This brazen collection of joyfully sinister short stories is appropriate to the melancholy, brooding atmosphere that is associated with the paintings of the author's brother, Giorgio de Chirico. Alberto Savionio (aka, Andrea de Chirico) was a master of lurid description. His prose triumphs over the mundanity of daily existance while simultaneously shoving in the reader's face the bleak and formless features of existential truth. All this in a highly entertaining, playfully obscene, and compact little collection. No lover of surreal literature (or surrealism in general) should be without this lip-smacking mental delicacy.

This is a gem of a book that is very much like a diary, if not therapy sessions. The book is divided into topics on which "Savinio" expels remembrances of things past. It is a bit like the novel "Carrots" by Jules Renard, if only in temperament. The theme of the book is put forth near the beginning when he writes: "How can it be denied that our parents' deepest joy feeds on the sufferings of us children?" Admittedly, this is not entirely accessible material. If one is interested in psychology (such as Alice Miller's work) and the essence of art and what kind of person is inclined to make art, this book speaks to that. Elsewhere he writes: "Why are we not more astonished by the annihilation of the will that the educator practices on the child?" Still elsewhere: "Every memory, be it only the shadow of a reminiscence of what childhood was, is the pitilessly cruel confirmation that life, by law, is a defeat." Overall, it is a very sad, angry, and truthful book, that questions the morality of education and self-proclaimed civilized society. ...Keep in mind that this book was first published in 1937, but was first drafted, in part, in 1919. WAY ahead if its time.