We are in an era of complete hegemony of domestic animals, driven by absolute fame to their ubiquity in social circles and their dominance on the street, where in many urban centers they outnumber the sum of the adolescents and children born.
Autobiography of my perros
Sandra Petrignani
Translated by Andrés Catalán. Nordica, 2026. 219 pages. €19.90
Humans have been a constant in universal literature, from Homer to Harry Potter. However, even beyond your famous status as a man’s best friend, your appearance in the text universe allows you to give them unexpected forms of protagonism which are really excuses for playing with genres and textual forms.
This is the case Autobiography of my perrosby Sandra Petrignani (Piacenza, 1952), here we can consider how one of the heirs of a great generation of Italian writers from the second story of the 20th century, from Elsa Morante to Natalia Ginzburg, who was able to recognize all her wisdom and forgot that to build the present you need to know the past.
This has always led in prose to parameters that oscillate between the brilliance of the narrator and the extraordinary ability to tell stories. Both talents come together in his latest book, which takes as its starting point an interview in a legendary Roman cafe with a flawed writer.
The recollection of the same, in all probability by Daniele Del Giudice, is the real one leitmotif who opens the door to this hybrid, which at a glance should record the great classic that it is I miss Tulipfrom British director JR Ackerley. The affinities are limited to the protagonism of the dogs, who differ in both style and intent.
The first is fresh, fast and impressionistic in Petrignani, who does not really pretend to be processing the autobiography of his mascots, but uses them to depict him with greater accuracy; each of them helps understand the stages of life’s journey adjusted for spaces. For the first time, the latter is in the center of the city, in the district of Monti, where the intellectual moved to look more for her son, which allows her to turn into a pleasant old woman with a young appearance, who goes poker with dogs in these labyrinthine streets of mediocre tourist books.
Petrignani’s prose oscillates between the narrator’s brilliance and his ability to tell previous stories
This present is a distant image of the origin. We’ve been at it since early childhood pure todávia país s perros with whom it was possible to become acquainted by chance, something more difficult, although not sent from that place, as soon as the family settled in a villa in Monte Mario, on the privileged heights of the Eternal City, for the greater glory of the little girl who fell in love with her in her eyes, among the other trifles of the neighbor.
One of them, Wendy, can be an example of the play of this autobiography not so long ago. The author follows the footsteps of the beauty of childhood, only to meet her again on the surface and in memories. The same happens with some mascot, like Guapa, who disappears and is then resurrected during a sigh on the beach. When the youth was incarnated, distracted in his recovery, agony low before the sun, before it rose forever.
These changes are the same changes of the narrator who, due to conventions, never writes with his real name, baptizándose as Electra without being complete on the horizon, and the rarity of advertirnos sober, because the boundaries between truth and falsehood are fundamental to his cometida. A celebration where the elements combine with fraudulent hair, conscious and without veils, spectacular for the enjoyment of how it matters whether it matters a lot, whether human or animal.
Leave a Reply