2024-10-05 16:24:00
The new book by the two-time Strega award-winning writer comes out on Tuesday 8 October for La nave di Teseo. A man looks at the boy he was in the summer of 1972
Sandro Veronesi’s novels always come from the sea. Sometimes at the beginning of the journey, as in Calm chaos (2005), which opens with two brothers who have just finished surfing. «Navigate: like twenty years ago. We borrowed boards from two kids and threw ourselves into the high, long waves, so unusual in the Tyrrhenian Sea that they have bathed us all our lives.” Other times, the sea is the central hub, the one to leave behind if you want to continue your journey in peace. As in one of the key chapters of The hummingbird (2019),
At the Mulinellihomage to the story The Gorgo by Beppe Fenoglio, or on the Viareggio coast by Where does this happy train leave for? (1988), in which everything – the blocks of flats, the restaurant menus, a meeting among the deckchairs – recalls the impossibility of reclaiming the past.
The sea takes center stage even where it really couldn’t, for example in Trentino where the beautiful (and somewhat forgotten) film is set. XYof 2010. There, bro the many unexplained deaths recorded simultaneously in a snowy forest, there is one due to a shark bite. «Not a wolf nor a bear, nor a lynx nor a lion or a leopard or a tiger. A shark.” Impossible? Not for Veronesi, who autographed copies of the Hummingbird writing «To all ships at sea» and which set his only historical novel – Commanderof 2023, written together with Edoardo De Angelis – inside a submarine. It was a matter of time, therefore, before he wrote a book with which to definitively elaborate his neo-Conradian obsession with waves, beaches and bathing establishments, even, as places where life surges and sometimes suddenly stops.
It’s called Black SeptemberLa nave di Teseo publishes it and it is the story of Luigi Bellandi known as Gigio, «twelve years and four months, promoted with Distinct in the eighth grade, a fan of Juventus, Bitossi and Ferrari as well as a fan of all other sports even without practicing any of them , meek, passive and generally not very enterprising.” Gigio, in reality, is an adult man who speaks from the present, but what he wants to tell us concerns his summer of ’72, spent following the Munich Olympics on TV and listening to records in the bedroom of Astel Raimondi, a beautiful, rich neighbor with an umbrella. and (perhaps) unconquerable. How peaceful, right? Finally a novel in which nostalgia is a sweet, rounded, relaxing thing… It’s a shame that Gigio ruined the party for us already on page one: what we are about to read, he says, is the story of how unhappiness is born. And in fact, the expectation of catastrophe hovers over everything. Which certainly concerns the massacre of September 5th in the Olympic village of Munich – by the terrorist group Black September, hence the first meaning of the novel’s title – but also something in the private life of the Bellandis. Something that has not yet turned into tragedy. Father’s boat?, mother’s suitors?, sister’s rutilism? Or perhaps the proximity to the Raimondis, the silence that reigns in the large house of Astel? Veronesi plays the spiteful god and sprinkles the beach with false leads, aware that the combination of summer and first love makes everyone blind, inside and outside the pages. «This is why I thought that exposing myself with a truly sincere, honest and scrupulous story could help me finally go beyond that question: was I capable of changing the course of events? All I need is one syllable: yes. Or: no. And finally see what’s behind it.”
For us readers, Sandro Veronesi’s career is behind it, in the sense that Black Septemberas has been said, it seems like a book prophesied by all ten novels that preceded it. Yet he doesn’t look like any of them, not even Touched upon them (1990), from which it inherits the countdown effect for disaster, nor a Where does this happy train leave for?of which it seems a kind of counterpart, a story about the genesis of disenchantment. It’s like a young brother who has taken his father’s voice and movements but not his features: in short, you recognize him, but only after seeing how he walks, how he gestures, what he has to say. To begin with, it is one of the very few books by Veronesi written in the remote past, and perhaps the only one set entirely in memories. And then it becomes a genre unto itself. “Like any good book”, someone may be commenting, thinking of excellent authors of novels that are always different and always free of labels, such as Kazuo Ishiguro or Thomas Pynchon, who for Veronesi is a declared model. No, here the definitional question is more concrete: Black September It reads like a mystery despite not having the formal characteristics of one. That is, it is a mystery in which we await not the resolution but the trigger, not to discover the culprit but the nature of the crime. What happened to Gigio and his family? When will the bomb that we hear ticking from the beginning explode? The answer to the second question is: very late, almost in the thanks. Because this is what the author wanted: to write a novel of anticipation, of pure tension; see how much and how a headless thriller can advance.
Veronesi, who due to his commercial success and welcoming prose is today imagined as an institutional, classic, linear writer, has always been, in truth, a great experimenter. His least remembered books, the aforementioned XY And Burn Troy (2007), had a courageous visionary structure, like the epistolary interlude of Calm chaos (Pietro who snoops through Lara’s emails and discovers a delusional one) and the stories Prophecyin which the writer processes his father’s death before it happens, and Goodbye baby Lucioin which she bids farewell to her son in the infantile form to welcome the adolescent one. Perhaps due to his studies as an architect, Veronesi also showed himself to be restless in managing the structures:
Calm chaos And Rare earths (2014) are nothing but a jumble of meetings, dialogues and anecdotes held together by a pretext, which in the first was the protagonist’s need to stop and in the second that of escaping; The hummingbirdinstead, it reveals a certain intolerance for narratological cages and proceeds in fragments, letters, emails, text messages, almost essayistic digressions, while remaining genuinely and proudly novel.
