Memories from the Twentieth Century

In these three short books--Servabo: A Fin De Siècle Memoir, Miss Kirchgessner, and The Medlar Tree, collected in one volume in English for the first time--Luigi Pintor retraces a life marked, often in spite of itself, by politics. At once intransigent and ironic, these autobiographical texts are written "to reorder in the imagination things that don't add up in reality."

From the idyll of his Sardinian childhood to the transformative experience of the anti-Fascist resistance, and from post-war militancy to the dismal regression of Italian culture, Pintor captures memories that are intensely personal and inseparable from political and intellectual experience. Episodes and observations recur across all three books, but the tropes of autobiography are insistently displaced. Sparse and evocative prose, borrowing from the aphorism and fable, struggles to give form to personal and political despair, while Pintor never relents on the attachments and convictions that shape a life.

About the author

Luigi Pintor (1925-2003) was co-founder of the independent communist newspaper il manifesto and one of Italy's foremost political journalists.

Product details

• Authors: Luigi Pintor
• Assisted by: Gregory Elliot (Translation)
• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.08.2018
• EAN: 9780857425782
• ISBN: 978-0-85742-578-2
• No. of pages: 204
• Dimensions: 125 mm x 205 mm x 17 mm
• Weight: 250 g
• Series: Italian List
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Biographies, autobiographies