by Robin Hemley
Speculative Book Reviews
Writers are sometimes advised to write the book they'd most like to read. We invite you to write the book review of a book of speculative nonfiction you wish was out there, or a book that was never written but could have been, or a lost book of which there is scant evidence, or a book to be written in a hundred years. We invite you to consider the aesthetic qualities of this book and to use the opportunity of your review to push, adhere to, or reconsider the boundaries of speculation in nonfiction, as you see them. We see these reviews as furthering the conversation this journal seeks to encourage. We invite you to have fun. The limit is the limit of your speculation. Traditional reviews of nonfiction books that utilize speculation are also welcome.
We hope to publish several each issue. Typically, we imagine these reviews to be no longer than 1000 words. We'll be accepting reviews starting with our next submission period.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28, 277 pp.)
“Every person I’ve known in my life, and I’d venture to include as well, all those on earth I have not been acquainted with, carry with them a curse. My good fortune is in having known from an early age, the manifestation if not the exact reasons for my curse. The vast assemblage of humanity, by contrast, know very little of their own particular curses and spend the better part of their lives attempting to untangle curse from blessing, much like the unfortunate protagonist of James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” the curse in his case being that he let his life slip by unacted upon.”
So might begin this curious and ultimately moving memoir by the Italian Art historian and Literary critic, Mario Praz. An unvarnished and overt memoir would have been painful and/or too mundane for him to write, as he had previously written one of the most eccentric memoirs ever written, The House of Life, a memoir told through the possessions with which he filled his apartment in Rome. But if he had been coaxed to write another memoir, perhaps he would have found a little fascination with the attitude of others towards him, that nearly everyone in Italian society considered him portava iella, a jinx. Known by some as “L’Anglista,” for his vast knowledge of English literature, he was most famous in academic circles worldwide for his 1933 groundbreaking study of Romanticism, “The Romantic Agony,” and for his exquisite sense of interior design, as demonstrated in his work, " An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau." But in Rome, among friends, foes, and acquaintances, he was known as L’Innominabile” “the Unmentionable,” an irredeemable carrier of misfortune whose presence always brought some measure of disaster. When Maria Callas lost her voice during a performance at the Teatro dell’Opera of Bellini’s Norma, she found grim satisfaction upon learning that Professor Praz had been in the audience. If he approached an acquaintance at a restaurant or café, as he did once the famous Zambrano sisters, Maria and Ariceli, they’d cower quietly, in direct opposition to their vibrant natures, until he moved on.
How much did this perception weigh on him: otherwise sane and intelligent people certain he carried evil with him, all because of a congenital limp ( a sure sign of the devil)? How did the almost gothic fascination others had with accursedness determine his scholarly fascination with the Romantics whom he blasted as immoral and decadent in their obsessions with beauty and horror. Or conversely, his own appreciation of beautiful exteriors? Beginning his Romantic Agony with a chapter on Medusa, how much did he see himself reflected in her, his own ability to alter the life of anyone in his presence? An Anxiety with no possibility of escape is the main theme of the Gothic tales, he wrote. Describing these anxieties and resisting them was in some fashion his life’s work. In surrounding himself with beautiful objects that carried memories of his life for him, he created one memoir. In writing about the Romantics and their free-floating anxieties that sought expression in the supernatural, he wrote in a sense another “covert autobiography” (as John Russell called The House of Life in an article in The New York Times shortly after Praz’ death in 1982).
The missing fork of this trident of memoirs is the one he might have written perhaps titled, The Anxiety Catcher or The Unmentionable: A Memoir or Of Curses and Beauty.
Let’s say this curious book exists, though only in manuscript form, typed a year before Praz’ death. If you go looking for this book you might or might not find it, but you will certainly find him, or at least one branch of his autobiography at the Mario Praz Museum, brimming with the furnishings and books that soothed his restless and often lonely existence. Perhaps hidden in a secret compartment of a burnished cherrywood desk with ebony accents on the third floor of the Palazzo Primoli, Of Curses and Beauty is kept, admired and reread by the museum’s docents, but otherwise kept under wraps, the true nature of Mario Praz jealously guarded. While we are unable at this juncture to properly review it, we eagerly await its discovery and eventual publication.