Sylvie

Sylvie, Gerard de Nerval, Barcelona, Quaderns Crema, 1995 (1854)

This story, collected in Les Filles du feu (1854) was the unique testimony of the day before the reading of my thesis. Within hours of the event, after six years of continuous work, he found a pearl of nineteenth-century literature. A book where illusions fall one after another, like the peel of a fruit: is experience. It has the bitter taste, yet has a touch sour fortifying (p. 81).

This is the story of the unnamed protagonist of Gerard de Nerval, we can identify with the author, who complained on the last page of the book “we read some poetry or some pages of these books so short that no longer make much” (p. 84). Any repudiation by the author to a habit largely forgotten by the literary world tradition. Sylvie is a different text. A nimble prose, poetic, well constructed, well-punctuated – as Umberto Eco refers to regard it as a fantastic work, and continued his favorite reading – but it uses words in a short space of a substantial body of literary references, linked to the aesthetics of his century, but spontaneity and direct exposure can make us remember undoubtedly the most modern prose. A work, therefore, fully applicable, to recommend to the lovers of ease and beauty.