2024-03-26 19:23:25
by CRISTINA TAGLIETTI
On March 22nd with the newspaper the second issue of the series dedicated to the writer: his debut, published in 1991 and set in an imaginary nineteenth-century city
Welcome back to Quinnipak, where it all began. It is here that Alessandro Baricco set his debut novel in 1991, in this imaginary city dominated by a bell tower that strikes the hours «as if those chimes were cutting the night into segments, it is time that is a very sharp blade and dissects the eternity”. Castles of anger in the «Corriere della Sera» series comes out after Oceano mare, the second novel published in 1993, which unequivocally registered Baricco as an original voice – it is not excessive to say unique – in the Italian literary panorama and the he gained legions of devoted readers.
Yet the break with the classical stylistic features of narration was already evident in that first novel selected in the top five for the Campiello prize and then, translated into France (Châteaux de la colère) where Baricco is among the best known and loved Italian writers, winner of the Médecis prize Étranger. An unusual novel from the beginning, with those three pages of dialogue, a question and answer without preambles or descriptions. The fast and direct editing suggests a peculiar vision of narration, a storytelling that will distinguish Baricco from his contemporaries. It is the beat of a musical tempo obtained through a use of language without fear of any kind (“the breath rambles, rattles, rolls and squints”), with an exuberant and brazen rhetorical arsenal, at times of conscious and self-deprecating virtuosity, as when he writes «It was three in the morning and the city was drowning in the bitumen of its own night. In the foam of your dreams. In the shit of his own insomnia. Etc”.
Baricco puts all this at the service of a timeless reality (Castelli di rage is set in an undefined European country of an undefined nineteenth century) and of unconventional characters who intertwine their lives with their talents, their visions, their utopias. Dreams so powerful that, at times, they are able to replace reality, like that of Mr. Rail, one of the bizarre, crazy, enigmatic, paradoxical protagonists, of owning a train even if there is no railway, because «the the only true meaning of a train is that man gets on it and sees the world as he has never seen it before, and sees as much of it, in one go, as he has never seen in a thousand carriage journeys. If, in the meantime, this machine also manages to transport a bit of coal or a few cows from one country to another, so much the better: but that’s not the important thing.”
Mr. and Mrs. Rail, the orphan Pehnt who wears a jacket that is too large and his friend Pekisch who plays the humanophone and acted as a father to him (“Pehnt is weird” people said. “It’s life which is weird” said Pekisch), old Andersson, the widow Abegg enter and exit the pages as if they were on a stage.
The wonders of technique, the power of imagination, the search for the impossible inhabit this succession of stories that fit together, even if, at times, banal reality and everyday life claim them. As happens to Pehnt who, after leaving Quinnipak, after becoming an insurer and starting a family, writes to his friend Pekisch: «Who said that one really has to live in the open, always leaning on the ledge of things, looking for the impossible, to spy out all the loopholes to slip away from reality? Is it really obligatory to be exceptional?
Baricco experiences the work of narrating as a civil task, convinced that men need stories not only to transmit knowledge and knowledge, but precisely to feed themselves, to live. If his writing has pursued, welcomed and undergone evolutions and changes over time, coming to terms, like Pehnt, with reality, that sense of wonder, that enchantment that involves writer and reader, that search for the “new” in narration (as well as in essayistic analyzes on the digital revolution, from The Barbarians to The Game) is something that Baricco has always experienced, even in subsequent novels, faithful only to the dictatorship of stories. «I was born to tell stories», I couldn’t have done anything else» he often repeated.
Founding cities (like Quinnipak), giving life to the inhabitants, mapping the places, imagining dialogues that undermine literary etiquette, went hand in hand with the search for a syntax with an irregular but vital rhythm and a lexicon with its own precise sonority. He has always been supported by the belief that writing novels is «a domestic, onanistic, moving way of being God», as he said last year at the Turin Book Fair where he announced his new narrative somersault, the metaphysical western Abel, in which , as he confessed in the podcast created with Matteo Caccia, “there is the man I have become over time”.
Each work costs 7.90 euros. The twelve-volume series
The initiative of the «Corriere della Sera» continues, offering twelve selected works by Alessandro Baricco (Turin, 1958), including novels, essays, monologues and collections of articles. The series, created with the graphic design of An innovative novel also in form, it was a challenge for the literature of the time, and highlighted many of the characteristics of Baricco’s style. To continue, on March 29th the novel Seta, from 1996, will be on newsstands, a story of love and travel, one of the writer’s great successes, from which the film of the same name directed by the French François Girard was based. The series will continue on April 5th with the provocative essay on the digital revolution The Game, released by Einaudi in 2018. Fifth volume of the series, on April 12th, one of Baricco’s theatrical works, the monologue Novecento, from 1994, which inspired 1998 the film The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore and starring Tim Roth. Telling the Homeric epic in a narrative closer to our culture: this is the idea of Homer’s long story, Iliad, which will be on newsstands on April 19th. In the following weeks: the novels Without blood (on newsstands April 26), City (May 3), This story (May 10), Smith & Wesson (May 17) and the tetralogy I Corpo, which collects the four novels Emmaus, Mr Gwyn, Three Times at Dawn and The Young Bride (on newsstands May 24); to close with the first historic collection of articles and interventions by Baricco on contemporary society, Il Nuovo Barnum (31 May)
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March 21, 2024 (modified March 21, 2024 | 9.16pm)
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