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Chapters (5)
  1. Cover
  2. Copyright page
  3. Introduction
  4. NARROW ROOMS
  5. About the Author

Truth is, you can’t mimic human relationships. You have to work a different magic, and to do so, first of all you have to drop all you know about human relationships. All that’s continuously put under your eyes and stuffed in your ears. All you have superficially experienced. All you’ve been told. All the chatter about “human relationships” in our time, the whole “culture” of it. Because this is a partial view of the subject. It’s biased. The truth is under the skin. You must feel it, have faith in it, it’s something that reveals itself like a tremendous undercurrent piercing through the gigantic flow of opinions, information, news, cultural trends. James Purdy was gifted enough and strong enough to exhume those truths about the eternal human nature which were long believed dead. They’re not truths about a specific civilization, American or Western or whatever. I suffer every time I read, for example, that Dostoevsky probed the “Russian soul”. He probed the soul, if there is one, and that’s why he is appreciated all around the world, and will be forever. The approach may be peculiar, and surely Purdy’s approach is positively extreme, but he does not talk about monsters, or degenerates, simply because he does not show any interest in mediocrity. The myth of the common man is all too useful for celebrations and fanfares, much less for a good book.

Giordano Tedoldi

Giordano Tedoldi was born in Rome in 1971. He has published a collection of short stories, Io odio John Updike (Fazi Editore, Roma, 2006; 2nd ed. minimumfax, Roma, 2016) and two novels, I segnalati (Fazi Editore, Roma, 2013) and Tabù (Tunué, Latina, 2017).

NARROW ROOMS

NARROW ROOMS

The human embryo is curled up in a ball with the nostrils placed between the two knees.

At death the pupil opens wide.

Vance De Lakes waited an interminable while in Dr. Ulric’s office. Every few seconds he would lose courage and make a motion to leave. The smell of carbolic acid, chloroform, whatever it was, always made Vance a little light-­headed in any case, and looking through the two medical books whose quoted sentences are above was as nauseating as the smells. There were extremely few magazines in the waiting room, and most of these were of interest only to farmers. The National Geographic was the only reading matter Vance could stand to open but “The South Seas Today,” and “The New Eskimo,” and the disappearance of the puffin, to tell the truth, did not mean too much to him.

“It’s about Sidney.” Vance had begun volubly when the Doctor stood before him gazing under knitted brows, and extending his hand which Vance did not take only because he did not see it.