The author, actor and playwright from Vicenza was born in 1960. Suicide was probably found at home. Before writing he had also been a tinsmith and night porter
There were many goodbyes already scattered in the pages, through the narrative voices, like that Thomas who in his first novel, The fifteen thousand steps. A report (Einaudi Stile libero, 2002) he thought: I’m leaving, I leave behind me forever all this crap Catholic democratic industrial craftsman. I leave this disgusting provincial hole forever, filled only with dull, dangerous and dangerously evil people.
That hole is the industrial North East, the material and mental theater of the works of Vitaliano Trevisan, writer, playwright and actor who on the morning of Friday 7 January was found lifeless in his house in Campodalbero, a hamlet immersed in the wood of Crespadoro, a small town where he lived in the province of Vicenza, among several elements that indicate an extreme gesture. The news was given by Jacopo Bulgarini d’Elci, cultural critic and long-time deputy mayor of Vicenza, in a post on Facebook in the late afternoon: what I think is the greatest Italian novelist of our time died. I was also a friend to him, many years ago, and we had recently met.
Trevisan, born in Sandrigo in the Vicenza area in 1960, had just turned 61 on 12 December and in October he was admitted to the Psychiatry ward in the Montecchio Maggiore hospital, also in the Vicenza area. Having entered following an Apo (mandatory psychiatric assessment) requested by his partner who resides in Tuscany, the author had told his prisoner condition on social media, later explaining the reason for his gesture to Corriere della Sera: The so-called social networks are used to communicate. I needed help.
The help. What different from the affection of the readers and the esteem of the critics that have never been lacking. Trevisan, in the midst of so many disparate works, had made his debut at the end of the nineties for Theoria with A wonderful world (1997) e Trio without piano / oscillations (1998). The next one The fifteen thousand steps. A report, winner of the Lo Straniero and Campiello Francia Prize, coming out for Einaudi Stile Libero had revealed a voice marked, in verbal dictation and in poetics, by obsession. The figure of the narrator of Thomas who suddenly lost a brother and who counts the steps to keep the world in order and himself counts the steps, was hypnotic. Although stylistically the daughter of Thomas Bernhard’s work, honored in the name of the protagonist, the work explored a new world, decadent and rotten, with restless eyes.
If Trevisan then finds himself involved in cinema, as an actor and co-writer of First love (2004) of Matteo Garrone, recurring themes and figures emerge in writing: jazz music, self-portraits by Francis Bacon, the body of Buster Keaton. These are the years in which he publishes the stories of A wonderful world. A standard (Einaudi Stile libero, 2003) and Shorts (Einaudi Stile libero, 2004), winner of the Chiara Prize, and in which he also began his frequent activity as a playwright: in 2004 with the theatrical adaptation of Juliet from Federico Fellini, in 2005 with Work makes you free staged by Toni Servillo, up to the pice One night in Tunisia (Einaudi 2010) inspired by Bettino Craxi.
In 2010, with Very sad gardens (Laterza), the autobiographical turning point: Trevisan becomes the protagonist not defining himself as me, but always as an author. A filter also present in his last great work, the river Works (Einaudi Sile libero, 2016) in which he retraces his professions before becoming a writer, from the tinsmith to his experiences as an acid dealer, to the night porter, playing right from the title on the ambiguity of the English term which means both works and works. Not long ago he delivered his latest text to Einaudi Stile Libero and the publisher Paolo Repetti recalled the author in a touching tweet that closes by saying: You did not like humanity. In no way. But you loved individual creatures. The unpublished is called Black Tulips: tulips, a sign of love, have been permanently black since yesterday.
January 7, 2022 (change January 7, 2022 | 21:26)
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