Guido Seborga Biography
Guido Seborga (1909 - 1990), pseudonym of Hess, Guido, was a writer, born in Turin in 1909 and died in 1990. From a family of Semitic Egyptian origin, in the 1940s he assumed the pseudonym from a small town near Bordighera where he had spent his childhood. He attended high school in Turin and subsequently studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, but without graduating. Paris remained the fundamental point of reference for his rebellious and adventure-loving temperament and for his contact with French artists and writers. Strongly anti-fascist since he was a boy and with an absolutely secular spirit, he participated in the Resistance in the Matteotti Brigades and then continued his socialist militancy as a collaborator, among other things, of Avanti! and deputy editor of the magazine Socialismo. His first novel, L'uomo di Camporosso was released (1948) in the Mondadori series ''La medusa degli Italiani'' and was immediately translated into France. Self-defined as a realist, Seborga confirmed himself as such with The Son of Cain (1949) where, however, the need to give a more pressing flow to the story of the partisan struggle in Liguria, marked by dramatic betrayals and atrocious torture, led him to radically renew his own style, with the adoption of an unprecedented narrative rhythm formally supported by a type of prose poetry without punctuation which, in addition to proving highly functional to the assumption, creates lyrical and figurative moments of considerable suggestion. The subsequent novels, Capital Loves (1959) and Ergastolo, were then reunited with the previous two in the volume Four Novels (1963). A love story set in Paris, The Innocents (1961), constitutes one of the last tests of his career as a writer. Perhaps more interesting was his activity as a painter which is influenced by his ancient African roots.
