Maasimo Rizzante: Non siamo gli ultimi (Effigie, Milano, 2009)

In his excellent run-through of the principal themes of twentieth-century literature, Massimo Rizzante (see his text on Roberto Bolano in TRoL 20), a poet and connoisseur, wrote about TRoL as follows:

"In 1997, after fifty years of feverish activity as a writer, journalist, translator, historian and university professor, Keith Botsford, with his great friend Saul Bellow, founded 'News from the Republic of Letters'. This is a cosmopolitan review, entirely without advertising or sponsorship, with a few thousand readers. Part of its purpose, KB explained, was to give some hope to good young writers who found it difficult to publish their work. Saul Bellow spent a good deal of his time reading unpublished manuscripts and defined this task as 'both a duty and an Utopian act' in a world in which attentiveness to quality writing was ever more the province of a very small circle of readers. [. . .] I was at the time a young provincial European, imbued with a natural pessimism. When I met him, this seventy-year-old giant, a constant smoker and full of energy, said: 'You remember the early Christians? Today art survives in the catacombs, and it is in the catacombs that faith retains and strengthens its resolve and its hope to see once more the light of day.' One day, ten years ago, I asked Bellow if there existed any sure way with which to form Sensibility. He said he didn't, unless it might be through taking into oneself certain literary masterpieces as if they were consecrated hosts.

"It is perhaps partly the curiosity of a tourist who becomes an exegete, or an exegete who fancies tourism, someone who is not limited by -- he lacks the necessary time -- the possibilities and limitations of individuals, but who has the illusion that he is able to be, at any time or in any place, at home. As KB said, it was like Augustine's 'vain curiosity', the curiosity that led some to seek out, without any particular purpose, that which lies beyond his own existence, that is outside of himself. [. . .] Every time I open an issue, I am taken miles away from Literaturistan. Every literary review worthy of the name has the same desire to embrace Weltliteratur; it is a desire without limits and should stay such. Goethe defined it as a 'madness': a madness and a faith rising from the catacombs.