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158 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
A pharmacist's son went abroad to study. On his father's death, he came home to practice, becoming the pharmacist in a small place near Viadana in the province of Mantua.*This opening is typical of most of the stories: the facts laid out baldly as in a fable, none of the characters given proper names. By returning to an almost antique form, the stories examine the art of storytelling itself. But Celati does not have much to say for his profession. Suffering the ruin of his business, the foreign-educated pharmacist devotes himself to writing happy endings to the classics of tragic literature. A captured Italian officer, spending years of idleness in a prison camp in India, spends the rest of his days writing unpublishable novels about a life he has never lived, in a language learned from his reading of authors long since dead. Conversely, a student moves to France determined to become a writer; separately and together, he and his girlfriend get involved in a series of adventures, but his experiences take away all desire to write about them.