Le storie di Conrad. Biografia intellettuale di un romanziere by Richard Ambrosini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le storie di Conrad. Biografia intellettuale di un romanziere by Richard Ambrosini Tania Zulli Richard Ambrosini. Le storie di Conrad. Biografia intellettuale di un romanziere. Rome: Carocci, 2019. 339 pp. ISBN: 9788843096435. At a publishing house in Milan called Bottega di Poesia (Poetry Workshop), a group of artists and intellectuals meet in a sophisticated art gallery in via Montenapoleone to discuss the publication of the first Italian translation of Heart of Darkness; these images provide a rather different setting from what one expects when opening a book on Joseph Conrad. We are used to thinking about Conrad’s life and career differently, in the context of cold Eastern cities and political unrest, or in tropical islands and stormy seas. By choosing a different country as the background of Conrad’s intellectual life, Richard Ambrosini’s new book, Le storie di Conrad. Biografia intellettuale di un romanziere (Conrad’s Stories: Intellectual Biography of a Novelist), makes its aim clear from the beginning. The analysis starts by adopting a “consciously Italian critical viewpoint” (13; my translations throughout). The aforementioned setting, in fact, refers to Conrad’s reception in early twentieth-century Italy. A few months before he died in Bishopsbourne, Conrad was being born as a novelist in another country, thanks to that first translation of Heart of Darkness and to a famous essay by Emilio Cecchi who was to launch his name as a great European novelist. Later, interest in Conrad spread out through Italo Calvino and to other critics so that, by the second half of the twentieth-century, Italy was the only country boasting two complete editions of his works, translated and edited by Bompiani (1947–1966) and Mursia (1967–1982) respectively. Such an introduction leads the reader to reflect on a crucial issue: what is Conrad’s position as an intellectual, a writer, and a novelist today? To which [End Page 114] country does the “cosmopolitan,” Anglo-Polish, world-travelling writer belong? These are questions the book answers in a number of ways by presenting different “stories” about Conrad. In fact, we can read a “Story of the origins,” “Stories of the Malay Archipelago,” “Stories of the sea,” and “Stories of love.” Through these narrations, Conrad’s life and career are presented in a fresh, original way, and anyone approaching this volume should be ready to welcome a new critical view of the author, made complex by this innovative inflection. The focus on “an Italian Conrad” is meant as an invitation to consider a wider analytical outlook, namely, it is there to remind us that a reading limited to a one-sided, Anglocentric perspective cannot be considered as a viable hermeneutical path anymore. Looking at an Italian, Polish, French, American Conrad becomes the only way to define—and redefine—his poetics in broader terms. Also, the importance given to the transnational quality of his fiction is presented in the book by linking his works to a great number of other stories, references, and authors. As a transnational novelist, Conrad’s artistic identity is better understood when seen in the light of names such as Proust, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Mann, etc. This transnational orientation is related to the idea of the Conradian text as a site of theoretical elaboration. In this volume, Conrad’s stories become the intellectual biography of a novelist precisely because another story emerges from the analysis of his narratives; one whose author is an original and nonconformist intellectual able to transform his ideal artistic project in fictional practice by inventing different forms, techniques, and narrative structures, and by changing plots, character types, geographical and historical settings (17). Ambrosini’s study is led by one main purpose, that of analysing how Conrad’s novels speak, and not simply focusing on what they speak about. This allows considerations of Conrad himself as an “orchestrator of different viewpoints and temporal shifts” (18). The reader of Le storie di Conrad is accompanied by this idea through the whole corpus of his novels and most of his minor fiction, all of which are analysed by keeping an eye constantly turned to the Author’s Notes—and to A Personal Record—defined as “reading guides.” Conrad was aware that the...