La Superba

La Superba

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

Language: English

Pages: 400

ISBN: 1941920225

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


"If Italo Calvino decided to make one of his invisible cities visible, the result might look something like Pfeijffer's Genoa." — Benjamin Moser

An absolute joy to read, La Superba, winner of the most prestigious Dutch literary prize, is a Rabelaisian, stylistic tour-de-force about a writer who becomes trapped in his walk on the wild side in mysterious and exotic Genoa, centering on the stories of migration and immigration, legal and illegal, telling the story of modern Europe. Part migrant story, part perverse travel guide, La Superba is a wholly postmodern ode to the imagination that lovingly describes the labyrinthine and magical city that Pfeijffer calls home: Genoa, Italy, the city known as La Superba for its beauty and rich history.

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (b. 1968), poet, dramatist, novelist, renowned in the Netherlands as a master of language, is the only two-time winner of the Tzum Prize for "the most beautiful sentence written in Dutch" (including one in La Superba!).

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written that he loved a girl named Diana and that to him she was a dream become reality. Later on, he or somebody else had crossed out the confession.There was garbage on the street. Pigeons pecked around in their own shit. Today ships will arrive with Dutch, German, and Danish tourists on their way back from Sardinia and Corsica. They arrive dozens of times a day, and the tourists cautiously and reluctantly lose themselves a bit inside the labyrinth for an afternoon. They seldom dare venture

small, almost as small as a cuddly toy. She stirred slightly and said, “Don’t I have any goddamn right to privacy?” I said she shouldn’t worry. I actually wanted to say that the crux of what they call love is trying to get closer to someone during difficult periods, not shutting the other out. Or something like that. I couldn’t quite articulate it. She had already gotten up and dressed in a lot of very thick, gray clothes. “Where are you going?” But she’d already closed the door behind her. She’d

wasn’t, that was their business. My job was to relate everything exactly as they’d said it.   “And to be honest, that’s how I… But wait.You really have to 157 LA S UPERBA promise me that you won’t mention this to anybody.” I promised. “But I’m serious.” He disappeared into his thoughts. “Cheers, big ears.” He remained silent. “And to be honest, that’s how I witnessed a few important developments. Not to say caused them.” I ordered him another gin and tonic. “You understand.” “Well?” He

over the city. But in the city itself the sun shimmers. The mist is the air we breathe. In the city, this goes by the fairy-tale name of macaia, a word that can only be whispered, otherwise they’ll reach in through your open windows while you sleep and choke you with their soft hands. If the Genoese, who always complain about everything, complain about one thing more than anything else, it’s these clammy days and nights of suffocation that paralyze even your thoughts. Macaia is made up of the

never ask a question because she knows all the answers, even to the questions we’ve never asked ourselves. If it had been up to her, she could have solved everyone else’s problems before they even happened. Her thankless vocation is to explain everything, to just keep on explaining everything over and over again to the deaf ears of the blind populace because she is, as we ought to know, a good person. And as soon as anyone sits down at her table, the true source of her wisdom is revealed. It’s

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