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Capri and No Longer Capri
Raffaele La Capria
September 2001
ISBN: 1560253487
Long a cult travel guide/memoir for Italians, Capri and no Longer Capri, now translated, is available to a wider audience.
Raffaele La Capria, a novelist well-known in Italy, creates a portrait of Capri that begins in the time of Ulysses and moves to our present complex and hectic reality, and composes an elegy for a Nature blasted by human negligence and error. La Capria broods upon the mythology of Capri: Homer's Sirens, the Roman emperors in their villas, the foreign "explorers" of the Blue Grotto and the "northerners" who were bewitched by Capri (Fersen, Krupp, and Norman Douglas), all of whom later committed suicide.
Americans have been visiting Capri for decades and La Capria's book will offer much to newcomers to the island that they would not otherwise have at their disposal, for his slim volume is a guidebook of a special kind, something like a novel and a local Italian guide, or perhaps a primer on how to align oneself with universal feelings.
Capri has had a long history as a place of retreat, of sensual license and of unparalleled natural beauty. Without running through the usual list of sights, La Capria gives his reader the sensation of having peered beneath each stone, and of giving an appreciation of what such a place has done to others, some of whom, once under Capri's spell, gave their lives over to their dreams. Far removed from the piazetta, with its teeming crowd of sightseers and cafes, still stand the silent, secret and "sacred" places not usually reached by day trippers and all of them splendid occasions for taking out La Capria and reading him.
What readers are saying
"It is impossible not to love this book... it's like a mysterious film noir, full of shadows, beauty, sun...there to draw us along splendid false leads." --La Stampa
"A luminous island memoir and an underground classic,...a keening song for Capri, fey and singular...powerful and most disturbing." --Kirkus
About the Authors
Raffaele La Capria is well-known to Italian readers for his novels and novellas. Ferito a morte (1961) is considered his greatest novel and was awarded the Strega Prize.
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