The writer Premio Strega returns to Neri Pozza with «The wave of the harbor», a book that came out for the first time in 2005: a journey to India between autobiography, observation and writing
A boiler does not work in the Roman winter, another broken object that enters the “fault log” with which
Emanuele Trevi orders the world of things that leave himconstantly and inexorably, reaching the classes of the “Major Damages” or the “Concluded Rupture” or, as in this case, of the “Atonement”: “The culmination, the initiatory secret, the deepest and kabbalistic level of meaning of obscure alphabet of breakdowns ».
As the cold invades the house, in the opening of The wave of the port (afterword by Pietro Citati, Neri Pozza, pp. 176, euro 17), re-edited after the release with Laterza in 2005, the images of the devastation of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean of December 26, 2004 continue to pass on TV. When at the end of January he manages to consult «the King of the Boilers», an always busy technicianby now the author is leaving for India, also to see what remains after the disaster: “the Star of Discomfort”, the warning light that signals the failure “testifying the surrender of the boiler to thoughts of inertia, self-forgetfulness” , will wait for him.
It is another world that Trevi finds in Mullur, Kerala, where the tsunami did little damage, a village that overlooks the sea and develops in a forest of palm trees. What should be the first stop on a journey is transformed into a residence for weeks, out of laziness and curiosity, where the damage to be repaired is more personal, but “the prospect of” finding oneself “in a place like India does not it wasn’t even worth considering. If anything, the idea, equally chimerical, of getting completely lost, once and for all, was interesting“. It is the invitation to a poetic diviner between autobiography, observation and writing, a gesture opposite to the dominant fiction of the imagination that Trevi ironically dismantles, and which the author follows with a unique voice in this unusual diary: A dream made in Asiaas the subtitle says.
To reflections on writing and the epic poem Ramayana, alongside the daily life of Mullur where the meeting with Vijesh and Vinosh, brothers of 12 and 11 years, “who won’t let me go for a second”, becomes fundamental. The small couple is the author’s shoulder, between the search for a sandal taken away by the village’s “psychotic sandal-stealing dog”, a theater show, a dinner in which he discovers the misery of the two, saved thanks to the school founded by the Italian Neema, but also their ability to laugh at it. It is a beautiful relationship that makes us think about how well we Westerners are built in a culture that creates prejudice. Trevi does not follow a method, but is like someone who “goes in search of fortuitous suggestions, keys found by chance that fit into the right key, for the melody of coincidences”. These keys may be cultural, like Hokusai’s waves or Nicolas Bouvier’s writings, but the intuition with which he associates them changes the pace. If in the speech he addresses to the students of the school, Trevi says: “I grew up without knowing anything”, keeping it in its possibility and openness is a rare art. It is just one of the fascinating and possible conclusions of a book that touches on many themes, such as the relationship between the unknown and our attempt to shape it with the little language we have, powerless in the face of out-of-scale phenomena, real and imaginary, from the tsunami to the dream of a wave in which the animal world that haunts the author is reflected
May 26, 2022 (change May 26, 2022 | 10:24 am)
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