Bai Pian Xiao Shuo

Centuria is the book in which Luisa Lattes rediscovers three poems associated with her relationship with Marco Carrera. Its return, during the clearing of her desk after her thesis, turns an ordinary act of sorting into a renewed encounter with the past: she had decided to put the volume away, and the forgotten pages bring her attachment to Marco back into the present.

A book kept, then put away

In a letter dated October 22, 1998, Luisa tells Marco that she has just realized she will never leave Giorgio Manganelli. She had been putting away the books, notes, and other materials that had accumulated on her desk after finishing her thesis. Among them was a copy of Centuria, a book she had handled and read many times while working on her doctorate. Three photocopied poems, unrelated to the thesis, had been kept inside it and then forgotten.

The poems’ rediscovery occurs as Luisa decides to move the volume to the library with the rest of her books. She describes the decision as a final separation from the book and part of an effort to loosen her fixation on Manganelli, which she felt could impede academic advancement at the Sorbonne. The poems surface at precisely that moment, making the planned act of closure the occasion for renewed memory.

The poems as a record of attachment

Finding the pages immediately recalls the day Luisa first read the poems in a book belonging to her professor. She cannot fix the date exactly, placing it around 1991 or 1992, when she and Marco had lost contact and stopped writing to one another for a while. After returning to Paris from Bolgheri in September, she was still affected by the days she had spent there with Marco. The poems seemed to speak about the two of them, and she felt an urgent need to photocopy those three in particular.

Luisa placed the copies inside Centuria because, at the time, she thought she would never part with the book. Later she stopped handling it, although it remained on her desk; eventually she chose to move it to the library. The sequence gives the volume a double role: it first serves as a container for words that Luisa reads as bearing on her love, then becomes the overlooked object through which those words return. The poems do not resolve the relationship; their reappearance restarts its emotional history.

Books and the circulation of memory

The novel places Centuria among several forms of material and mediated communication. Luisa’s rediscovered poems belong to a private archive of reading and copying; elsewhere, she writes to Marco from Paris, describing how memories of him return during solitary taxi rides. A postcard is also identified as written by Luisa in 1998, while Marco’s correspondence includes a letter addressed to him in Rome. These forms preserve different moments and voices rather than producing a single, settled account of their relationship.

The contrast with later records is consequential. Marco’s hidden correspondence, credit-card statements, emails, and text exchanges leave documentary traces that Marina can discover, turning private communication into evidence of concealed attachment. Much later, Miraijin is encouraged to upload videos to YouTube, a medium through which her advice and example reach a vast audience. Across these episodes, the movement from copied poems and letters to searchable digital records changes how intimacy is kept, revisited, or exposed. Centuria matters within that pattern because its forgotten pages make memory tangible: the book can be put away, but what it holds can return.