The Failure - Giovanni Papini

A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:
Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:

support the site

The Failure

by
Giovanni Papini

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Failure
Author:	Giovanni Papini
Genre:	Memoir
Written:	1913 (Eng. 1924)
Length:	240 pages
Original in:	italian
Availability:	Un homme fini - France
	Ein erledigter Mensch - Deutschland
	Un uomo finito - Italia
	Un hombre acabado - España

	directly from: Sublunary Editions

Italian title: Un uomo finito
Translated by Virginia Pope
Also translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, as A Man–Finished (1924)

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B : peculiar, but impressively vigorous

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Ex Libris*	F	2/1925	Frits Holm
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	30/3/1924	Lloyd Morris
The Spectator*	.	17/5/1924	James Young

(* review of a different translation)

From the Reviews:

"(T)he volume here under review, as a literary product, as a human document, as an argument, is indeed an utter, a dismal, a tragic-comic failure. (...) The book is probably one that today gives pain even to its author. To a reviewer, who prefers to praise, the task has been one of mild torment." - Frits Holm, Ex Libris

"The Failure is a novel by courtesy and a confession by explicit intention, but a complaint in effect. (...) Papini's embittered view of life is chiefly an inverted self-pity. (...) In The Failure Papini offers an explicit analysis of his mind and character as well as a document in confession, and, unlike the majority of such analyses which find their way into book form, Papini's happens to be largely accurate." - Lloyd Morris, The New York Times Book Review

"This is God-Almightiness -- without grace -- without the tongue of flame which floods the soul with a light in which not only fellow-men but crocodiles and scorpions are seen to be aspiring to divinity. This light comes not unless a man accept his human smallness, not remorsefully but in all innocence and humility. Only then can he recognize his own humility. Only then can he recognize his own divineness. This operation of the soul comes through self-knowledge. But Papini will have none of self-knowledge." - James Young, The Spectator

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       Giovanni Papini wrote his novel-cum-memoir when he was barely into his thirties, and he had more than four decades ahead of him after its publication in 1913 (he died in 1956), but, yes, he already saw himself as washed-up. 'The failure' of the title translator Virginia Pope chose is perhaps too strong (or not: he does eventually sum up that: "It would be difficult, I believe, to find a man who has made a greater failure of his life"), but he certainly seems to have felt he was, as the original Italian title and that of Mary Prichard Agnetti's translation (published in the same year as Pope's !) have it, 'a man–finished'. (He certainly wasn't finished writing, however, continuing to churn out a heap of books; his collected writings are published in eleven fat volumes.)
       In The Failure, Papini certainly puts himself through the wringer: he's a tortured soul, but to a great extent it's his own doing. Born to a humble but hardly desperately poor family he nevertheless resented how little he had in his youth, where: "a wretched middle class family gave me no actual suffering except for lack of real money". Soon enough, his complaints -- and the suffering he claims for himself -- take on much greater dimensions, as he finds that, at every step, he can not achieve what he hopes to achieve, not least because the world is set against him in so many ways, first and foremost in not recognizing his great genius.
       Papini describes himself as ugly and clearly did not do well in attracting women (though apparently he went on to have an affair with Mina Loy at one point), and was a largely friendless, unpleasant child. What he could take solace in was books -- and his firm conviction in his own genius: as he puts it: "I was born with the disease of greatness in my brain" -- and:

Mine was not ambition, it was not vanity: it was pride, but real honest pride, the pride of a Lucifer, the pride of a god ! I wanted to be truly great, heroically great, epically great, immeasurably great.

So, yeah, he set the bar kind of high for himself, and although apparently of considerable intellect he inevitably came up short. His descriptions of his youthful encyclopedic projects -- à la Bouvard and Pécuchet -- are particularly entertaining: nothing less than "an encyclopedia which would not only contain the materials of all the encyclopedias of all the countries and in all the languages of the world, but go far beyond them all, gathering together in one place information now scattered through many works", for example, or then: "a comparative history of the world's literature".
He tumbles endlessly in the bottomless abyss -- but he just can't stop himself:

I was smothered in facts, but facts were not enough for me. No matter how deeply I fathomed them, no matter how many of them I got put together, I could never exhaust the Infinite. The wealth of the particular which had been my sole wealth during the days of my disordered erudition seemed woefully meager to me now. My mind eager for vastness and completeness now hungered for universal concepts as the only food able to appease its appetites.

       Even: "My discovery of life's unhappiness became, in its turn, a pretext for new compilations", because ... of course ..... He just can't leave be.
       There's something of the Bildungsroman here, as Papini chronicles the stages he goes through -- including, for example, in philosophy, his discovery of Schopenhauer (of course), who is then superseded by Berkeley (another logical conclusion for this peculiar character, as he could certainly embrace the idea that: "The whole universe was only a part of my Self; its very being depended on me, on my senses, on my mind"), and then, inevitably -- since he can't see anything through --: "I came across Max Stirner at that time and it seemed to me that I had at last found the only master I could not do without". (Stirner is, of course, the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum ('The Ego and Its Own').
       A passionate reader, he always read widely -- but his conviction that he is the equal of the masters does seem to keep getting in the way, from when he was a schoolboy and: "filled a notebook of more than a hundred pages with a captious and violent criticism of Manzoni's novel The Betrothed", shocking the two friends he had (almost) made.
       Along with other young dreamers he imagines putting out a magazine -- such as: "a vehement, violent, incandescent magazine, to be called the Flame (Vampa) and devoted exclusively to masterpieces" (of course) -- and eventually, in 1903, does, Il Leonardo, which, at least for a while: "was all that we expected it to be". For a while the going is good but, as usual, Papini grows disillusioned: "It could no longer satisfy me", and after less than five years he gives up on it.
       That is, of course, the story of his life -- summed up also by his acknowledgement that: "I did not accept reality". Given that reality is hard to avoid, that made life tough on him -- buoyed though he always was by the fact that: "All of my life has been based on the belief that I am a man of genius". Eventually, however, doubts creep in -- "But what if I were mistaken ?" And, indeed, he begins to see his life also a failure ... though he can't quite shake all his ambition.
       At one point Papini admits: "Nothing but extremes ever satisfy me", and The Failure is a work full of extremes; one can practically hear Papini declaiming in a booming voice (his text is littered with exclamation points). His vanity does shine through -- blindingly, practically -- but admirably he doesn't try to paint himself more agreeably, in many respects, than he could: he comes across as an unpleasant fellow, and seems to pretty freely admit that he is. The appeal of the book is in that pompous certainty (and desperation) -- and also the life he led, to that point. It is a very warped intellectual biography, but it is one nevertheless; Papini is many things, but he's no fool -- and his vigorous style and pacing make for a good if often bizarre read.
       Papini had arguably gone off the deep end already in earliest childhood; he certainly did later on, embracing religion as well as fascism, but still as seemingly driven as ever (and producing great amounts of writing), but as The Failure clearly shows: he didn't lose his hold, he never had one.
       For all his reckoning with his life's path, Papini is too little self-aware here, too convinced, deep, deep down, of his own genius, for The Failure to truly be a success, but it is a fascinating document, and, in its own way, an impressive account of a peculiar life and mind.

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 October 2024

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

The Failure:

Sublunary Editions publicity page
Oscar publicity page
Menoscuarto Ediciones publicity page

Reviews:

Giovanni Papini:

Giovanni Papini at books and writers

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Italian literature
See Index of Biographical works under review
See Index of Books Written Between 1900 and 1945

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

Italian author Giovanni Papini lived 1881 to 1956.

- Return to top of the page -