Robert S.’s Reviews > Fratelli d'Italia > Status Update

"Little Sartres will raise their fingers in gelaterias and pizzerias if you still care about the quality of works, and perhaps even have fun with the pages. Instead of searching for those who narrate squalor and describe miseries, like a good little bourgeois monkey of the Sartrean type that opens a hundred debates and doesn’t even spend a dime..."

"... they feel it as something against them because literature must evoke displeasure, just as the bestseller list must indicate not the restaurants where you eat well, but those that serve more meals. If you offer a soufflé, it is neither standard nor mass-produced: thus, it doesn’t work, also because it doesn’t take into account calamities and disasters...."

"Of course, in literature-as-life, it's known that those who live a life of sorrow mostly want a literature of sorrow, just as it's shown that those who live a life of mmm... demand a literature of mmm... They get offended if they suspect a bit of irony to lift them a little from the horror of their condition. Vulgarity is fine because mmm... is also comic, so it’s consoling and makes one laugh..."