an endless lesson – Corriere.it

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This article was published in «la Lettura» # 492 of May 3, 2021 (the full issue is available in the archive of the supplement App).

In the nine stories that make up Richard Ford’s new book there is a twilight so tenacious that it makes one doubt the existence of the night. Right from the title, which is a courtesy title (Sorry for your trouble, translated by Vincenzo Mantovani in Sorry for the inconvenience), from the very first lines of the first story, also with a courtesy title (“Nothing to declare”), there is an air of farewell that seems to herald a detachment: resigned, certainly, very polite and almost sweet, but definitive. Instead, the detachment does not come, and the farewell becomes a form of its permanent negation – of negation of the end.


Richard Ford, “Sorry for the trouble” (translation by Vincenzo Mantovani, Feltrinelli, pp. 288, euro 18)

Richard Ford is a master, there is no doubt about this. He is one of those writers universal that America produced in the second half of the last century – and that only of that century are children. He, Roth, DeLillo, Pynchon, up to David Foster Wallace, with all the differences of the case, which we will not even mention, are writers who have exalted the American point of view on the world, and in so doing, given the absolutely preeminent role conquered by the United States precisely in the last century, and especially in its second half, it can be said that they were, and still are, the tuning fork on which any instrument with which it is intended, that world, and that century, to interpret them must be tuned. Under them the immense pop culture is pressing, which in part has also nourished them, and which then has recovered everything with interests, pulping their theme-themed works, with cinema, music, TV series, documentaries, podcasts, internet. Above them, nothing. Nothing relative to their time, of which they actually represent the highest point. Above them, in reality, there is only the sky full of movement of great literature.

This applies to each of them – I repeat, mutatis mutandis – and above all it is true for the farewell works that each of them has written, but especially it is true for Ford who among them, among the American masters, is certainly the least peremptory, the least strong-willed and inevitable – what if he had been young in another time, for example this one, would have had a much harder time seeing his talent recognized. For this reason, among the children of that time that is ending with them, Richard Ford is perhaps the one who most represents him – almost incarnating him. And therefore, returning to Sorry for the inconvenience, if the twilight it contains is so tenacious that it does not give way to the night, we can well think that this is also the feeling that Ford distills from the decline of our civilization, and which concerns precisely all those who live in his time: to finish does not mean to finish; to finish means to prepare to finish, to be ready. It means to remain attached to one’s own end, to the bitter end; it means don’t stop running out.

There is a clear sign of the testamentary nature of these stories: the fact that all nine stories cluster around some common points. Ireland and Irishness; Canada; the profession of lawyer and real estate agent; Maine and New Orleans.

Each of these points is intimately linked to the idea of ​​beginning, for Ford – the idea that comes to mind more than any other, when dealing with the theme of the end: Maine has been Ford’s place of residence for many years now, in East Boothbay, on top of that New England so meticulously traveled and described in many of his novels, while New Orleans is his city of choice, where he lived for many years before starting a new life in Maine. Real estate agents (indeed, in these stories the real estate agents) are the imprint of Frank Bascombe, the sports journalist who became a real estate broker after the tragedy that strikes him in the first of the four novels of which he is the protagonist, and they are also the imprint of Ford’s intuition, who in unsuspecting years (the 90s and all the early 00s) understood that it was precisely in that frantic buying and selling American houses that the first great monster that would attack the system was hidden, that is the bursting of the bubble that has led to the great recession of 2008; while the lawyers, well in America they are the sink hole, that is the end of it, and it is not really possible to tell the decadence of the middle class without portraying them, the lawyers, wallowing in it. Canada because in its reversal of the point of view (“what for the Americans was the north, for the Canadians was the south”), it is the opaque mirror in which sooner or later every American ends up reflecting himself; and because in this role it has already been wonderfully told in the novel entitled precisely Canada, of 2012; and finally because it was also constantly present in Ford’s life, that wherever he resided or resides, in New Orleans in the past as today in Maine, he never gave up spending part of the winter in Montana, under the daily temptation to pull long on the highway, cross the border and become a new man.

