Re: Severini
 

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection:-

SEVERINI

"There are two faces which must never confront each other."

I have never met or even privately corresponded with the author of this book, as if that has always been meant to be. i know that I am at best a literary sideshowman and like the disciples of SEVERINI in this story. But I can't help thinking that illness - here "belly sickness" or "cancerous matter" - is a combining force, those potential doppelgängers in the previous two stories now melding as one in tune with inimical "body changes" or in some diseased spirituality of Aesthetics, a museum of imaginary exhibits or of real sculptures, a marshland hermit called Severini in a shack who wants you to be invited as a kindred spirit, the earlier mention in my Ligotti reviews of the CATHRian-Catholic "pool of snakes" (cf Mauriac's NOEUD or Knot of Snakes)...
On a different level, this is a rarefied texture of words building on Ligotti's Art of Delirium (here as 'tropical landscape" and "common sewer"), his Scatology of Eschatology, sleeptalking...
A yearning to become not only kindred spirits but also "sympathetic organisms" - as a guard against this book's dark truth represented by its backcover emblem of the words "the nightmare of the Organism" originally used in this important story?
Dysentery and Prostate (Antistate?) cancer as just another pair of "sympathetic organisms"? Who knows? The answer may be in another emblem of words in this story: "The way into the nightmare is the way out." The knot of knots.

(I will now read my 2008 review of this story shown at the start of this thread.)

*

Scattered throughout this edition of TEATRO GROTTESCO is this symbol as a break-marker. It seems to be something poised to tie itself into a knot - or a knot that has already been untied?
https://dflewisreviews.files.wordpre...1/severini.jpg

Re: Severini
 

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK