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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

Biography | Cattolicissimo trio composed of mother father beloved son God, why doesn’t the English language have an equivalent for –issimo?   Incidental beginnings: the mother (1951) broke off from her Milanese family in the early Seventies, got married rashly and in absence of her parents, by religious rite, for the sake of controversy, asking a cousin to be her best man She has been living in Rome with her husband ‘in exile’, as if in a colony, as if in Africa Nicola’s father (1948) was raised by a single mother, and lived with her in the council estate where they shot Una Giornata Particolare with Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren   Nico’s first eight years of life: he lives with his father, mother and paternal grandmother   The father had attended seminary Then studied architecture Fatti di Valle Giulia (the Italian equivalent of May 1968 in France): the father does not partake, because of his cousin – who he is not really in touch with – who is a Carabiniere On the matter, Nicola quotes from a Pasolini poem, which is also often quoted by his father (remember to ask which one)   The father leaves university Joins the Navy for his compulsory military service   He goes back to uni with a newfound interest in ships and submarines, which will affect his creative production via the dissemination of portholes everywhere in his projects, even on the dividing walls between two rooms, which is unpalatable to the Berengo family, as well as slanted perspectives and sequences of rooms with no connecting corridors   He is a solitary youth; he spends his life putting The Way of a Pilgrim into practice, repeating to himself over and over (when he is angered by the endless queue at the post office; when his mother’s dinner is yet again tasteless; when he inadvertently tears up the wrong drawing) Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me   Despite his marriage he keeps his boyish good looks He becomes morbidly enamoured with his son He doesn’t want him to become sophisticated During a catechism lesson when Nico is eight years old, his father taps into his own reference material,

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

READ NEXT

poetry

Issue No. 8

The Cloud of Knowing

John Ashbery

poetry

Issue No. 8

There are those who would have paid that. The amount your eyes bonded with (O spangled home) will have...

feature

Issue No. 10

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 10

This tenth editorial will be our last. Back in February 2011, on launching the magazine, we grandiosely stated that we...

poetry

September 2012

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend

Cutter Streeby

poetry

September 2012

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend     [SEAside          Gra-                         –i.m. Ronny Burhop 1987-2010                                                                      ffiti]...

 

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