The most common feature, however, among the characters and scenarios portrayed in this book, is Ireland – and this is new. I go by heart but I don’t seem to remember so much Ireland, before, in Ford’s books. Its explosion (it is truly present in all the stories, the Irish blood, the call of Ireland, Ireland itself, where two stories are entirely set) has perhaps something to do with the previous book published by Ford, the memoir Between them (2017), entirely focused on the love story between his parents – the beginning of the beginnings, the one that brought him into the world. There the Irish ancestry of the paternal branch of his family was discovered, there Ireland was dug up as the original substance, however quietly, without any particular emphasis. Emphasis that instead pervades all these stories, in which, precisely because they lead one step away from the end, the myth of the origin assumes great importance.

One step away from the end, yes. Each story in its own way, in a mix of middle-aged men and women, older and distant children, widowhoods, divorces and second marriages, drags everything, characters and scenarios, one step away from the end: but that step is never taken. . Not only that: never doing this is so insisted that with the passing of the pages it is no longer even conceived, and that end to which everything seems inexorably tending, as in Cheever’s stories, disappears from the horizon.

Then, of course, there is the style. The clear beauty of the turn of phrase which, while laden with adjectives and subordinates, is lightened by worries and afflictions – the cipher of Frank Bascombe’s tetralogy – but now also, grasped so firmly in Ireland, the abandonment of America, the egira towards Dublin, the breaking of tribal ties with his compatriots and the recognition with the two greatest writers of the twentieth century – both, precisely, Irish.

With Beckett it is a declared thematic recognition, very useful to understand even better the concept of immanence that is released from the last step not taken, of which we have just spoken: it is a dentist (Irish, in New Orleans), who names him while he is produced with the protagonist (lawyer) in a weird monologue on phantom limb syndrome: “A loss becomes your fundamental presence, which is the essence of Beckett, if you don’t mind that your dentist is a reader.” Done. Here is explained in two lines, in the middle of the third last story (“Leaving for Kenosha”), the sleight of hand that makes this book so oriented towards absence, loss, and detachment, a kind of amazing – in the end, but really – hymn to life.

With Joyce, on the other hand, it is a stylistic embrace, especially with Dubliners: the infinite delicacy with which the surface of life, so fragile, so defenseless, is handled; the irruption of an out-of-scale detail, too fast, or too large, or too long, or too focused, and the end is suddenly there, one step away: the breath stops, that formidable silence is produced ( to hear the sound of falling snow, as at the end of The Dead), but by a kind of miracle it is precisely the element that caused the rupture that initiates the recovery process. A story, the shortest, entitled «A free day», seems to be a tribute to Joyce, set as it is in Dublin, centered as it is on the near-end of a quasi-innocent woman.

Others, longer, always keep one of those off-scale elements somewhere – a tart, a sigh, or perhaps the rubble left by Hurricane Katrina in the neighborhoods that, rather than restore them, the inhabitants preferred to leave – to which the enormous and excruciating weight of surviving the loss is attached. Finally, two are tales in a manner of speaking (the way of saying “tale” proper to The Dead, precisely), that is, they are long, therefore they are more than anything else two short stories, and Ford’s writing can be stretched out, and in relaxing it can weave sentence by sentence its consolidated American teaching on heroism and on crossing borders with Joyce’s wisdom on poses and silences, producing truly high results.

As in Joyce’s masterpiece, the emotion is there, is the center of gravity around which all words orbit, but it is a full, dry emotion, exciting, more similar to the one he takes in front of the landscapes than to that produced by the events of man, almost as if to the first – be they the beaches on the ocean, the snowy plains, the French Quarter of New Orleans or the Irish countryside that passes by bus window – more importance was given than to the latter: for the right sense of proportion, for protection, for pity. And the result is precisely this non-happening of what the narrative seemed to be heading towards from the beginning: the result is the non-detachment after the farewell, it is the non-night after the twilight, it is the last step not taken, the cry that does not flow. And it is Ford, the master, who puts the definitive seal on this non-crying, with perhaps the most beautiful phrase of the whole book, the truest, the most moving: “On most occasions, when you cried you discovered that you would had to cry first. ‘

May 14, 2021 (change May 15, 2021 | 09:14)

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