LA BEAUTÉ EN ÉTAT D’AVENTURE DANS LA VIE ET LA MORT D’ADRIA ET DE SES ENFANTS DE MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI
BEAUTY AS ADVENTURE IN MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI’S VITA E MORTE DI ADRIA E DI SUOI FIGLI

Summary/Abstract: Beauty as Adventure in Massimo Bontempelli’s Vita e morte di Adria e di suoi figli. The novel Vita e morte di Adria e di suoi figli, published in 1930 by the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli turns the aestheticising story of the feminine obsession of unchanging beauty into a modern myth. Object of an ambivalent process of petrification and volatilization, Adria converts the narrative discourse itself into a laborious attempt to catch the untouchable, the aetheral essence. A metaphor of the modern work of art which escapes the incidence of its own creator in order to become a universe on its own, the protagonist is an emblem of the confrontation of two different aesthetic ways: the decadent "ottocento" literature and the "novecento" adventure novel. The bontempellian novel develops the invariants of the novecento art, specially the idea of objectifying space and time, of settling a restoring centre of the universe and of the existence of the individual as well; the poetics of the magical realism with a view to the intermingling of everyday routine and the background mystery; the aesthetics of the game as an adventure of the unpredictable in the fictional field.

• Details
• Contents