Throughout his career as a writer, Giuseppe Cafiero has produced reeditions, free adaptations, reductions for radio, translations from French. Cafiero has also written for theater and radio, collaborating with media such as RAI, Sveriges Radio and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
After drinking from sources as diverse as William Shakespeare to Eugene O’Neill, from Rudolf Erich Raspe to Alphonse Daudet, from Ernst Toller to Bertolt Brecht, Giuseppe Cafiero has established himself as a fundamental reference in the field of bio-fiction.
Edgar Allan Poe or the ambiguity of death is -so far- Giuseppe Cafiero’s literary summit in his incursion into the field of bio-fiction. His biography also includes other literary works dedicated to characters such as Vincent Van Gogh, James Joyce or Gustave Flaubert.
Book to learn about the life of Edgar Allan Poe
The reading of Edgar Allan Poe or the ambiguity of death is, in fact, a journey through the life of the writer Edgar Allan Poe. The reader, as he turns the pages, will discover a man – Poe – wounded by a deep malaise, by alcohol and drugs, even by an irascible aggressiveness that becomes self-destructive and can lead to death.
Giuseppe Cafiero has reached a high level of knowledge about the figure of Poe. To achieve this, Cafiero penetrated to the root of his writing, and investigated Poe’s writing as an essential moment of a life.
Giuseppe Cafiero takes the reader through painful and dark pages of a disturbing writing, through the characters that marked Poe’s life, his friendships and established enmities that contributed to his frustrating and delirious restlessness.
Giuseppe Cafiero proposes to trace, in this book and through a penetrating imagination, a psychological construction of Edgar Allan Poe through the different characters of his works, creating 16 short stories and a prologue that narrate Poe’s life.
Each of the stories included in Edgar Allan Poe or the Ambiguity of Death is constructed through surreal events and the presence of certain characters so that each story delineates from the life of a specific year in the life of Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe or the ambiguity of death is a sort of memoir necessary to understand what became of Poe’s life, marked by abuse and strangeness, which allowed this incredible writer to outline a will conquered by the inescapable pleasure of writing.
Excerpt from the book
The theater, built a year earlier on the north side of H Street, became a red-hot trap when, in raising the chandelier to the ceiling, the lighted candles brushed against one of the scenic elements, which immediately caught fire.
Then, an infinity of sparks began to fall, like rain, on the back of the wooden scaffolding, between infamous walls crammed between bricks to contain a maximum of six hundred people. It was then that Mr. Robertson, the editor of the Richmond Enquirer, suddenly shouted, “The house is on fire!”.
It all happened at the start of the performance of the play Raymond and Agness or Nun Bleeding, after having seen the comedy The Father, or Family Feuds.
The editor of the Richmond Enquirer was present in the hall, and because of this the news was accurately reported, telling painful chronicles in detail.
-A fire trap? An apocalypse? Richmond the great is fallen, Richmond the great is fallen,” cried a Puritan. Miserable insinuation to go back to the time when this infamous disaster occurred by speaking of the conduct of Mrs. Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, the actress, just deceased.
From that moment on, only cries, “Help, help!” could be heard amidst the mournful ringing of bells and the creaking of burning timbers. The fire was devouring the place.
Then, the nauseating smell of burning bodies amid deafening screams of pain: fifty-four women and eighteen men were charred to death. Cruel fire.
Many of the victims belonged to the most illustrious families of Virginia. Also the governor of the state, Mr. George William Smith, and the former senator Mr. Abraham B. Venanzoni perished in the fire. Among the victims were several blacks, but few knew or wanted to remember their names.
It is certain, however, that one Gilbert Hunt, a black slave who had his blacksmith shop on one side of the theater, saved at least a dozen people.
For some, the deaths symbolized a supreme purifying act. Giving precise meaning to rigor, moral intransigence and rank fundamentalism.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)