Love Letters. Correspondence of 20th Century Writers

Love does not need words, yet it would not exist without words: whispered or shouted words, words that reveal the feeling or that laboriously conceal it, trembling words, angry words, ecstatic words, betrayed words, cold words, fiery words. Words that often must reach those who are far away and that for centuries have been entrusted to letters, postcards, and telegrams; to crumpled and worn sheets of paper, folded and torn.

This work collects the Love Letters that eighteen writers from the twentieth century sent from every corner of the world. From the solemnity of Gabriele D'Annunzio's prose to the emphasis of Salvatore Quasimodo, from the sentimentality of Erich Maria Remarque to the unusual associations of Franz Kafka, from the reticence of Colette to the eroticism of James Joyce, up to the warmth of Edith Wharton, these epistles tell a private and unconfessable side of their world and their personality. In their turmoil and uncertainties, we discover them so fragile, exposed, contradictory, impulsive, ridiculous in love just like we are, like us dragged by forces that, unlike when they compose their poems and novels, they cannot and do not know how to control. Massimo Onofri writes in the preface that 'the discourse of love is an impossible one: it cannot be analyzed, but only stated.' And indeed this collection is above all an attempt to respond, through the heartbeats of great authors, to the question that has accompanied being human since the beginning of its history: is it possible, will it ever be possible, to explain love in words?