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Unforgivable: And Other Writings
Unforgivable: And Other Writings | Cristina Campo
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Thrilling, stylish essays about everything from flying carpets and Doctor Zhivago to God and Shakespeare, by a rediscovered Italian writer.Christina Campo published only two short collections of essays in her lifetime: Fairy Tale and Mystery (1962) and The Flute and the Carpet (1971). The Unforgivable and Other Writings brings together both volumes, along with a selection of essays on literature and an autobiographical short story, offering readers of English the first full-length portrait of a writer who has long been admired in Italy and abroad. Campo's subjects range from the canonical to the esoteric. She writes stylishly about Shakespeare and Doctor Zhivago, as well as flying carpets, sprezzatura, and the theophagic origins of the Latin liturgy. Her passion for Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot makes her a modernist, but like these American counterparts she is a modernist preoccupied by the deep past and by her desire to escape from personality through sustained attention to form. For Campo, writing was a spiritual discipline, and her sentences are at once wonderfully and wildly alive and serenely self-effacing. "I have written little," she once said, "and would like to have written less."
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The_Penniless_Author
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This book melted my brain. I can't claim I fully grasped everything Campo laid out in these essays, even after multiple readings. Attention is good, imagination bad. The Gospels, (true) poetry, and fairy tales are good, realist fiction and contemporary are bad. Virtue can only be found in an ascetic, hermetic lifestyle. I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse a worldview that dismisses the Renaissance as a "universal disaster", but I have...?

The_Penniless_Author ...to admit that a lot of what she argues rings true, even when I found myself having an immediate and visceral reaction against it. Whatever else Campo is, she's a genius. I wouldn't say this is an "enjoyable" book (not in a million years), yet I guarantee I'll still be thinking about it long after I put it down. 1mo
The_Penniless_Author I should also mention that Campo writes some incredible sentences. The strength of her opinions lies heavily in the quality of her writing. I'm continually shocked to find myself being persuaded that the correct course in life is to drop out altogether, move to the desert, and become an anchorite Catholic monk. 😂 1mo
The_Penniless_Author I also feel compelled to add that Campo is kind of a whack job and believes that illness has its roots in spiritual decay and asserts - sincerely, by all appearances - that "wild creatures do not usually attack children" because children are "the saint's model". ? You can see her slipping further into religious fundamentalism as the book progresses, and even her excellent writing can't save her from becoming tedious by the end. 1mo
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#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

To accuse the French fabulists of frivolity because they adorned their fairies with a handful of ostrich feathers is to "have sight and not perception."