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Why are men and women sometimes attracted to the desire to feel pain or must suffer, while achieving happiness and psychophysical pleasure is more understandable and desirable?
I don't believe there is currently a clear and definitive answer, but surely this book will reveal a small grain of truth. Bernard Wolfe (1915 - 1985) was undoubtedly an interesting character with an extraordinary personality. After graduating in psychology, he decided not to practice as a psychoanalyst but to pursue a series of experiences as diverse as ever. For a brief period, he served as Leon Trotsky's bodyguard during his exile in Mexico and left the position shortly before the leader was assassinated. He enlisted in the merchant navy and became a war correspondent for Popular Science. He also lived in Cuba and wrote novels, screenplays, and essays: an important one being his book on Jazz "Really the Blues".
DeB Sez.Interiori (Vol 1.2).
Dr. Martine is the protagonist of this revolutionary and brilliant post-modern sci-fi thriller anticipating various Cyberpunk themes written back in 1952. The story begins with Martine hiding on an island in the Indian Ocean (Tapioca Island), where he leads an apparently peaceful life with his wife Ooda and his son, conducting lobotomy experiments on the most antisocial and dangerous natives, taking inspiration from the Mandunga. A series of strange encounters with cybernetic men, however, will convince him to return to North America. Martine will discover a completely disrupted and hallucinated society where limb amputation, called "Immob", is practiced and subsequently replaced with computerized prosthetics. Self-mutilation is adopted because society believes it has the power to eliminate all forms of violence. Essentially, it is a sort of extreme perfection of the Mandunga. The doctor will despairingly discover that the cause of all this was a block of his forgotten notes written years earlier, where he hypothesized that voluntary amputation was the only system to create an evolved and peaceful society. But the dramas that Martine will have to face won't be limited to these because, besides the looming threat of a new war within this new 'civilization', he will have a harrowing, conclusive, and lethal encounter with...
An unforgettable inner journey seen through the protagonist's psyche, spiritually guided by Norbert Wiener (father of cybernetics). A powerful and substantial book (over 420 pages), frighteningly compact and highly dramatic, loaded with passion and strong positive and negative feelings. In all honesty, this novel deeply touched me with its multiple intellectual concepts related to the human psyche and was able to make me observe our multifaceted society more closely in both good and bad. It's difficult to analyze the number of topics addressed within this volume because it contains considerable psychological insights from Freud, Georg Groddeck's "The Book of the It" and "The Unknown Self", Theodor Reik's "Masochism in Modern Man" and particularly the in-depth analyses made by Dr. Edmund Bergler "The Battle of Conscience", "The Basic Neurosis: Oral Regression and Psychic Masochism" and "Neurotic CounterfeitSex". The erotic themes are also fundamental, treated with such a personal and suggestive style that provokes an intense emotion in the reader, especially because, in those years, the theme of sex within the sci-fi genre was almost absent except in some rare and forgotten work.
The book also contains drawings by the writer himself, Fred Sagal (page 308), and Nanno deGroot (page 314) and some 'doodles' taken from Tristram Shandy (pages 305 and 315). After the conclusion of the novel, there are extremely interesting notes from the writer himself, as well as a postscript by Vittorio Curtoni "From Here to Immob(ility)" particularly incisive and clarifying on the historical and sociological importance of the book, as only an industry professional can provide. Suggested music to accompany the reading: Terje Rypdal "Odyssey". Reading difficulty: 4 out of 5.
Post-modern regards.
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