Small Parties by Michele Serra Review

Michele Serra’s short stories are well done – actually rather “small parties” as ” Cerimonie < ” Michele Serra: “Cerimonie” remarkable in Twelve short stories gathered the pretty linen cord from the Diogenes Verlag.

The table of contents stimulates the imagination: twelve beginnings of sentences, all of the text of each story are taken. “The partisans of the grinding machine and Emery,” “Who knew when the deer finally roared,” “gongs in the bamboo grove, bagpipes in the mountains and harps on the heath?” – which may as well expect a

All stories are written from the first-person perspective, so give yourself realistic, authentic, perhaps autobiographical. The situations in which the author presents his characters are not always commonplace.

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Right in the input history we are “taken” from the old man who unabashedly stripped in front of us on the Tuscan riverside his clothes and the way God created him, goes into the water. It has a conversation ( “I am a friend of all earthly things”), the old man is Spinnertes and concerns out of himself. What bothers him is the dilemma that he is an atheist, but felt a strong urge to pray. he wants to communicate a God not suffering, despair or fear, but to be able to be happiness live. Convinced that man is a social being, he wants to establish a prayer group and the service of the priests oppose a worldly, purely human liturgy.

“He’s crazy,” thinks the narrator at times, but can be an adventure in this inspiring blend of sociology, philosophy ( “Are all donkey born a donkey?”) And religion ( “we formed a small round Supper”). Finally, a kind of spirituality is to help in the face of natural beauty to invent an “own rite” of unbelievers. Although that does not want to work so well and we the grumpy old man, forced our narrator follows, must leave his fate, he has a lot of light on the meaning of life, religion, beauty, values, words and literature thrown.  Serra’s short stories did not score by external action. Which is quite calmly, but original, like some bizarre or absurd and thus quite surprising and entertaining.

However, larger space occupy the many considerations that trigger the events at the teller. He characterizes the people, analyze what’s going on inside them, associated this and that and expanded his thoughts flights regularly in philosophical and spiritual spheres. Strikingly often as he wrestles with the plight of the “Entchristianisierten” to satisfy the desire for “higher” to fill in the blanks of desolation, since he “had banished theological tales  in the dustbin of my Catholic upbringing” all the. There are certain extent> essayistic narrative The fact that the reader can be like to be captivated by these stories, is also an artful at Serra’s style, humorous lightness, a distinctive and original poetic imagery and combines the full range of critical statement Elders of gentle suggestions of mild irony to biting sarcasm

So we read the one hand -. always from the first-person perspective – as Manlio, owner of a small shop in via Pacini ( a Milanese “dog shit mile, at least two kilometers full of old, rattling sheet metal blinds”), not to mince words takes when it comes to the “non-existent” with “idiotic shaven military heads” whose paltry “identity consists solely of a blue-violet WOW they at night next to an identical POW “spray. Their “dull-witted alphabet” of “I’m still here” messages disfigured whole road and railway trains. After he was himself a few times fallen victim to this anonymous “Men I” and its shutter has cleaned laboriously, he lies in wait – and actually caught one perpetrator. What follows is a verbal skirmishes and an amusing “drama of identity.”

“Small Temple of Childhood” it goes against it harmlessly back to childhood of the narrator. In the fully loaded Fiat 600, the Milanese family drove in blistering summer heat about “streets that were more bad than quite fit into the terrain” to the Riviera di Ponente. Since the mind wanders from practical questions (the “knee Kiss attitude” in the back seat, and “how we did it actually with the luggage?”) On the characteristics of the car types ( “the squat egg shape of the car with its yolk of persons”) by a wealth of travel impressions (the shaved necks of the front occupants, the outside scurrying “moats, the rows of poplars, the bright country houses”, which in blowing through the open little window odors, dust particles, insects).

on most touching is the last story of the band. How comforting a child who is released over a painful loss in tears? The warm sympathy, compassion of the father penetrates unattenuated through the mild irony and the bold imagery of the descriptions. “In his face, on which the trains were still gathered in a small space, all crying at once. The chin was zusammengekrampft among the down-drawn lips and shone like a wet table tennis ball. Out of sight dropped an incredible amount of tears every few seconds one, with the unfailing zeal of a water meter. ” How Giovanni from “rain stick our family,” the the “all tears cloudburst” collects and discharges to earth, finally back to life purifies (including “geschäftsmännisch like all children”), gives rise, through familiarity, men and women as mourners the afterlife, life and death ( “midwife and gravedigger working in the same direction, albeit in different unions”) and reflect the eternal cycle of the water. Beautiful, fun and very stimulating readings in between!