A Year in Reading: Anne Serre

Having a mild fascination for anything to do with Trieste (that magical city where languages flow together and and still walk), I devoured a wonderful collection of reader’s reports written by (1902–1965) for the Italian publishing houses Einaudi and Bompiani. The book’s called in French and contains, among other things, a note about that made me laugh: “Un aspirant loup qui se dandine face à l’irrationnel (…) Petit névrotique esthétisant et bourré d’auto-compassion.” (“A would-be wolf toddling about in the presence of the irrational…A neurotic little aesthete steeped in self-pity.”) He was being a little unfair, of course: I remember how discovering Bataille when I was 20 ( and ) showed me a new way to think and write about the world. Bazlen, by the way, was the inspiration for another fine novel, by , which is about a famous author who never writes anything.