Sam Savage

Il lamento del bradipo

    (The Cry of the Sloth)

Einaudi, 2009    [humour, Ita, I3]

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Andrew Whittaker is neck-deep indebted, the literary magazine he runs is close to bankruptcy, the house where he lives crumbles away, and his wife has dropped him off. But Andrew holds on. He is a source of ideas and projects. Perhaps even fantasies and foolish ambitions. He keeps writing to everybody, like a madman. And then he picks up everything. A present and a past of dreams, ideals, and regrets comes out from the excerpts of his odd correspondence: rejecton letters to would-be writers, missives to his ex-wife, orders to firms which should repair ceilings in his house, eviction requests, advertisements of tenements, notes, ideas, drafts of stories and novels, letters to his mother, post-scripta to his mother’s nanny, pages from his diary, shopping lists, notices to his tenants, more letters, more thoughts, more notices...

The result is the wild pamphlet of a nice idler. Or, better, of a neurotic and painstaking filing clerk of the void lot which is all around us.

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Probably one of the worse and useless books I’ve read (or, better, I’ve tried to read). A distilled nonsense of empty notes, that I’ve kept reading only because I was hoping that the next page couldn’t be as bad and silly as all those I’d already read.

And, after about half of it, I’ve given up both reading and any hope that arriving at the end of the book might be worth anything. My fear is that people like the main character of this book may also exist in the real world.

But the title of the book is catching, nevertheless...