I like being a completionist. When I find something I like, I want to consume all of it. If possible, in one blow. This had me attempt to read all of Philip K Dick and Isaac Asimov in high school. It made me read almost all of Samuel R Delany as a young adult. I am just an obsessive person.
Thankfully, Astutillo Smeriglia made my life easier by having just three published works, all of which were blessedly easy to get through. I have reviewed his collections of comics, here and here. So now it is time for me to pick up his prose satire.
So how was it? It was enjoyable enough. But I don’t think it had the same punch as his comics. Why? Because frames matter.
It would be a stretch to say that the content of this volume is the same as it was for the comics. But there are certainly many similarities, and the spirit is certainly the same. Preti stands out a bit as being a satire on the faith, and thus is a little more thematically concentrated. Pianeta Terra and Il Mondo più Pazzo del Mondo are the two more similar ones, in that they both are a reaction to modern society (or modern Italian society). Both works are a in effect the grumblings of a person not completely satisfied with the world around him. Pianeta Terra is framed as being from the point of view of an extraterrestrial who is describing the planet Earth, but aside from the first and the last chapter, that frame is largely lost in the remaining 29 chapters of this book. It ends up distilling to just being a book about Smeriglia’s pet peeves. One could almost say the same thing about the comics, but the fact that it is in a comic format helps to stop this, or at least did for me.
That isn’t to say that I didn’t like this volume. Smeriglia’s sense of humor works for me, and there were more than a few scenes that stuck in my memory even a few months after reading them (such as the scene where Johan Sebastian Bach is trying to beg his wife for sex… yea, it’s hard to explain). I think it is telling as well that Smeriglia’s most memorable parts are his dialogues. It seems to suggest that his talents really do lean towards comic writing.
Well, I guess I should now go through and watch all of Smeriglia’s videos on YouTube. Then I really would have the whole catalogue done.
Failures in Polymathy 