1913 Un'altra Storia by Florian Illies

What a beautiful book 1913 Un'altra Storia by Florian

Illies. I was thinking, while I was reading it, why there is a lot of attraction for this period. Maybe because there has been a big concentration of creatives; painting, writing, dancers, politicians, theorists, world was rapidly changing, but at the same time there was still memory of the past.

You'll have the sensation of "swimming" in the 1913; you will meet many characters, talented people, and you will live their existence, creative and private. In some cases it couldn't be different.

We will see Puccini busy with his new lover, his wife, a divorce, then the idea that he didn't also want this new girl, but...We will assist at the devastation experienced by Enrico Caruso, big opera singer. His wife disappeared with their chauffeur. He thinks that maybe he can finds a different consolation but it's another mess.

Matisse doesn't want to paint as Picasso and other painters are doing. He thinks that donating shape to the world is the best thing to do.

We will meet a serial-killer as well: he killed a lot of family members. Considered a very good person no one thought that that close departures could be connected with him. They were.

Marcel Proust is busy with his Reserche. He sends the manuscript at various publishing houses and the chief of one of these ones answered him back complaining that maybe that book was not of his interest. Later Proust found someone interested in publishing his big work, although what it followed were corrections on...corrections.

Proust was a genial and perfectionist. At the same time he will fall in love for his chauffeur, a straight man. Proust will try to convince him that homosexuality is the best thing; he will also present him an airplane, because the chauffeur loved airplanes, but the man run away while Proust is indebited. Proust paid a private investigator for trying to see where his beloved object of love ended; the poor man died with the airplane bought by Proust. Look what a destiny.

Stalin spent several time in Capri with other friends. Gorkij in particular lived there for more than six years and at the beginning we see him tribulated because of his wife and his lover and because in Russia there was a big desire: to see the Romanov defeated once and for all.

Karen Blixen is promised to someone in Africa. The future author of Out of Africa is thrilled of leaving Denmark for the sun. During the trip she will fall in love for another man, who later will be his witness during the wedding, and the first night of wedding her husband will share with her syphilis because his intense sexual activity with promiscuous girls.

The dad of Blixen hanged up himself when he heard the news that he had syphilis. He didn't want to cause a big scandal at his family.

Karen Blixen returned in Denmark for being cured,but this illness followed her for the rest of her existence.

Djagilev was a name of ballett in Paris at the beginning of 1900s. His lover was Nizinskij with which he organized a show considered by Le Figaro a bit cryptic and eccentric. The newsmagazine asked at readers some help for trying to put a new light in that show that they had seen that days and was misunderstood. 

The couple sounded incredibly good, but then the young man fell in love, horror! for a woman. Djagilev thought that Nizinskij needed to be destroyed and so he found another lover known later as Leonide Massine. 

In the while the happy couple had a daughter.

In Monte Carlo a couple died for mysterious reasons.

People who survived at the sinking of the Titanic are re-borning in sport and through documentaries.

Much more than this, in a book that will tell you the life of many creatives in a crucial year for the world.

It can be a very good book for students as well. They will fall in love for history passing through characters that they meet studying.

The author is funny and sunny in the explanation of the various existences and I hope to read the rest of his books dedicated at 1913.

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori