THE CONFIDENCE MAN - Herman Melville

Published on the day it is set, April Fool’s Day 1857, The Confidence-Man concerns a group of passengers travelling the Mississippi by steamboat (aptly named the Fidèle) and their various onboard encounters with an enigmatic conman figure (who appears throughout in a variety of disguises). Poorly received at the time of its first publication, The Confidence-Man was indeed Melville’s last novel — he would thereafter turn to poetry and resumed prose fiction only much later in 1885 with the commencement of the unfinished Billy Budd, Sailor. Though largely misunderstood in the mid-19th century, the novel and its central message — that the art of the con lies at the heart of American society — began to garner more appreciation and salience as the decades rolled on. Orson Welles was said to have wanted to make it his first film, before eventually settling for Citizen Kane.

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891) was born in New York. Family hardships forced him to leave school for various occupations, including shipping as a cabin boy to Liverpool in 1839, a voyage that sparked his love for the sea. A shrewd social critic and philosopher in his fiction, he is considered an outstanding writer of the sea and a great stylist who mastered both realistic narrative and a rich, rhythmical prose.

«The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel that could just as well have been called “The Art of the Scam”».

                                                                        Philip Roth

«What started this was, to account, if necessary, for the changed air of the man with the weed, who, throwing off in private the cold garb of decorum, and so giving warmly loose to his genuine heart, seemed almost transformed into another being. This subdued air of softness, too, was toned with melancholy, melancholy unreserved; a thing which, however at variance with propriety, still the more attested his earnestness; for one knows not how it is, but it sometimes happens that, where earnestness is, there, also, is melancholy».

                                                             Herman Melville

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BENITO CERENO - Herman Melville

"Benito Cereno" is a novel by Herman Melville, a fictionalized account about the revolt on a Spanish slavery ship captained by Don Benito Cereno, first published in 1855. Off the coast of Chile, captain Amasa Delano of the American merchant ship Bachelor's Delight visits the San Dominick, a Spanish slave ship apparently in distress. After learning from its captain Benito Cereno that a storm has taken many crewmembers and provisions, Delano offers to help out. He notices that Cereno acts awkwardly passive for a captain and the slaves display remarkably inappropriate behavior, and though this piques his suspicion he ultimately decides he is being paranoid. Employing a third-person narrator who reports Delano's point of view without any correction, the story has become a famous example of unreliable narration.

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was born in New York. Family hardships forced him to leave school for various occupations, including shipping as a cabin boy to Liverpool in 1839, a voyage that sparked his love for the sea. A shrewd social critic and philosopher in his fiction, he is considered an outstanding writer of the sea and a great stylist who mastered both realistic narrative and a rich, rhythmical prose.

«Such were the American’s thoughts. They were tranquillizing. There was a difference between the idea of Don Benito’s darkly preordaining Captain Delano’s fate, and Captain Delano’s lightly arranging Don Benito’s. Nevertheless, it was not without something of relief that the good seaman presently perceived his whale-boat in the distance. Its absence had been prolonged by unexpected detention at the sealer’s side, as well as its returning trip lengthened by the continual recession of the goal».

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JOHN BARLEYCORN - Jack London

Jack London was born on 12th January, 1876 in San Francisco. He did not have a usual childhood but he dealt with it and overcame his grief. He could not continue higher studies because of financial problems but this did not restrain him from becoming a writer. He had a vivid way of expression and was efficient in putting this in writing. London realized his flair for writing and decided to take it as a profession and began to write regularly. This novelist was adventurous and his voyages and journeys provided him the material of his stories. During his short life he has penned several stories,about 40 novels, poetry, journalistic reports and even autobiographical literary pieces. Jack London breathed his last on 22nd November 1916, in his ranch in California. There are many speculations about his death but the cause of his death is still not determined.

John Barleycorn is an autobiographical novel dealing with his enjoyment of drinking and struggles with alcoholism. It was published for the first time in 1913. In this memoir, London discusses various life experiences he has had with alcohol, and at widely different stages in his life. Key stages are his late teen years when he earned money as a sailor and later in life when he was a wealthy, successful writer. The name “John Barleycorn” is taken from a British folksong, about the Spirit of Alcohol.

