Sharp flashes of lucid observation fill the brilliant pages of Beauty Fails, Currado Malspina’s 2002 anthology of notes, dreams and jeremiads. Originally published by Palmira Press, it is Malaspina’s first prose work in English.
His rough knuckled illustrations fan across each page creating the faint impression of an illuminated book of hours. In fact, one short essay in which he describes a restless longing for an estranged colleague’s alluring young wife is entitled O Intemerata.
It is endlessly rewarding, charting the dingy grottos of Currado’s tactless imagination. Connolly Rothschild famously described Beauty Fails as “a libertine primer on liberty” and assigned it each year to his creative writing students at Yale.
Rothschild’s sudden demission from the English department may have been the result of a rising tide of censorious priggishness but no one in New Haven is talking.
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