Library of Babel
10346 L’amico della morte
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. Edited and with an introduction by Jorge Luis Borges
1978 I ed. .
Language: Italian
Of Alarcón’s extensive literary production, two stories from Narraciones inverosìmiles: are presented here: The Friend of Death and The Tall Woman, legends that Alarcón heard from the mouths of goatherds of Guadix.
From a noble and decadent family, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was born in Guadix in 1833. Initially wavering between theology and law, he eventually chose literature as his permanent field of interest. His education, like all authentic educations, was the passionate and arbitrary education of the self-taught; the closing down of convent libraries quenched his never-satisfied curiosity. Spain, which inspired so many famous Romantic writers, yielded poor, tardy reflections of that movement: Pedro Antonio de Alarcón is, along with a few others, an honourable exception. The image of The Tall Woman besieged, without a doubt, Alarcón’s mind, and also appears ennobled of her demonic character in the author’s other tale The Friend of Death. In the first half of the story this novel may appear like a careless series of improvisations; but as it progresses, we realise that everything, up to a Dantesque ending, is deliberately prefigured in the opening pages of the work.