My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More): A Memoir - Hardcover

Fo, Dario

3.75

173 ratings by Goodreads

9780312359171: My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More): A Memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312359179 ISBN 13: 9780312359171

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006

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An extraordinary coming-of-age memoir by the Nobel-Prize-winning playwright My First Seven Years is Dario Fo's fantastic, enchanting memoir of his youth spent in Northern Italy on the shores of Lago Maggiore. As a child, Fo grew up in a picturesque village teeming with glass-blowers, smugglers and storytellers. Of his teenage years, Fo recounts the struggles of the Fascists and Partisans, the years of World War II, and his own tragicomic experience trying to desert the Fascist army. In a series of colorful vignettes, Fo draws us into a remarkable early life filled with characters and anecdotes that would become the inspiration for his own creative genius.

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About the Author:

DARIO FO was born in 1926 in northern Italy. He began working in theater as a comic and actor. Together with his wife, Franca Rame, he has been highly successful as an actor, director, and writer of satirical comedies for the theatre. His work has been politically important in Italy and won him international acclaim. In 1997 Dario Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. JOSEPH FARRELL is an award-winning translator of Italian novels and plays and is the author of Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Harlequins of the Revolution. He lives in Scotland.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Fo, Italy's leading contemporary playwright, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, is a radical dramatist best known for his political satire Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970). In staging his provocative plays on such social and political issues as abortion, political corruption and organized crime, the controversial Fo was attacked and censored. In this memoir, he offers a lively, evocative narrative of his youth. Born in 1926, Fo grew up on the shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, and he vividly recalls his childhood experiences, encountering jazz musicians, circus performers and, most importantly, storytellers. From his grandfather and locals, he learned the art of improvisatory storytelling: "Their language and tales made an indelible mark." In the concluding chapters he writes of WWII and gives an amusing but tense account of sneaking a trainload of British and South African prisoners disguised as women out of Italy and into Switzerland. Writing with verve, wit and an imaginative flair, Fo reveals the roots of his caustic satires, his commedia dell'arte style and his anarchistic attitudes. (Oct. 4)
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