num_pages: 184
description: A parody of the Lives of the Saints from the Middle Ages, Ermanno Cavazzoni’s Brief Lives of Idiots offers us a perfect month of portraits of idiots drawn from real life, from overly realist writers to fringe-belief obsessives, punctuated every seventh day with a litany of suicides—failed, foolish, or fatal to others. This roll call extends the ridiculous to melancholic extremes, introducing us to such exemplary fools as the father and husband unable to recognize his own family, the Marxist convinced that Christ was an extraterrestrial, the would-be saint who finds a private martyrdom through the torturous confinement of a pair of ill-fitting leather oxfords, and the man who failed to realize that he had spent two years in a concentration camp. This is a display of a myriad idiocy, blissful and baneful, discovered and achieved by hook or by crook, be it through paranoia, misapplied methodology, religious hallucination, or relentless diarrhea. But Cavazzoni engages in neither finger pointing nor celebration. If Saints can be counted, idiots cannot: idiocy is ultimately the human condition.
language: English
title: Brief Lives of Idiots
publisher: Wakefield Press