First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Originally published in Italian as L’Angelo della Storia in 2001 by Ugo Guanda Editore SpA
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Bruno Arpaia, 2001
English translation copyright © Minna Proctor, 2006
The right of Bruno Arpaia and Minna Proctor to be identified as respectively the author and translator of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The publishers gratefully acknowledge subsidy from the
Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume
This English translation was supported by
The Italian Cultural Institute, Edinburgh
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 237 2
To Iaia and Alfredo, the angels of my history
It is, however, characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life – and this is the stuff that stories are made of – first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end – unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it – suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story.
– Walter Benjamin (from ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, English translation copyright Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc.)
‘Why the fuck are you asking questions up and down every street in town? What the fuck is all this gossip-collecting for?’
‘So I will know what I’m doing when I lie.’
– Mario Vargas Llosa (from chapter 8 of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, translation copyright by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.)
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