Massimo Bontempelli's La Vita operosa between fiction, autobiography and "autofiction"

From the earliest pages, Massimo Bontempelli's La Vita operosa (1921) seems to mix the characters of an autobiography, a narrative text and, it could be said, of an autofiction. The first is certainly the re-enactment by the narrator of some facts of his own existence, the reminder attributed to the memories, the autobiographical pact, justified by the subtitle (Avventure del '19 a Milano), established with the readers, often called in question. Various situations and characters, however, are clearly unlikely: the Daimon with whom he maintains constant dialogue, the golden "waterfalls" pouring into the streets, the magical mirror with which the seventh chapter ends. All this, in line with the program of magical realism, would seem to authorize the recall of some aspects of Doubrovsky's autofiction. On the other hand, the individual "adventures" of the narrator, who does not hesitate to express controversial judgments about the society around him, are real self-contained narrative inserts, as shown in the subdivisions of the chapters. So, in the text, we have three planes intersecting. And this makes Bontempelli's operation more important, an operation that does not run out, therefore, only in the will to rebuild space and time.

Keywords: autobiography; fiction; autofiction; modernism; magical realism