«And so I draw the indictment home to John Barleycorn. It is just those, the good fellows, the worth while, the fellows with the weakness of too much strength, too much spirit, too much fire and flame of fine devilishness, that he solicits and ruins. Of course, he ruins weaklings; but with them, the worst we breed, I am not here concerned. My concern is that it is so much of the best we breed whom John Barleycorn destroys.(…)Immediately, with greeting and salutation, I am taken into the fellowship. The alcohol, shrewdly blended with water, is handed to me, and soon I am caught up in the revelry, with maggots crawling in my brain and John Barleycorn whispering to me that life is big, and that we are all brave and fine -free spirits sprawling like careless gods upon the turf and telling the two-by-four, cut-and-dried, conventional world to go hang.»

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RETURN TO ZANZIBAR - Gabriel-Aldo Bertozzi

Return to Zanzibar, a French novel first published in 2008 by Editions du Rocher, and the following year in paperback by Motifs, is an inspired and powerful road movie of incredible originality, involving alchemy research, and imbued with visions of antiquity. In 2013 it was translated into Italian for Pironti Editions in Naples. The lover of poet Julius Applemayer has left without a word, leaving behind only an assortment of unusual and mysterious objects: an edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s works, a post card showing a fresco of the Queen of Sheba, a golden pendant, an Ethiopian banknote, two sheets of enigmatic signs…. On the trail of the fugitive Noname, Julius undertakes a wild voyage that takes him from Ethiopia to Greece, passing through Zanzibar, Tanzania, Togo, France and Italy. Following Rimbaud’s African trail, Julius tries to find meaning in the objects left by the runaway, but will that be enough to lead him to her?

Gabriel-Aldo Bertozzi, writer, artist and university professor, is the founder of Inismo, an international literary and artistic movement created in Paris in 1980. An expert author in narrative techniques which he exploits to offer a work in a new genre. Novel translated from the French by David W. Seaman, professor of French literature at Georgia Southern University, specializing in the avant-garde.

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THE DUEL - Joseph Conrad

The Duel is a story attained the dignity of publication all by itself in a small illustrated volume, under the title, "The Point of Honour." That was many years ago. It has been since reinstated in its proper place, which is the place it occupies in this volume, in all the subsequent editions of my work. Its pedigree is extremely simple. It springs from a ten-line paragraph in a small provincial paper published in the South of France. That paragraph, occasioned by a duel with a fatal ending between two well-known Parisian personalities, referred for some reason or other to the "well-known fact" of two officers in Napoleon's Grand Army having fought a series of duels in the midst of great wars and on some futile pretext. The pretext was never disclosed.

Joseph Conrad, (born Dec. 3, 1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv, Ukraine]—died Aug. 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.), English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the short story “Heart of Darkness” (1902). During his lifetime Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places.

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DIARY OF A MADMAN - Gustave Flaubert

Diary of a madman is a brilliant demonstration of the difficulties and complexities inherent in writing. At first sight it could seem a frustrating and fool text. It might appear incoherent and crisis-ridden, but at the end the reader could hear the voice of a writer who is, slowly but surely, preparing himself for the world’s literary stage. 

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen, France on 12 December 1821, the fifth of six children in a family of doctors. .In the 1830s Flaubert attended the Collége Royal de Rouen, writing for its newspaper, reading Shakespeare, travelling extensively and at the age of fourteen began in earnest his own writings, inspired by his unconsummated love affair at this time with the much older and married Elisa Schlésinger, that inspired Diary of a madman. He unsuccessfully studied law in Paris, and after the death of his father, Flaubert lived in Rouen for the rest of his life. His malady of nervous fits (epilepsy started when he was around twenty-two years old) caused him to be sequestered at home much of the time, while allowing him the peace to continue his writings. Flaubert embarked on a trip to Egypt and the Far East in 1851. In 1857 he published Madame Bovary,a portrait of the young provincial Emma Bovary as fallen woman and her adulterous liaisons. It was criticised then banned for a period after its first release. In 1870 Flaubert became very sick, but continued to write. Afflicted by syphilis and rapidly declining health, Flaubert died on 8 May 1880 due a brain hemorrhage.

«I was in love.What it is to love, to feel young and full of tenderness, to feel the harmonies of nature palpitating within you, to need this reverie and this action of the heart, to feel happy on account of it! Oh! Those first beatings of a man’s heart, his first palpitations of love! How strange and gentle they are! And later, how trite, how stupid and ridiculous they seem! What a strange thing! There is at once both torment and joy in this sleeplessness.»

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