2023-12-08 17:54:26
of Conversation by Alessandro Baricco with Matteo Caccia
An excerpt from the podcast created with Matteo Caccia for Feltrinelli and «il Post»: «Love? Perhaps more things have happened to me in the last 10-15 years than in the rest of my life. The sick body is like a musical instrument you have never played. Abel? Inside this book is the man I have become, over time.”
The text we are publishing is an extract from the podcast «Wild Baricco», created by Alessandro Baricco with Matteo Caccia for Feltrinelli and Il Post.
Matteo Caccia: First of all: why do you have a baby grand piano at home?
Alessandro Baricco: [risata] This [suona qualche tasto] it is a piano that is more than one hundred and ten years old. It’s a Steinway, it accompanied me for many years: I spent, I think, almost all the money from Oceano Mare to buy it, at the time.
As anyone who has read Abel has already understood, I am starting to think that time is not linear. The before and after are an illusion: I have this piano because I play the piano, badly, but always… I started when I was five and have never stopped. It is one of the great pleasures of my life. I never play for anyone, just for me. Coming home and playing is one of the best things that could happen to me. And so I have always had a piano in the house, even in the most unsettled periods… but then I must record the fact that today the woman in my life is a pianist, and one of the reasons why she came to live with me when I I asked her only that there was a piano… if it hadn’t been there she would never have come or in any case it would have taken me longer to convince her. In short, for four or five years, since I’ve been with her, the piano has entered my life in an invasive way.
I don’t know, there was something between me and the piano, beyond Novecento. The piano is in many of my books… there are some things that come back often: brothels, pianos… it’s strange. And now I’ll tell you that Gloria and I, the woman I love and who lives with me, rewarded ourselves by buying ourselves a new piano… that buying a new Steinway piano, I’m not saying it’s like buying a Ferrari… but no, on the contrary , it’s just like buying a Ferrari if your passion is the piano.
Matteo Caccia: Listen, is love in adulthood different from love in your twenties? You know when they say “Well, that stuff, that feeling, the butterflies in your stomach”, I say something very banal, “you feel it at the beginning, then when you’re fifty it doesn’t happen anymore”. It is true?
Alessandro Baricco: But, look, I’ve had a strange life anyway, so I don’t dare say any rules for anyone… it occurred to me that after the age of fifty-five, in short in the last ten-fifteen years, perhaps things have happened more things, from that point of view, than in the rest of life.
But even… precisely because I’m here to disgrace myself in the name of Abel… but even the body, in my opinion, first you don’t know what it is. Yours, huh. But maybe that of others too…
Matteo Caccia: And when did you know him?
Alessandro Baricco: You definitely don’t know him at twenty. When I see my son, who is twenty-five years old, I know for a fact – I can say this – that he has no idea what he is wearing. Which is also in splendor, isn’t it?, because at that age (I have two children, they are seventeen and twenty-five): physical splendor, both. In fact they sent them to war…
From the point of view of how the body dictates your life, from the erotic point of view, from the point of view of beauty for example… you can’t have a precise idea.
…But do you know how many things someone writes, when they haven’t yet understood them, but with crazy precision? As if in him there was a knowledge still closed in the egg, closed in the shell, which then reverberates in this involuntary way in the story… We are mixed scholars: wisdom, knowledge, understanding are not a linear process, it is a single great explosion, which happens in an instant, you don’t know which one, and everything else are these shreds that you collect… and among the various shreds of knowledge there is your body. And I must tell you that sex, physical love, is a chapter, but not even the greatest, of what your body can do. When you enter the hangar of disease, your body becomes, look, crazy stuff.
Alessandro Baricco: The sick body is like a musical instrument that has never played and starts to play: the sound box, the strings… The seriously sick body. But he was always there, resting on the furniture, you understand?, a cello resting on the furniture. Every now and then he would strum – maybe you broke your knee -, but then he makes sounds that you didn’t know, timbres that you didn’t think he was capable of. Harmonies, coincidences between the brain and other parts of the body… it’s really a completely new chapter, comparable to when you discover sex at sixteen-seventeen: first you had a body for running, for playing football etc., then suddenly you you discover that it does things… and there too: it is an instrument that begins to play. And paradoxically the disease leads you to a very similar experience, that’s it. Understand the number of things your body has to give you. All in all, if I had to do the math now that I’m sixty-five, the history of bodies is more fascinating than the history of minds.
Matteo Caccia: How did you write Abel? You wrote it a little differently than usual…
Alessandro Baricco: Yes, I started giving pages of it around, to children, friends, to Gloria, like that. But things changed a bit there, so I sent it to the publisher, who wasn’t even expecting it, anyway.
Matteo Caccia: And are you happy?
Alessandro Baricco: Abel is a particular book, that is, it has a particular meaning for me, of life, let’s say of biography, because it accompanied me through difficult years. It’s a small book, but it’s very dense… in almost every word, almost in every sentence there is a work behind it.
I love him very much, and in my opinion he is very handsome. Now I bring out an arrogance, the sweetest I have. Meanwhile there is the man I have become over time. So it’s the only book I’ve written that is the son of this man here.
… It’s one of those books that have this sort of strength combined with lightness, so, tac, they detach themselves from the ground, I don’t know how to put it, and then remain suspended there. And this I also believe is the highest calling of writing books, that is, what you should aim for, if you have the talent. And, in my opinion, in my life I have written a few pages that have fallen off the ground, never an entire book. And Abel, I look at him and he’s in the air.
… It’s not that I can explain it, but I don’t want to explain it, because then talking about your own books is horrendous. But I have this feeling and it is this feeling that makes me love it so much: enough to celebrate it by doing this disgraceful interview, but then not too much, and in short make it a different book from all the others for me. Then I don’t know about the readers, let’s see what happens, but for me it’s like this.
THE EXTRACT
The excerpt we anticipate here is taken from the Wild Baricco podcast. The text has been rearranged for publication but not modified, therefore it retains all the particularities and immediacy of an oral and recorded rather than written text.
Wild Baricco is a conversation lasting over two hours «about everything, without a network», with Alessandro Baricco, who decided for the occasion «to do things that I don’t usually do: talk for a long time and talk about things that I don’t have never wanted to speak”: this proposal became a podcast-interview conducted by the author and host Matteo Caccia and produced by Feltrinelli and “il Post”. You can listen to it — for free — starting today on the Post app and on all podcast platforms.
This initiative arrives just a month after the release of Baricco’s new beautiful novel, Abel (published by Feltrinelli), and after a complicated period in which the author announced that he was suffering from leukemia and had undergone two bone marrow transplants , the last one last August. Abel marked Alessandro Baricco’s return to fiction after a hiatus of about eight years.
Born in Turin in 1958, writer, playwright, screenwriter, music critic, television author, Baricco, one of the most multifaceted and eclectic figures on the Italian cultural scene, made his debut as a novelist in 1991 with Castelli di rage for which he won the Prix Médicis stranger. Among the many publications we remember, in 1993, Oceano mare, one of his most successful novels (Viareggio Award), then in 1996 the release of Seta, a book from which a film directed by François Girard was made. (s.ba.)
8 December 2023 (modified 8 December 2023 | 16:54)
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