The pinnacle of Fuster’s essay writing, Final Judgements is a book of aphorisms that, used to teach moral and/or philosophical truths, reveal things that are relevant to the universal human experience. As Adam Gopnick of The New Yorker puts it, “the aphorism is, in its algebraic abbreviation, a micro-model of empirical inquiry.” And Fuster uses the aphoristic tradition, less to establish truths than to undermine them, to question the conceits contained in the established truism. Despite the seriousness of its subject matter, however, this book is laugh-out-loud funny, Fuster’s wit revealing that the best aphorisms are based in stripping language of its artifice and revealing its contradictions, and the cumulative effect is a quintessentially Mediterranean kind of playfulness.

Translated by: Mary Ann Newman