Guest of the ilb 2004
Gianni Celati was born in Sondrino, Italy, in 1937.
He earned a PhD from Bologna University with a dissertation on James
Joyce. In 1966, one of his short stories attracted the attention of
Italo Calvino, who was chief editor of the Einaudi publishing house,
which in 1970 published Celati’s first book »Comiche«. The following
novels »Le Avventure do Guizzardi« (1973), »La Banda die Sospiri«
(1976) and »Lunario del Paradiso« (1979) established Celati as an
author of the neo-avant-garde group, along with Umberto Eco and Italo
Calvino. From 1973 to the early 1980’s he was professor of English and
American literature at the University of Bologna, where he worked on
his studies of literary aesthetics. After leaving academia, he devoted
himself to writing and film making. He produced several experimental
documentaries, including »Visioni di casa che crollano« (»Crumbling
Houses« ) a critical meditation on the decay of deserted houses in the
plains area of the River Po. The prize-winning volume of short stories
»Narratori delle pianure<(1985; Engl. »Voices from the Plains« 1991)
marks the beginning of Celati’s experimentation with new methods of
minimalist narration. Oscillating between fiction and documentary, his
extraordinary tales are supposed to have taken place in the everyday
lives of existing people. Celati invents a chronicler who not only
narrates, but also plays with the idea of narrative. On the
subjects of irony and the grotesque in his short stories, of the
cinematographic element in literature, and of the writing process
itself, Celati has said: »I had been working on these stories for over
twenty years; then, over a long period of time, I rewrote them, partly
to keep myself busy and partly to see what was happening to them. When
you write stories or read them, you see landscapes and figures and you
hear voices: in other words, you have a sort of natural cinema going on
in your head, and you don’t need to watch Hollywood films any
more. Seeing, perceiving and observing are also the preeminent
issues of »Avventure in Africa« (1998; Eng. »Adventures in Africa«
2000). In 1999, Celati was awarded the New York University Prize for
Italian Fiction for this unusual travelogue, which is both a
documentary on his unsuccessful film project about the Dogon people of
West Africa, and also a record of his own experiences as a tourist. His
most recent work »Fata Morgana« (2005) tells of a fictitious place in
the desert and the tribe of the Gamuna. Apart from his work as an
author he has been a visiting lecturer at several universities. In
addition, he has translated the works of numerous writers into Italian,
including Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Céline, Stendhal, Samuel Beckett,
Joseph Conrad and Roland Barthes. Gianni Celati lives in Brighton, UK.
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