Blue Library
9853 Avventure di una monaca vestita da uomo
Thomas de Quincey. Introduction by Jorge Luis Borges
1975 / 156 PAGES.
Language: Italian
This accurate and truthful biography of a nun who dressed as a soldier and achieved great feats in the tangled void of Spanish America, is also one of the wittiest adventure novels of 19th-century England.
Though the book is a biography, readers follow it as a novel with a single central character, of whom the other characters and the setting are merely adjectives. Despite his lack of love for France, de Quincey – like many English writers – worshipped Joan of Arc, a heroine whose virtues he found in Catalina de Erauso. It is of course obvious that the extraordinary exploits of the military nun and the vastness of the lands and seas encompassed by her destiny interested de Quincey more than her character, which was essentially alien to his and perhaps he never fully understood. Humour abounds in the opening pages, pathos in the final ones; the transition is executed with mastery, while the two tones coexist and harmonise happily in the intermediate passages.