2023-07-11 20:33:25
by IDA BOZZI
The assassination of Kennedy in the novel «Libra» on July 12 with the newspaper. It is the second issue of the series edited by Sandro Veronesi: 27 works (with author’s preface) by the most important contemporary American authors
With one of the most documented and captivating novels on the assassination attempt on John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Libra by Don DeLillo, the new «Americana» series continues, edited by the two-time Strega Prize Sandro Veronesi: today DeLillo’s masterpiece is on the newsstands (ae 8.90 plus the cost of the newspaper), but also the first volume already released last week, the irreverent masterpiece Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (translation by Pier Francesco Paolini) remains on sale. The graphic design of the series is by XxY Studio, and the images all come from The Anonymous Project archive curated by Lee Shulman.
As Veronesi himself explained, each volume of the 27 titles in the series has a preface by a well-known Italian writer: critical overview texts, yes, but also stories of what each of these masterpiece-novels represented on a collective and personal level. DeLillo’s novel (in the splendid translation by Massimo Bocchiola), according to Emanuele Trevi, who signs the preface, is not only the result of a more than ten-year study of papers and documents, but also uncovers a typical aspect of American society of the time and of today, the paranoia: it delves into the personality of Lee Harvey Oswald, the bomber, but also reveals the network of double agents, infiltrators, unsuspected conspirators, in short, “the profound nature of every kind of intrigue”.
“In the destinies of the last 70-80 years – comments Veronesi – it has not been possible not to cross America: it concerns us all, whatever life we have chosen to lead”. Even the generations of the twentieth century had sensed this, explains the editor: two historic anthologies of short stories, which inspired the spirit of the series, had already brought together the great voices of twentieth-century literature, Americana by Elio Vittorini from 1941 and La mia America by Franco Cordelli from 1991, evoked by Veronesi also in the presentation. The titles of this new series, however, collect above all those “giants” who have also faced the new millennium, recording the traumas and fears of the new era, and drawing the literary trends of the 21st century.
For example, a book like Sister, my only love by Joyce Carol Oates (translation by Giuseppe Costigliola, on newsstands July 19), with an afterword by Teresa Ciabatti, is not just a great story inspired by a news story (the murder of a beauty queen), but shows, according to Ciabatti “the ambition of the American middle class to excel”. And she does it by inventing a new way of narrating, a direct take on life, with handwritten inserts, pages of notes, small drawings that seem to be from a child.
It is no coincidence, explains Veronesi, that the great America, the cradle of Pop, loved literature to the point of often making films of it: reading these books one encounters characters and moral temperaments that give us back the entire American imagination at its best: so much so that, as he writes Alessandro Piperno in the preface to La strada di casa by Kent Haruf (on newsstands on July 26, translation by Fabio Cremonesi): «When I read the novel, Clint Eastwood immediately comes to mind».
The images and the graphic project
All the volumes of «Americana», the new series of the «Corriere» edited by Sandro Veronesi, have on the cover the American photographs of The Anonymous Project by the filmmaker Lee Shulman, an archive of private images from all over the world. XxY Studio graphic project.
July 11, 2023 (change July 11, 2023 | 22:14)
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