Post Mortem
Albert Caraco was born to Constantinople into a wealthy Jewish family. His life is one of nomadism, endless reading and solitude.
The many books from he published had, as long as the author lived, no echo. Caraco killed himself in 1971, the day after his father's death.
Today he is discovered as one of the most singular and extreme thinkers of our years.
Post mortem, from from which the first part of the play is taken, was written from Caraco soon after the death of his mother, to to whom he was bound by a tropical lushness of love, unlove, hate, dependence, passion. Thus, in "love language," and almost punctuating a funeral homily, Caraco recounted a relationship terrible in intensity and ambivalence. His mother, a frivolous, devout woman to powders and cosmetics, adornment of parties in South American consulates, was both "devouring mother" and "Mater Gloriosa." Caraco celebrated her as a priest, aware that he had been sexually mutilated by the goddess. But that mutilation had also marked his initiation. And the son had recoiled on his mother's precepts: she only wanted him to reject sex (thus other women), he went as far as to rejecting life and spent his years to sounding out, in perfect solitude, and in the purest classical prose, the Blackness of existence. In him nothingness had taken the place of God.
"I look forward to death with impatience and come to wish my father dead, for I dare not kill myself before he is gone. His body will still not be cold when I am no longer in the world," wrote Albert Caraco in Ma confession. And in September 1971 this came true.

Letter to the Father
The narrativity, or almost theatrical drama, of the Letter to the Father-second part of the play-is not given only from fragments of dialogue, nor even from more or less veiled allusions to glorious works of Kafkian fiction. This flavor, which to us seems very strong, is spread throughout and constitutes the real characteristic of the present writing: which is, no less than in the novellas The Condemnation or The Metamorphosis, a "scripted" confrontation between father and son, as well as, of course, autobiographical confession and exercise in self-analysis. Perhaps from the beginning Kafka felt that that letter was not addressed to the objective and external father but to the subjective and internal one: yet another conversation with an inner specter. As they say of the insane, in short, Kafka "spoke from only": and this letter would be but an anguished soliloquy entrusted to written paper.
We today reading these pages are strongly induced to to take sides: obviously for the son, the genius, the victim, against the obtuse father, the executioner. It is an almost fatal temptation, but one that must be rejected. After all, Kafka himself would not have liked it. While hurling accusations of enormous gravity at the father, he nevertheless takes care to highlight the positive sides of the parent, but more so to highlight the negative sides of himself. The good and the bad, in this text, are not divided from a clear cut, just as the happy and the unhappy are not. If anything, it could be assumed that everyone, father son wife, is equally unhappy, that everyone harbors excellent intentions that are poorly realized. About the origin of all this, one has only to assume "something not working or malfunctioning in the machine man." And this Letter to the Father is a terrible and not at all literary document of this frightening inconsistency, of this stubborn "methodless" madness that has been poisoning our every most promising day since the dawn of time.
Italo Alighiero Chiusano

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