Carpaccio and D'Annunzio's Il Fuoco Available to Purchase

James Joyce expressed great admiration for Gabriele D'Annunzio. His biographer Richard Ellmann explained that Joyce admired the novelist who “turned his own iconoclastic life into fiction, eliminated action, and made the novel a prolonged lyric in prose.” As a young man, Joyce hoped to write something as important as D'Annunzio's novels. Joyce called him a “magnificent poet,” compared his “great natural talent” to that of Tolstoy and Kipling, and believed Il Fuoco (The Flame) 1900, “was the most important achievement in the novel since Flaubert.” Taste has radically changed during the last hundred years and it is now hard to understand Joyce's exalted judgment.