Frédéric Pajak's 'Manifesto incerto' Vol. 1 Published in Italian by L'orma

Italian publisher L'orma has released the first volume of Frédéric Pajak's nine-part work 'Manifesto incerto', titled 'Con Walter Benjamin, sognatore sprofondato nel paesaggio'. Pajak, born in 1955 in Suresnes, France, combines text and drawing in a manner akin to W.G. Sebald's photo-textual literature, but using drawings instead of photographs. The series aims to 'evoke erased history and the war of time'. This first volume features not only Walter Benjamin but also Samuel Beckett's lesser-known essay on the van Velde brothers, Abraham and Gerardus. Pajak's portrayal of Benjamin is critical, describing him as 'aesthetic, moralist, populist, resentful lover of high dialectics' and 'the archetype of the bourgeois boy from a good family'. The book is part of the Kreuzville series, a portmanteau of Berlin's Kreuzberg and Paris's Belleville. Each volume includes a chess game reinterpretation; this one features the July 1934 match between Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht at Skovbostrand. The translation initiative makes Pajak's opus magnum accessible to Italian readers for the first time.