A Short Theory of Travel and of the Desert

A Short Theory of Travel and of the Desert is a real challenge to most of the accepted rules in our literature regarding the form of a story. All the stories in this volume embrace the entire vast human experience, placing us in every corner of the world, from the dry shores of the Mediterranean to the pages of the brilliant Serbian writer Milorad Pavić: this is the whole journey. Thanks to an exceptionally elastic prose, a wandering writing style that adapts to the various spiritual, physical or imaginary places of each story, and the fragile individuality of its characters, Crusat-i leads these weary characters toward the abyss of fear, doubt and desire that make up the contemporary world.

They wait, seek or explore the possibility of a discovery that does not reach their numb present, although, strangely, they seem incapable of any useful action, except perhaps the seductive Lena, who writes to us from the bubbling world of dreams. As Sufi mysticism says, the soul seeks change, and so stillness is equal to the slow death that watches us everywhere, pursuing us along secondary roads, empty parking lots or hotels full of tourists. This is the desert of reality, where, fortunate or not, we are slaves, so that fate or chance (an insignificant event, a loss of feelings on a nudist beach, a plane crash that never happened) is what, like some explosion, reveals to us the true face of our loneliness.