00 Most novels possess a shape that Hollywood likes to call the "narrative arc," sturdy but unsurprising . The ouroboros presents a different configuration, the snake with its tail in its mouth. Or was that a dragon? The Gnostics who developed the symbol in the first century after Christ didn't fuss over the species , any more than they cared about the predictable novelistic arc that most of the new faith subscribed to. Gnostics sought ecstasy, not box office, and the hundred "novels" of Giorgio Manganelli's fractal beauty Centuria strives for the same. The late Italian 's 1979 project—his work has appeared in many other languages, but this book is only his second in English—gathers visions from illuminati. Centuria speaks in tongues and tells of miracles, even as it folds each revelation into an astonishing origami. The translator's preface cites an interview in which Manganelli claims he found his inspiration in a ream of larger-than-usual typing paper. Thus each piece here occupies roughly a page and a half, which presents a self-contained story-simulacrum. Most of these, by far, feature the sort of monstrous array that would torment a saint in a cave. Dragons, yes: the bias runs towards freaks of that kind, with historical standing. Novel "Sixty-three," for instance, features angelic visitors and the bell that rings at Judgment Day, in perhaps the closest Manganelli comes to traditional parable. Elsewhere, ghosts suffer problems with their castles, blockbuster secrets travel via old-fashioned post, and women give birth to enigmas. When trafficjams occur, or firing squads, these don't dent the rule of the fantastical. Even in a contemporary setting, locales must be eonsidered, like that of novel "Fifty-three," "not a properly human place." Translated into our prosy dimension, some of these hallucinations flare and terrify, while others flutter and tickle, but, either way, that's the least of Manganelli's accomplishment. More remarkable is that nearly all convey a thumbnail wholeness. Only a few pieces fail to register with sufficient pain, or oddity, or thoroughness of imaginative pursuit. The rest achieve a flash catharsis, in which thereader both becomes the beast and bites down on its tail. You can't skim over these apparitions and their changes the way you gloss the alternative realms of Alan Lightman's Einstein 's Dreams (1993), mere descriptive exercises which encourage the fantasy that we all can play the genius game. Here the genius plays us, manipulating, in a very small space, classic gambits of reversal and irony. "Classic" in fact seems a word that suits many aspects of Centuria, in spite of its author's rejection of tradition. Manganelli, who died in 1990, was a member of Gruppo '63, an avant-garde Roman salon that included Eco and Calvino. It appears that Manganelli's encounter with these colleagues spurred his productivity; the first oftwenty-six titles came out in '69, and by the period of Centuria he was publishing a book a year. For this author, therefore, brevity would seem to be the rule. His one previous English publication is in fact a sequence of stories, All the Errors (1990)—another handsome McPherson production , and another adept translation by Henry Martin. And yet, as Jascha Kessler noted in ABR, there's no "superficial skating" in the reading experience. In Centuria, the best pieces sting and chill in ways not unlike a novel of five hundred pages. Part of the magic is style, which shares the sinuosity and indirection of Manganelli's former Gruppo colleagues. The impulse to tie together end and beginning finds expression also at sentence level, when, for example, multiple parallel clauses take us through such a variety of responses to the same supernatural event that it ends up seeming two distinctly different phenomena at once. But then again, the book never wrings its twisting perspectives dry. Manganelli also likes to poke fun: "[B]ut during the night between Saturday and Sunday, his soul had developed that bizarre outgrowth which includes the idea that writing a book is a...