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488 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1889
"Everywhere, roses roses roses drifted down, slowly, densely, delicately, like snowfall at dawn"
"D'Annunzio's place in the pantheon of great Italian poets is widely acknowledged, but it is easy to forget that such major twentieth-century authors as James Joyce and Marcel Proust were great admirers of his novels."
"One of the many striking things about reading Pleasure is its obsessive interest in things, in the buying and possessing of beautiful objects, of furniture and décor, drapes, bowls, bric-a-brac. Sperelli is obsessed with surrounding himself with beautiful things . . ."
"The protagonist, Andrea Sperelli, is an alter ego of the young D'Annunzio: a poet and refined aesthete, a slave to beauty and pleasure . . . "
"Displaying a delicate spirit inclined toward things of intelligence, toward rarity of taste, toward aesthetic pleasure."

"There was a rainfall of roses in the sky"
"The recurring references to roses in this novel are significant. Roses have many meanings, but with regard to this novel, there are two that are most significant: that of symbolizing the female sex organs, and that of being associated with the Virgin Mary. In this novel, which frequently juxtaposes the sacred and the profane, the rose could be seen to be the most representative symbol of this juxtaposition."
"Rome was his great love: not the Rome of the Caesars but that of the popes; not the Rome of the arches, of the thermal baths, of the forums, but the Rome of the villas, of the fountains, of the churches. He would have given the entire Colosseum for Villa Medici, Campo Vaccino for Piazza della Spagna, the Arch of Titus for the Fountain delle Tartarughe. The princely magnificence of the Colonnas, of the Dorias, of the Barberinis attracted him vastly more than the ruins of imperial grandeur."
"The world that D'Annunzio describes is the Rome of the nineteenth century, only recently the capital of Italy, with one foot in the old papal Rome, a sleepy, provincial, but extravagantly beautiful city dominated by the old aristocracy, and a newer world of lawyers, politicians, and a rising bourgeoisie. D'Annunzio—the lover of beauty—sides clearly with the first over the second."
"The young man felt his soul overcome by it."
"Have you ever seen certain sweetmeats from Constantinople, as soft as dough, made from bergamot, orange blossom, and roses, which perfume your breath for the rest of your life?"
"Oh, the story . . . is a marvel! Anabasis was nothing compared with this!"
"My eyes were mistaken, drunk on perfumes."
"Art! Art! Here was the faithful Lover, always young, immortal; here was the Source of pure joy, forbidden to the multitude, conceded to the elect; here was the precious Food, which makes man similar to a god. How could he have drunk from other cups after bringing his lips to that one?
"Divine Rome!"
"How marvelous! You are right to be so in love with Rome."
"By nature of his taste, he sought out multiple aspects of enjoyment . . . the complex delight of all the senses, intense intellectual emotion, abandons of sentiment, impulses of brutality. And because he sought out these things with skill, like an aesthete, he naturally drew from the world of objects a great part of his exhilaration."
"Having imbibed some Nietzsche, D'Annunzio saw himself as a kind of superman and was not content with mere literary fame . . . "The world . . . must be persuaded that I am capable of anything," he wrote during his first electoral campaign."
"The creation of his persona was D'Annunzio's principal vocation in life and art. He regarded life itself as a work of art. "Life imitates Art, far more than Art imitates Life", wrote Oscar Wilde, with whom D'Annunzio had much in common. In Pleasure, published in 1889 when D'Annunzio was only twenty-six, he created an exceptionally complex game of life and art imitating each other in infinite regression, like a pair of opposing mirroprs in which it is impossible to distinguish the object from the reflection."