The Fakir of Florence

Description

A new book by anarchist writer Paul Cudenec published by Winter Oak Press.

The Fakir of Florence: A Novel in Three Layers explores, in fictional form, the connections between anarchism, metaphysics and artistic expression.

The three threads of narration centre on characters inhabiting different, yet interwoven, levels of reality.

Perantulo is a wandering sage, spreading his mystic pagan wisdom from Khaluvia to Mesqa-Murro, from the chestnut forests of Sevennola to the rain-lashed archipelago of Prydina.

He is the fictional creation of il fachiro, an Eastern philosopher who arrived in Renaissance Florence in 1459 and challenged Cosimo di Medici and Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonist revival with his own empowering and anarchic metaphysics.

Paul is a writer visiting 21st century Italy who, while laying himself open to inspiration from the energies and art of the Florentine past, comes across an historical account of il fachiro and his fables. But he, too, resides inside a book.

The novel is a first-time fictional publication for Cudenec, whose 2013 work The Anarchist Revelation: Being What We’re Meant to Be is described by John Zerzan in Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization as “the least pessimistic book I can recall reading… It brings anarchist resistance and the spirit together in a very wide-ranging and powerful contribution”.

A review by anarchist writer Gabriel Kuhn adds: “The book attempts no less than equipping contemporary anarchism with a footing that is often neglected: the transformation not only of society’s structures but also of people’s souls”.