Poetics of Abandonment

By Carolina Bertaggia

A fifteen-year-old boy in the Veneto region in the aftermath of World War II. A son who returns to his hometown in search of his father and finds only ghosts. Two works written four years apart and ten thousand kilometers apart-Goffredo Parise's *Il ragazzo morto e le comete* (1951) and Juan Rulfo's *Pedro P ramo* (1955)-are linked in this essay by three common threads. The first is biographical: both authors are marked by a fundamental rupture in their origins, transformed into a universal poetic vision. The second concerns the choice of genre: the fantastic is not ornament but structure; the dead rise from the earth because such a brutal reality cannot be told using the tools of realism, and only the absurd remains as the last hope. The third is formal: through chronotopes of consciousness and cinematic montage, they develop a language capable of expressing what would otherwise remain unspoken, to give shape to a world that is still our own, in which solitude, orphanhood, incommunicability, and violence are the norm. Rereading these novels together means equipping ourselves with the tools to inhabit the present without renouncing faith in the word-that crack in the silence that is the only possible form of resistance.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 6630362233
• ISBN13: 9786630362237
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Our Knowledge Publishing
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"