Goffredo Parise
Goffredo Parise was an Italian writer and journalist born on December 8, 1929, in Vicenza, Italy. His early life was marked by the absence of his biological father, but he was adopted by journalist Osvaldo Parise in 1943. Parise began his literary career in the early 1950s, initially writing surreal fairy tales that explored the complex transition from childhood to adulthood, as seen in his first novel, "Il ragazzo morto e le comete." While these early works drew inspiration from authors like Franz Kafka and Feodor Dostoevski, they did not achieve significant critical success.
Shifting towards realism, Parise created a trilogy that scrutinized the rural life of his upbringing, satirizing the hypocrisy and emotional emptiness he perceived in marriage, religion, and material aspirations. His 1965 novel "Il padrone" solidified his reputation, blending fantastical elements with a critique of capitalism and the dehumanizing effects of authority. After a period of writing for stage and film, including collaborations with Federico Fellini, he returned to journalism, reporting on critical global issues throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Parise passed away on August 31, 1986, in Treviso, Italy, leaving behind a legacy that reflects a deep sense of alienation and the search for meaning in an indifferent universe.
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Goffredo Parise
- Born: December 8, 1929
- Birthplace: Vicenza, Italy
- Died: August 31, 1986
- Place of death: Treviso, Italy
Biography
Goffredo Parise was born in Vicenza in northern Italy on December 8, 1929. Although his mother was unmarried at the time and Parise’s biological father was never identified, his mother’s eventual husband, journalist Osvaldo Parise, adopted the boy in 1943 and gave him his name. Parise studied briefly at the University of Padua but left in 1950 to pursue what would become a very successful forty-year career in journalism.
Parise began publishing novels in the early 1950’s. He initially crafted surreal fairy tales that explored the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood in fractured narratives that often involved fantasies and dream sequences. His first novel, Il ragazzo morto e le comete (1951;The Dead Boy and The Comets, 1953), is a bleak account of a young boy’s violent death and his postmortem wanderings among other ghosts. La grande vacanza, his second novel, is a fantastic take on a child’s holiday with his grandmother at a decrepit resort that concludes with the grandmother’s death. With their obvious debt to Franz Kafka and Feodor Dostoevski, which made these novels out of sync with the postwar Italian embrace of realism, neither book found significant critical or popular success.
Parise eventually departed from such experimental narratives. His next works, published from 1954 through 1959, form something of a realistic trilogy. In each, Parise, who was raised a Catholic, trained an unblinking satiric eye on the rural life of his childhood. Each work offered a scathing critique of a life Parise saw as hypocritical and emotionally thin. He examines marriage, the role of religion, and the bourgeois dreams of material success and finds each grotesque and unsatisfying. Despite this turn toward conventional realism, Parise still found little critical praise.
He turned briefly to writing for the stage and for film, assisting in several cinema projects with Federico Fellini, among others, before he returned to fiction and published what has become his defining work, Il padrone (1965; The Boss, 1966). This audacious, experimental work, less a narrative and more a sort of parable, brings together Parise’s career-long interest in the fantastic, the satiric, and the realistic. The novel is the story of a young man who comes to the city for work; he is hired by a nightmarish boss, who systematically destroys his dignity and humanity in a series of grotesque and cartoonish exercises in gratuitous authority. Parise critiques with Swiftian excess the mercenary spirit of capitalism and the aggressive way it destroys those who try to find success within it. Although the book was translated into English and found some appreciation internationally, Parise returned to journalism and during the next fifteen years covered with insight and an unwavering sense of moral outrage some of the era’s most difficult international stories, including the American involvement in Vietnam, the cultural reformation of Mao Zedong’s China, the devastating droughts in Africa, and the student riots in Paris in 1968.
When he died on August 31, 1986, in Treviso, Italy, Parise was remembered for his profound sense of postwar alienation and spiritual malaise, a haunting sense of the individual’s struggle to accept an absurd universe indifferent to the demand that it have meaning.