«Logbook to cross the waters without maps of the literary imagination, Dialogues of the lost form alludes in its title to a threatened variant of cultural treatment. If Encyclopedias of Conversation were published in the 18th century to stimulate the art of learning by speaking, the emerging 21st century seems to be afflicted with autism that isolates individuals from others, but above all from themselves, and where reality does not occur between people but on the tremulous surface of a screen. Massimo Rizzante is aware of this context, sharply described in We are not the last, but he is not nostalgic. He does not converse to recover an elegant ancient tradition. His dialogues are an act of presence in a double sense, a way of intervening in space and time. When they meet, two minds discover ideas that they could not reach separately, and this peculiar contact also affects the perception of time: what is said here modifies the present and gives way to the forms of the future ». Juan Villoro
In Dialogues of the lost form, Massimo Rizzante gathers the conversations that he maintained, throughout the last decades, with some of his favorite writers. The "score for two voices" that characterizes these dialogues represents a memorable journey through artistic forms and generates a series of luminous variations on the leitmotif of lives and works devoted to the "great context" of universal literature. The testimony of a deep affinity and closeness becomes an exciting search for the roots of the modern novel. Thus, the reader goes through the author's hand the genealogical tree sprung from the imagination of the "last teachers" of the 20th century: Italo Calvino, Carlos Fuentes, Kenzaburo Oé, Juan Goytisolo, Milan Kundera, Gudbergur Bergsson, Gianni Celati, José Saramago and Goffredo Parise. Against the endemic decline of tradition, Rizzante rescued with irreducible freedom the vital principle of a culture of conversation dedicated to unveiling the heterodox whisper and erratic features of Weltliteratur.
MASSIMO RIZZANTE (Venice, 1963) is a poet, essayist, and translator. From 1992 to 1997 he was part of the "Seminar on the European Novel" conducted in Paris by Milan Kundera. Regular contributor to newspapers and magazines, he is a member of the editorial staff of "L’Atelier du Roman". In this editorial, his book We are not the last has appeared. Literature between the end of the work and human regeneration (2015).