The book is the author's house

Mario Praz (Rome, 1896-1982) was a man who stirred many passions in his lifetime despite being, in essence, a scholar who, over time, blended into his home, filled with thousands of objects and volumes capable of synthesizing all his wisdom. His final fame as a hermit earned him the main inspiration for the protagonist of Luchino Visconti's film Confidences (1974), in which Burt Lancaster plays a collector of paintings with family groups in a boarding school, isolated in his universe of Chinese boxes with no connection to outside reality.

This metaphor also served for poor Praz, whom many, in a more cultured era than the present, defined as a "pasistat ", delighted to anchor himself in the knowledge of Europe, with special interest in the United Kingdom, where he was a lecturer from 1923 to 1931 at the University of Liverpool, an apprenticeship that earned him the honors to inaugurate the chair of English Language and Literature at the Sapienza in 1935.

In the late 1970s, despite collaborating with multiple print media, he felt the need to bring together all his best texts to offer readers a comprehensive posthumous testament. Thus, in 1980, La voz tras el Escena was published, now appearing in Spain, which has been more or less prolific throughout this century in recovering his unique work, as Península Pentagonal (Almuzara, 2007), a gloss on a Spain that also appears in this compilation of articles, stories, and essays that are not only literary, addressing lives, tastes, and observations beyond the bookish.

Praz graduated with a thesis on Gabriele d'Annunzio at a time when he was venerated as a god. In D'Annunzio and the Scent of the Rose, he complains about how postwar modernity had ruthlessly buried the warrior poet, erasing him from the scene as an antique, like those our protagonist, whose house museum is a Roman must-see, loved to hoard.

He was able to adore the master of his younger years, which didn't mean strictly following his style; his is much more fluid, typical of someone with a superior mental order who conveys in the reflections on his pages a leisurely journey through Europe over the centuries that shaped its modernities, as heterodox as the Italian's specialties. Each of them ended up shaping the books of that strange man with so many intuitions, an Englishman by choice and magical because he is international from his home.

Another of the merits of The Voice Behind the Stage is how its mysterious design seeks to refute, but not without paying homage to, this British label by distributing its disquisitions across many countries of the Old World. To understand its handling of sources, combined with a unique voice that doesn't conform to the hackneyed, one would appreciate the account of the death of J.J. Winckelmann in Trieste, murdered, like Marlowe, "under the knife of a dark, paying friend."

Praz places us in the inn and, suddenly, has the brio of a crime reporter in his unpacking of those moments. He chronicles the death of the beauty restorer with clinical zeal and, from his normality, summarizes with a few brushstrokes the depth of the era he chronicles.

This is evident when he abandons the edge that flirts with fiction and navigates with delight among characters and their contributions to culture. He can dissect the shift toward romantic sensibility as well as meditate on Napoleonic plunder. Each topic is treated with passion and great attention to detail, a mot juste of an obsessive intellectual.

The most striking thing, reading him in our 2025, is the disdain of his contemporaries. After his death, his work was revised and gradually acquired a new dimension. Mockery turned into admiration. Perhaps he knew he would conquer time, imposing himself from a perch not envied, but rather a place to be frequented.

Mario Praz The Voice Behind the Scenes Translated by Pilar González Rodríguez Siruela 592 pages 49 euros