The world is a chicken coop. And we are, among others, its astonished inhabitants.
I don't know about you, but me, precisely because of this kind of perplexity that sometimes grips us, when I happen to see a dog and a cat in the street, or a cow or a hare in a field, or a bird on a gutter, makes me wonder: what will they think of us? That is, what will they think seeing us human beings on foot, by bicycle or by car, always busy, running, covered in strange clothes? I don't think we'll ever find out the answer. And I don't know if Luigi Malerba asked himself the same questions when he wrote Le galline pensierose, but I like to think so. At the very least, he must have thought that the world is a chicken coop, otherwise he would not have written such a book.
The animal world of Luigi Malerba
Luigi Malerba was - and still is - one of the most important, versatile and inventive writers of contemporary Italian literature. In the 60s and 70s, in particular, he was well known and appreciated abroad, translated in numerous countries, and considered a narrator capable of subverting the forms of the novel and short story. And with good reason, considering books such as The discovery of the alphabet, his first book of short stories - a sort of collection of realistic fairy tales, set on the Emilian Apennines, from which he came -, or Il Pataffio - which seems to anticipate L'Armata Brancaleone -, or The protagonist - in which the narrator is the penis of the guy whose stories are told, a sex maniac who
would like to have sex with anything -, or The snake, Imperial roses - stories set in ancient China -, or the small stories and fables of Storiette and Pocket Storiette, and I could go on, up to the most recent books, for example the beautiful Roman Ghosts.
