“The book of my life”
NoonAugust 5, 2022 – 09:20 am
“Moravia almost like a refuge during the high school years”
from Vincenzo Trione
NMy parents couldn’t get over it. I lived in a house full of books. On a daily basis, I met philosophers, men of letters, some writers. But I was attracted to something else. I studied because I had to, without particular passion. Those years were formidable. I spent whole days talking about football, watching games on television, filling Panini albums with stickers, having fun with Subbuteo and, from spring to autumn, playing sweaty and endless challenges on improvised fields. Read some novels… », my father repeated to me. Then, the day comes when you cross the shadow line. And you understand that your identity is a bedlam. You are made of body, blood, cells and even immaterial matter. You are a repertoire in which experiences and people, loves and wounds, impulses and expectations also converge. But not only. Your nature has one foot resting on the body and emotions and another made up of sheets of paper, celluloid tapes, transparent screens, literary and pictorial mythologies. We are cyborgs with anatomical parts that combine with fantastic organs. We have a “right ventriloquist of fleshblood and a left ventricle of papier mache,” recalled Tiziano Scarpa. A right eye of pure rock salt and a left one “encrusted by the points of view of the smudges of three millennia of art history, wide-angled and zoomed in by the factious lenses of the directors of a round century of cinema history, and all these points of view are one after the other like colored lenses, pulverized inside a telescope ».
If I try to go back to the moment when I grasped this complexity, I find myself in a spring in the mid-eighties. A little by chance I felt the desire to browse and then read Memorable times by Carlo Cassola: I immediately identified myself in that summer parable of adolescent loves. A little later my father said to me, “Read this.” Was Agostino by Alberto Moravia, a small book, published in 1956 in the series “I delfini” by Bompiani, accompanied by two drawings by Renato Guttuso. It is nice that a father entrusts the books that formed him to his son, thus suggesting a virtuous dialogue between generations and references. I remember few details of that novel. It was the story of a sexual initiation: the first approach to the idea of sex. On the one hand, a thirteen-year-old boy from a middle-class family; on the other side, a woman. Agostino and his mother, still a seductive widow, on whom he shapes the shape of his desires. I have kept, in my memory, above all the epilogue of Augustine. “But he wasn’t a man; and a long unhappy time would pass before he was. ‘ In those words I was there, at the age when you feel suspended on a precipice of feelings and anxieties.
I never quite understood why, but that long story was a revelation. Of course, for intimate reasons: following a mimetic game, I identified with the curiosity of that boy almost my age. Since then I have begun to read a lot, continuously, ordering my ideal literary library, which I continue to enrich. A central place is occupied by theThe works of Moravia. Unlike most critics, I loved little The indifferent, The girl and the Roman tales, while I preferred the novels of the Eighties, which always revolve around Eros, conceived as a key to interpreting reality: from 1934 to The man who looksyes The trip to Rome to posthumously The leopard womanpassing through the stories of The thing.
He is not a glamorous writer. Moravia is intimately realistic, the creator of a sort of Balzacian human comedy. A large fresco, which depicts Italian society in its various strata: the underclass, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the educated classes. To compose this polyptych, intolerant of any avant-garde and experimentalism, Moravia uses the tools of traditional fiction – novel and short story – which he deals with with the skill of a craftsman: his books are powerful machines endowed with great combinatorial skills, characterized by an extraordinary ability to define the characters of the characters, marked by a severe linguistic control, by a lucid, solid, dry prose, without adjectives, free of abandonment and yielding, apparently neutral and transparent, ready to penetrate with heterogeneous subjects and themes, committed to capture the changing events of existence, inclined to investigate the subsoil of the Ego, ready to measure itself with the uncanny, conceived, in Freudian terms, as “something that should have remained hidden and instead surfaced”. Faithful to the religion of literature, Moravia has a rather rare talent: he uses “classical” forms to grasp the manias, tics, vices and taboos of twentieth-century society and to reflect on the great currents of the last century (surrealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis) .
My classmates chose Hemingway, Garcia Márquez or Bukowski. I, Moravia. That, from the meeting with Agostino, for a long time it was my magnifying glass on life and on the world: I kept its interviews, film reviews in “L’Espresso”, political news and literary articles in “Corriere della Sera”, militant interventions, the wonderful reports from Africa. His novels helped me watch the transition from childhood to adolescence. I felt Moravia almost like a refuge. It was like that during the high school years.
EEntering the Moravian pages, I understood for the first time that literature has an extraordinary power: takes you elsewhere, while leaving you where you are. It leads you towards an “beyond the world” which is autonomous, free, independent, even if it is linked to the world in which you live through a dense network of threads. You open a novel and you come across thousands of human details that often have a strong visual value. A dense sequence of moments made up of words which, placed one after the other, wait to be transformed into a mental cinema. This process, Orhan Pamuk recalled, makes reading a novel «a more collaborative, more personal experience than looking at a painting». The reader feels the “dizzying pleasure” of being in a universe that he cannot see in its entirety: he can only focus on small details, on minimal “squares”, on “short irreducible moments”, indulging in “an activity full of suspense”. It is for this reason that even today, although I deal mainly with images, I dedicate whole days to reading novels.
I graduated in July 1990. Moravia died on September 26 of that year. He was unanimously hailed as a giant of the twentieth century. Which, today, has been guilty forgotten, unlike Calvino, Pasolini or Sciascia. Since then I have not opened Moravia’s novels: I don’t know if for fear of being disappointed. Perhaps, that farewell was another rite of passage: from adolescence to maturity. Since then I have approached writers far from Moravia, attracted above all by those authors (among others, Calvino and Kundera) who tend to disjoint and dismantle stories and events, careful to strongly affirm the centrality of language and form. Finally, while working on my most recent book, artivism (published by Einaudi a few months ago), by chance I came across some political texts from Moravia, gathered in Reluctant commitment (Bompiani). I took them back, annotated them, quoted them. By magic, the Moravian ghost has re-emerged. The ideal subtitle of artivism it could be a “reluctant commitment”. An expression that expresses my predilection for unpolitical art, capable of questioning the present without ever adhering to it.
PS. Today, before leaving for the holidays, I packed one of the most ambitious and discussed Moravian novels, The inner life.
August 5, 2022 | 09:20
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