2024-03-21 07:44:42
Mondadori publishes a Meridiano which collects the entire corpus of published and unpublished writings by John Williams, an American author who also became very popular in Italy a few years ago with Stoner, a novel originally published in 1965 which today we could place alongside Wim Wenders’ latest film , Perfect Days, being dedicated to the seemingly submissive (resilient?) life of an ordinary man. The boxed set, with an introduction by Francesco Pacifico, collects the author’s four novels already known to the public (Nulla, solo la notte, Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner and Augustus), two collections of verses (The broken landscape and The necessary lie), five stories never translated into Italian and two fragments of the unfinished novel The Sleep of Reason. Williams, born in 1922, who passed away in 1994, is the classic example of an author who was more successful dead than alive. Not completely, though. Augustus, published in the early 1970s, won the 1973 National Book Award, one of the most important literary prizes in the USA. Translated into Italy first by Castelvecchi and then by Fazi, it is worth remembering not only because Roman history enthusiasts abound in our country, but also because it may represent a surprise for those who only know Stoner about Williams. The two novels are in fact poles apart: Stoner tells, in warm and moving tones, the life in a minor key of an obscure university professor, a sort of man without qualities on American soil, more a stoic than a loser; Augustus tells nothing less than the life of Caesar Octavian Augustus, nephew and heir of Julius Caesar, who at the age of 18 gathered enormous power, gradually getting rid of external and internal enemies (even cruelly, as in the case of the “war of Perugia”, which ended with the massacre of the local aristocracy) and becoming, together with his adoptive father, the most famous Roman emperor in history. Experts and scholars of those events – such as Luciano Canfora for example – have stigmatized the inaccuracies contained in the book. Williams for his part expressed himself unequivocally: “According to some sources, a famous Latin historiographer declared that he would have made Pompey win the battle of Pharsalus, if he had asked him to do so in a nice turn of phrase. While I have not been given much freedom, some errors in this book are deliberate.” In short, a full vindication of the liberties that writers take with regard to facts, whether true or presumed. And rightly so, in my opinion: the writer is not a historian, nor even a journalist. For the “normal” reader, however, nothing changes. This polyphonic novel, which tells the life of Augustus through the testimonies of those who knew him, letters, diaries, and so on, is absolutely fascinating. Characters such as the general Marcus Agrippa or the poet Maecenas, or Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt who sided with Mark Antony, one of the triumvirs who shared power with Augustus during the first phase following the killing of Caesar, parade. Or again, like Giulia, daughter of Augustus and thrice married, always for reasons of State, a fascinating, complicated and sensual woman, attracted by the orgiastic cults known in Greece while traveling in the wake of her second husband, Agrippa, who later became the protagonist of the “worldly life ” of Rome and finally involved in an alleged plot against her father. Augustus spoke about her only at the end, in a long letter written to Nicholas of Damascus in August of the year 14 AD, during a last short journey by sea to reach his beloved Capri. But you don’t read the novel for this reason. Rather to see how a 100 percent American writer was able to put himself in the shoes, and in the psyche, of characters so far away from him, in time and space. Certainly further away than Stoner, the mild, unresolved professor who could instead be considered a possible alter-ego of Williams.
2024-03-21 07:44:42