2023-07-31 21:39:31
by HORATIO LABBATE
Disappeared in Bologna at the age of just 59. The announcement on the blog of the collective he was one of the founders of in 2000 and from which he left 15 years ago. Together with the other members of the Luther Blissett project he had achieved success in 1999 with Q
The writer Luca Di Meo passed away at the age of 59 after a terrible illness. Known in the literary world under the pseudonym Wu Ming 3, he was a founding member of the Luther Blissett Project (1994-99), as well as the famous Wu Ming writing collective. Together with the other four authors – Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Riccardo Pedrini -, he marked the publishing world through the precise choice of a controversial and tough anonymity (occasionally interrupted by group public events), capable of introducing an innovative vision of the literary work, thanks above all to the strength of an identity based on the charismatic weight of opacity.
With Wu Ming – which means nameless -, Di Meo participated in the drafting of an excellent series of works that marked a new way of doing and understanding literature. It is about the creation of historical novels, articulated according to different times and sprawling subplots, with daring narrative power. A wide world made up of an incredible number of events, marked under a serious and carnivalesque lens, through a language with an imaginative, warlike, social, almost anti-political force, with an insolent transversal taste.
As in Manituana (Einaudi, 2007), the first leaf of the Atlantic Triptych in which, in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, through a magnificent adventurous management, not only the wars between loyalists and rebels that led to the foundation of United States of America, but also events with a powerfully piratical and ethical aura starring the Indian tribes of the place.
But not only in Manituana that appreciates the profound narratological quality of Wu Ming (it seems to read on the pages the 60s cinematographic colossals of Universal Pictures, now much more underground), also in 54 (Einaudi, 2002), where the historical breadth – starting from 1954 -, it intertwines, with inventiveness, along the espionage issues relating to the Communist Party of the time (between Italy, Yugoslavia, the French Riviera), also involving the absurd figure of Cary Grant.
but above all with Q (Einaudi, 1999), a finalist novel for the 1999 Strega Prize, signed by the Luther Blissett collective, which Di Meo and the other four authors acquire notoriety. Without ever losing their tension towards a radicality in polluting history in a picturesque way, indeed tinging it with furious and colorful heresy. Q set in the sixteenth century. It sees as protagonist an Anabaptist heretic, forced to hide himself, constantly changing identity, due to the Inquisition which has sent the spy of a cardinal of Rome, Q.
A collective book, which, thanks to a first person invaded by never linear historical data (the aim of the novel, in fact, is to be a rebus within and against history that the reader must accept), confirms itself as a kind of frightening puzzle, full of ideals, as well as the best known literary manifesto of the collective. Theirs is a successful manifesto which is, on balance, centered on a radical narrative where history is a map that can be invaded by real and non-real elements. It is beyond the mysterious function possessed by the authors’ facade invisibility. their writing, therefore, is able to allow a charismatic attack on the most abysmal issues of the contemporary age: from political to religious, passing through existential ones.
Luca Di Meo (Wu Ming 3) had then detached himself from the group between 2008 and 2009, his project on football Ftbologia as well as the documentary In the ball. However, as in the spirit of the collective – which remembers him with sincere and touching delicacy by giving news of his passing -, he will not lose the greatness of his founding mask, nor the apical role, nor the silent talent, now in the invisible and never.
In addition to Di Meo, three other Bolognese authors were hiding behind the name of the collective Luther Blissett, then Wu Ming: Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga and Federico Guglielmi. Among the novels of the collective published by Einaudi with the collaboration of Luca Di Meo are 54 (2002), in which three stories set in 1954 intertwine; Manituana (2007), whose action takes place in 1775, at the time of the Indian wars fought by the Iroquois nation; Altai (2009), narration set between 1569 and 1571 which takes up some characters already appeared in Q.
Greetings from the Wu Ming
The announcement of Luca Di Meo’s death, which took place on Sunday 30 July, was released by the Wu Ming collective, of which he had been a member. In the second half of the nineties – the collective recalls – Luca was, among other things, Luther Blissett whose name was legion. At that time we wrote the novel that would change our lives. In the year 2000, we founded Wu Ming. He left the collective eight years later. In the meantime – writes Wu Ming again – we had lost sight of each other, and found each other again, and we would lose each other and meet again. Every now and then we did the reunion, like any self-respecting band.
July 31, 2023 (change July 31, 2023 | 21:39)
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