"There is nothing more futile than the review; a miserable, irresponsible gesture, a snippet of chatter, a ball of useless adjectives, frivolous adverbs, and risible sentences. Yet this insolent futility can make the review a literary 'genre' more inferior than minor, a chatter from back alleys, a senile babble; thus, even the review can expect some reception in the disordered, noisy square of literary trades, between the epic poem and the epigram, the caudated sonnet and the rhymed chapter. It is amusing to think of the literary article as related to the Eulogy of the eel-fish, nobly slippery – or the chamber pot – an intimate, sorrowful, and indispensable object, a matter of laughter and anguish. Indeed, something ambiguous, meager, frail, and elusive, and at the same time futile and poor, yet constant, a silly and unsettling thing like a shadow. If literature is a chaotic and unrestrained dream, a city inhabited by storytellers, buffoons, paid mourners, virtuous charlatans, and preachers of elaborate vices, then the reviewer will be the buffoon of the buffoon, the sidekick of the great tragic figure, the claque of the meditative, the parasite of the pedant. Behold, the parasite, a noble, archaic, odious, and petulant figure that belongs to the oldest traditions of the urban planning of the literary suburra. The parasite is a mixture of grimaces, misunderstandings, distorted words, ambiguous echoes, indecent noises, thoughtful jests, and lackadaisical concepts; what could be more pertinent to a literary discourse, an adorned, splendid funeral oration in honor of the only reliable hero, the negative hero! Indulgent, worried, cast your offering to the clever parasite."
G. Manganelli, Altre concupiscenze, Adelphi, 2022.
