Grace Paley
All the stories
Big Sur, 516 pages, 24 euros
In Isabella Zani’s translation, here is a book that everyone should have and read or, like me, reread. I was lucky enough to meet Grace Paley in Milan when La tartaruga (Laura Lepetit) published one of the three collections that make up this book, I think Huge changes at the last minute. I have the memory of a simple and straightforward woman, who made me think, and enjoyed when I told her, of one of the magnificent pioneers of John Ford’s films. A true companion, I thought then and I still think, because she was also an exemplary figure of movement American and of every “movement”.
He wrote, with Carver, the most beautiful short stories after Hemingway, learning from Chekhov and Mansfield, but reinventing a language to describe everyday situations and characters with simplicity and immediacy, of proletarians and bourgeois, of intellectuals and immigrants, of men and women, of old people and children. Against the backdrop of a city where the individual matters little but knows how to defend himself. George Saunders’ fraternal preface explores the originality of a unique voice in twentieth-century literature. He compares her to Whitman but reminds us that Paley was also talking about us, ours Small setbacks of living, in new ways, as a wise and humorous sister who knows the value of people and feelings, dreams that make life acceptable.
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