Il mondo come teatro. Storia e storie nelle narrazioni di Ernesto Ferrero

Ernesto Ferrero owes his popularity to his novel “N.”, which earned him the Premio Strega in the year 2000. It explores the intertwining of momentous historical events and the individual life stories through the ten months of Napoleon’s exile in Elba. His entire work as a narrator and essayist demystifies that theater of fictions and instrumental deceptions to which official history is so often reduced. Ferrero blurs the boundaries of genres and languages, focusing on the quality of a prose that draws on Calvino, Primo Levi and Sciascia, to explore the relationship between the face and the mask, art and life, the individual and the mass, through the extreme cases of larger-than-life men: the monstrous Gilles de Rais (“Bluebeard” or Barbe Bleu) and Francis of Assisi in the hallucinations of the Middle Ages; Napoleon; and Salgari, the American swindler who enchanted Italy in 1924. In a series of incisive studies, Luciano Curreri reconstructs this original historical pathway against the backdrop of contemporary culture.