Literary Fiction

Elogio dell'aberrazione

(In Praise of Aberration)

Ponte alle Grazie, October 2022, pp.208

The perverse story of journalist Tito Maria Imperiale and the aberrations, depravities and private vices in a small Italian town that is at once grotesque, exhilarating and despicable.

By Lake Garda, Tito Maria Imperiale, the editor of a local newspaper, organises raunchy events with his wife Ofelia, which are attended by aspiring writers and intellectuals. Despite their happy marriage, based on the sharing of their most varied sexual deviations, his wife leaves him and Tito has a meltdown. In an attempt to overcome his loneliness, he starts to draft a desperate, comical portrait of characters as grotesque as him: an old university lecturer haunted by ghosts; an aspiring film director determined to make a sequel to Pasolini’s Salò; a philospher looking for bishops’ rings to kiss.

Ponte alle Grazie, October 2022, pp.208

  • “What still appears intact in Permunian is the power of literary writing as seen in modern masters, from Kafka to Celine, to Beckett: it creates an image of the world that never leaves you unscarred.”

    Emanuele Trevi, Strega Prize winner

  • “Elogio dell’aberrazione is a kind of sequel to Pasolini’s Salò-Sade. Hardened coprophiliacs, third-rate seducers and unhappy small-town dwellers inhabit this twisted novel, sewn together with the thread of resentment.”

    Antonio Gnoli, Robinson. La Repubblica

  • “what Perminian’s exquisite novel aims to return to is not so much Pasolini’s Salò or the sequel eventually censored by the Brescia tribunal, or to de Sade’s writings, but to the very origins of the novel, to Milesian tales, in fact.”

    Renzo Paris, Il Fatto Quotidiano

  • “I think Permunian is less like Gombrowicz than his friend, the great and forgotten Stanislaw Witkiewicz.»

    Ermanno Paccagnini, La Lettura. Il Corriere della Sera

  • “his new novel is a very loose rewriting of The 120 Days of Sodom and at the same time a rewriting  of the rewriting of it.”

    Alberto Ravasio, Alias. Il Manifesto

Francesco Permunian

Francesco Permunianwas born in 1951, in Cavarzere, and has lived in Desenzano by Lake Garda for years now. He is the author of various books, including Costellazioni del crepuscolo (Il Saggiatore, 2017), Sillabario dell’amor crudele (Chiarelettere 2019) and Giorni di collera e di annientamento (Ponte alle Grazie, 2021). His books have been reviewed by major Italian critics.

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