In Black September a new somersault is attempted, this time backwards. A kind of martial call to self-discipline, built on the author’s passion for compilations, lists, memorabilia, idols. Much of the novel, in fact, slides by as highly enjoyable list of records, song lyrics and athletes’ stories, which all together provide a vivid and definitive picture of the Seventies – at least in Veronesi’s work, which is better than that, in terms of describing the past, than that past, he will not be able to do. How difficult it will be to continue his long discussion on fatherhood, which here takes on new, deeper and more elusive nuances. In Veronesi’s books, fathers have so far been of two types: fabulous badasses and daring ones like Alberto Sordi in Traveling with dad or half-prophets whose teachings are summed up in the word “patience”, like Marco Carrera in Hummingbird and Pietro Paladini in Calm chaos. The father of Black Septemberinstead, it is a trauma in the making, something that hasn’t broken yet but is about to, the true first love to say goodbye to. In short, he doesn’t belong to either category, because he’s a dad as childrenin the sense that Gigio describes him to us as he saw him as a child, when he adored him sight unseen. And his story becomes truly poignant precisely when he lingers on this adoration, because we all know it: loving his father like a superhero, discovering that he doesn’t have powers, watching him fall after tripping over his cape; go back to loving him as much as before, because over time we too have stumbled over the mantle he left us as a legacy. It is not easy to describe this swing between magic and disillusionment without sarcasm, without anger, yet Veronesi manages to do it. Indeed, he becomes very sweet, kind; evidently, look at that father AND father, which is perhaps the only way to break the chain, to discover that good literature sprouts from the phrase “When you grow up you will understand”. Here you are, Black September it is precisely this, a luminous declaration of love to the reasons for our cracks, that bifurcation that involuntarily generated unhappiness while showing us, at the same time, how pure happiness can be.
Another interesting thing about this novel, but not only: over time, Veronesi – thirty-six years of career and two victories at the Premio Strega (in 2006 and 2020, the only one together with Paolo Volponi) – is accentuating the tendency to imbue common but likeable figures with extraordinary features; to, let’s say, mythologize the lovable. This started in 2014, with Rare earthswhen Marta, Pietro’s disastrous and irresistible sister-in-law, as well as one of the most beautiful characters in our recent fiction, performed incredible feats during a trip to Iceland. Here, the extraordinary ones are Uncle Giotti, a colorful family friend with a turbulent life, and Gilda, Gigio’s brilliant sister. Who instead is only good at one thing: loving people. Like Paladini, Carrera, Mète and the other protagonists of Veronesi before him, and therefore perhaps like Veronesi himself, who has an increasingly enchanted voice, increasingly moved by the thought that families, brothers, children, new generations exist ; the others. Hence, the desire to pamper his characters with continuous praise, the same ones that follow one another at our tables, in our telephone conversations, when we define a sister who has just been promoted at work as “unique”, a young son who smiles at the elderly as “wonderful”. on the street, “crazy” is a wife with a more developed emotional intelligence than ours. This thing, this covering the ordinary with exceptionality, is called benevolence, and it is the topic that Sandro Veronesi has always wanted to write about. He did it this time too, passing by the coast as always and inviting us to look out, because there is a stupendous, unrepeatable sea.
The book and the meetings with the author
«Black September», the new novel by Sandro Veronesi, comes out on Tuesday 8 October by La nave di Teseo (pp. 293, €20). La nave di Teseo, for which the novel that won the Strega in 2020 («Il hummingbird») was published, now also offers books by Veronesi that have already appeared with other publishers, such as Bompiani and Fandango. Veronesi presents the book on Sunday 6 October in Naples (Festival Campania Libri, 7pm, with Teresa Ciabatti and Silvio Perrella), Tuesday 8th in Milan (Rizzoli Galleria, 6pm, with Cristina Battocletti and Antonio D’Orrico), Wednesday 9th in Rome (Feltrinelli Argentina, 6pm, with Niccolò Ammaniti and Loredana Lipperini), Friday 11th in Prato (Museo Pecci, 6.30pm, with Edoardo Nesi), Sunday 13th in Trento (Sports Festival, 11am, with Novella Calligaris and Aldo Cazzullo) , the 19th in Perugia (Umbria Green Festival, 6.30 pm, with Daniele Zepparelli), the 29th in Bologna (Sala Borsa, 6 pm) and the 12th November in Turin (Circolo dei Lettori, 6 pm).
October 5, 2024 (modified October 5, 2024 | 6:24 pm)
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Explored throughout his career. Through the lens of benevolence, Veronesi elevates the everyday experiences of love, family, and loss, transforming them into profound reflections on the human condition. In Black September, he weaves this theme seamlessly, presenting characters who, while seemingly ordinary, possess extraordinary depth and resilience.
As Gigio navigates his childhood and the complexities of his relationship with his father, the duality of adoration and disillusionment comes to the forefront. It’s a delicate balance—a portrayal that resonates with anyone who has grappled with the imperfections of their role models. Veronesi’s ability to capture these nuances elevates his storytelling, inviting readers into an intimate exploration of what it means to love unconditionally yet grapple with the reality of human flaws.
Moreover, by incorporating cultural artifacts such as music and sports legend into the narrative, Veronesi not only anchors the story in the 1970s but also underscores the impact of shared experiences on our identities. These interludes serve as a backdrop, enriching the characters’ lives with nostalgia while simultaneously reflecting the socio-political environment of the time.
In essence, Black September stands as a testament to Veronesi’s continued evolution as an author. His distinctive approach—blending personal history with broader societal themes—challenges readers to re-examine their own perceptions of family, heroism, and the passage of time. Ultimately, what emerges is not just a narrative filled with tension and anticipation, but a heartfelt meditation on love’s complexities, making Black September a worthy addition to Veronesi’s longstanding exploration of the human experience. Through his compassionate lens, Veronesi invites us to embrace the beauty in our imperfections and the extraordinary nature of the ordinary, crafting a narrative that lingers long after the final page is turned.