Italian Carousel: Scenes of Internal Exile - Softcover

Navrozov, Andrei

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0720611962 ISBN 13: 9780720611960

Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers, 2003

Synopsis

Unlike the myriad English-speaking itinerants flocking to the Continent since young Wordsworth travelled among unknown men, Andrei Navrozov writes of people he knows intimately and of social situations he has come to understand from within. Based in Italy since 1997, now with residences in both Venice and Palermo, he has on occasion described himself as a political refugee from Russia, a cultural refugee from America and a gastronomic refugee from Britain. Yet the theme of Italian Carousel is altogether less flippant: where in the homogenising and modernising Europe asks Navrozov would the hardened individualist find a last refuge? His answer is Italy or, more specifically, Palermo, where for the moment his flight from social progress ends. That answer takes the reader in an uncompromising, occasionally eccentric but deeply personal and always entertaining travelogue from the author s first day in Rome to his last night at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, through Monte Argentario, Florence and the Maremma on to Venice and the Veneto and finally to the wilds of Sicily, almost in every case with a sidelong glance at the Moscow of the 1970s, the New York of the 1980s and the London of the 1990s that he has left behind. To each of these destinations he is accompanied by his longtime friend and London gambling companion whom he identifies only by surname: Gusov, a Russian photographer whose last published portfolio was said by The British Journal of Photography to capture the essence of life. Here, rather in the manner of Phiz assisting Dickens, he has produced a collection of fifty arresting images to illustrate the author s flight from progress in Italian Carousel which masterfully serve to give another dimension to the author s ideas, arguments and impressions of the places evoked in this original book.

About this title

Review

"A maverick, rebel, iconoclast, clever, tricky man who is always going to march proudly out of step with the prevailing mood of his times. No dishonorable label for a journalist or a poet."

About the Author

Andrei Navrozov is the son of the writer, historian and translator Lev Navrozov, and grandson of the playwright Andrei Navrozov. He left his native Moscow at sixteen and went to live in the United States, where he attended Yale University before moving to Britain. This is his second volume of autobiographical writings. He has also translated Boris Pasternak s poetry for Peter Owen (Second Nature 0 7206 1192 X PB [pound]8.95, to be reissued November 2002).

Edition details

• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0720611962
• ISBN 13: 9780720611960
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 200
• Illustrator: Gusov Sasha