The book opens with a quote from Goethe’s Faust, which reads, in part, “Two souls, alas, exist in my breast,” and it is precisely this bifurcated soul upon which the narrative turns, alternating between the story of Daedalus and a contemporary story about a young architect, Fausto, who has sunken into a state both manic and depressive. This brief mythological footnote is the centerpiece of Fior’s Red Ultramarine-originally published in 2006, and recently translated for the first time-but it is put to perplexing use. And what remains is a father, forced to live with the grief of a dead child. And, in every version, the episode concludes in the same famously tragic way: Icarus flies too close to the sun.
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In all variations, their survival is at stake, so they run for their lives. Daedalus poses a threat or has fallen out of favor, and so he is shut away in a tower or, as in Fior’s telling, he is thrown into the labyrinth. In different versions of the myth, the specifics vary. Daedalus, Icarus’ father, famous for constructing the labyrinth that holds the minotaur, builds a pair of wings so that he and his son may escape some cruel fate. Everyone knows that the story or Icarus is a story about hubris, but Manuele Fior reminds us that it is also a story of of grief.