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The Untameables

"How could one define The Untameables? Adventure novel? symbolic poetry? science fiction? fable? philosophical-social vision? None of these categories fits. It's a free-word book. Nude crude synthesizing. Simultaneous polychromatic polyhumourous. Vast violent dynamic." So F.T. Marinetti the founder, theoretician, and ringleader of Italian Futurism, describes his fiction.

Well known for his manifestos, polemical writings, and theatrical arts (collected in Let's Murder the Moonshine), Marinetti here reveals his playful side. The adventures of Vokur, Mirmofim, and the Untameables, engaged in loony combat in the land of the Paper People, makes for hilarious reading. It is a portrait of the modern world in flux, of gearshifts, bayonets, electronic light signboards, and "spotlights inscribing acetylene words."

Comparing Marinetti's fiction with the great literary experimentation of the second half of the nineteenth century and with twentieth-century prose innovators such as Gadda, Delfini, and Landolfi, critic and scholar Luigi Ballerini reveals the full significance of this new translation of The Untameables. As opposed to the more psychologically based modernism of James, Proust, Woolf, and Mann, Marinetti's writing pushes narrative limits and creates a fiction more at home, perhaps, in our postmodern context than in 1922, the time of its first publication.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 226
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781557130648
  • Genres
  • fiction, italy, literature, futurism
  • Release date
  • 1994