Goliarda Sapienza - The Art of Joy

117. Julien Sorel is, of course, the young protagonist in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black . A starry-eyed dreamer from the provinces, Sorel is fuelled by Napoleonic ideals.

118. The great blasphemous Henry is Henry Miller, whose supporters supposedly referred to his Tropic of Cancer as a ‘dithyrambic novel’, meaning written in an exalted or enthusiastic vein. Dithyrambs were hymns sung to the Greek god of decadence, Dionysus.

119. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held in February 1956. It is remembered for Khrushchev’s so-called ‘Secret Speech’, which denounced the dictatorship and personality cult of Joseph Stalin.

120. Gabriele D’Annunzio was a Fascist poet, novelist and playwright. His reassessment was viewed as a kind of return to Fascism, which many anti-fascists felt had not been entirely defeated and seemed about to return to Italy. ’Ntoni’s words are reminiscent of D’Annunzio’s characteristic bombastic, extravagant style.

121. Grand Hotel was a 1932 film based on a 1930 play of the same title which was adapted from Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel . The film won an Academy Award for Best Picture and made famous Greta Garbo’s line ‘I want to be alone’. The ‘grand hotel theme’ came to describe any dramatic film that portrayed the activities of various characters in a large bustling setting such as an airport, ocean liner, hotel, etc., where some of the characters’ lives overlapped in strange ways while they sometimes remained unaware of one another’s existence.

122. Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) was a Surrealist painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica , the metaphysical art movement.

123. The migrating birds of passage recall the lines from Montale’s poem ‘Dora Markus’: ‘ La tua irrequietudine / mi fa pensare / agli uccelli di passo / che urtano ai fari / nelle sere tempestose ’; ‘Your restlessness reminds me / of those migrant birds that hurl themselves / at lighthouse beams on stormy nights’ (Eugenio Montale, Collected Poems 1920–1954 , Revised Bilingual Edition, Translated and Annotated by Jonathan Galassi, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998, 2000).