2023-09-03 14:13:04
by ANDREA CORTELLESSA
The novel (Ponte alle Grazie) by the Strega Prize Emanuele Trevi comes out on Tuesday 5 September, which once again digs into the abyss of the self. This time to penetrate the enigma of the indecipherable parent, psychoanalyst who disappeared in 2011
The magician’s absence does not annul the spell: these words by Emily Dickinson, heard a few nights ago by her Italian medium Silvia Bre, are the most appropriate comment on the new, bewitching, beautiful book by Emanuele Trevi, The Magician’s House (Ponte alle Thank you). The magician, his father Mario, as magnetic as he is elusive psychoanalyst who died in 2011 (the palimpsest of the new book is the conversation between the two, published four years earlier by Castelvecchi with the title Invasioni Controllata), in whose home – after having tried in vain to get rid of it – he recounts the son to have moved: for fun, boredom or an indefinable impulse. Only once he has become the rightful owner of ninety square meters of a horrible torn carpet, and of all the rest, who tells the story understands that, in that place deserted by the physical presence of his father, his spell has far from disappeared. During the night, for example, someone enters it leaving traces of his passage (and thus warning him that he is by no means the owner of his house): unequivocally feminine traces (like a lipstick-stained cigarette butt). The rightful owner sleeps undisturbed: each time, when he wakes up, he marvels at the new psychotic installation left to him by what he takes to define as the Visitor.
The paradox of this disquieting tranquility is a characteristic trait of his. If Mario, probing their mysteries, had the talent to handle the wounded soul of the people who turned to him, the son would be said to have grown up without an unconscious and, above all, without any desire to know himself and to know what people are like. others. With one exception: upon the magician’s death, he decides to penetrate the enigma of that wonderful and mysterious man, as affectionate as he is impenetrable in life. He studies his writings, the notes in the margins of those of his masters (for example Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, a labyrinthine analysis in absentia of a young American woman he has never met, Miss Frank Miller), questions how I King the small and apparently insignificant objects scattered in the folds of that house that make it his father’s museum: what we read is nothing but a sort of catalog raisonné of that interior museum.
Over time, the Visitors multiplied. A sloppy and cheeky South American maid, to whom the writer does not know how to rebel except by inflicting the nickname of Degenerata, fills the house with her indie legends and her proliferating clan ties. Thus began the Peruvian period of the writer (who hasn’t had one?); whose metonymic fruit, however, is the knowledge of the seductive double of the Degenerata: an irresistible semi-prostitute with always sweaty and vanilla-flavored skin, and with the improbable name of Paradisa. Her attraction to her has relatively to do with her sexual desire, and he doesn’t even quite understand what she whispers to him; if anything, it is her natural primacy that attracts him (a bit like the illiterate Faunia, the mysterious spirit-guide of the scholar Coleman Silk in Philip Roth’s Human Stain). The fact is that it will be in the company of Paradisa, under the Great Jet of Water of Lake Geneva (where he goes for a report on Cern and the particle of God that chases you), that he will believe he understands the meaning of his bizarre story. And always Paradisa to describe to him a children’s game in the time of Lima, the hijo del mago: the cueva del mago the dangerous den in which to hide. The son of the magician, who has taken up residence in his house (symbol of conscience, according to Jung), is not his heir but not even his usurper. If anything a parody of his father, an imposter, a bad copy.
That mysterious wisdom of his, in looking deep into the hearts of others, the writer will have to learn to apply it to himself. Over time he becomes convinced that what we write sometimes turns out to be a kind of prediction, a question […] that must wait for the right moment […] so that an answer can be formulated (a bit like the astral picture which, at his birth, the Great Magician Ernst Bernhard, venerable as well as problematic Mario’s teacher, composed for him). The son will have to answer the magician’s questions if he wants to meet himself; because he taught him that what happens twice has a magical and arcane meaning. The mysterious Visitors who leave him incomprehensible messages are the heralds of this truth: of the Soul, with which sooner or later he will have to reunite.
Once again Emanuele Trevi writes an initiatory treatise in the form of a novel of the self, and once again it is striking how his light, conversational and almost humorous tones (for example, the priceless episode in which little Emanuele queues up in the mazes of Venice to his father’s raincoat, always distracted, to finally discover that he had stuck to the wrong trench coat all day: worthy of Italo Svevo!), with apparent lightness they manage to draw, from his existence and from each of us, what we It’s more murky and unwieldy. After all, he dedicated his most beautiful essay (at least among those collected in volume) to initiatory journeys, published by Laterza in 2013 and by Utet two years ago. Here he cites as a perfect example of a modern initiatory journey Andrea or I reunited, a vision in the form of a novel on which Hugo von Hofmannsthal worked for twenty years, without being able to complete it, starting in 1907. Who, after the author’s death, published the fragments it was Heinrich Zimmer: brilliant Indologist son-in-law of the writer but also a close friend of Jung. And in fact that qute – reviewing on these pages the new edition of the text, well edited by Andrea Landolfi for Del Vecchio, in 2019, with the title it is not clear why it changed to Andreas or the Reunited – Trevi associated it with Jungian identification: that is precisely in search of Anima, the feminine principle (longed for in the dreamlike archetype of Romana) that Andreas believes he recognizes, between Friuli and Venice, in a couple of very earthly Spanish ladies, the lady Maria and the cocotte Mariquita (who knows that making her peruviana is not a tribute to Pantaleon and the visitors, a 1973 novel by Mario Vargas Llosa in which the visitors are the prostitutes sent to cheer up an expeditionary force in the Amazon: it would not surprise anyone who was pleased to report, in Something Written, the nice nickname of slut given to him by crazy Laura Betti…). If this, as I believe, is the initiatory matrix of the House of the magician, the Degenerata attenuates the demonic traits of the perfidious servant Gotthelf but the archetype of Mario is easily recognizable in the figure of Sacramozo (or Sagredo) by Hofmannsthal, who believes in the dual (Interpretatio duplex is called the decisive essay by Mario Trevi) and knows that true poetry is the arcanum that brings us together to life and isolates us from life. Mario is isolated, a deserter from the human consortium who, like no one, however, knows how to lead his suffering Visitors to reunite with themselves (this is Andreas’ underlying thought).
The only important thing in this type of written portraits is to look for the right distance, which is the style of uniqueness, we read at a certain point in Two Lives. Where the uniqueness certainly does not refer to the portrait in the round: vice versa, it is precisely the partiality that fascinates in those of Trevi (as in his masterpiece, Without verse). Not only because the portraitist (as par excellence in the Magician’s House is personally involved – his, that is, one of the two lives at stake – but because in each of these characters there is always an unsaid, a blind area (as it was called is, not surprisingly, the portrait of Trevi himself written by his ex, Chiara Gamberale). Soul, indeed.
Never as on this occasion has Emanuele Trevi accepted the challenge, in the form of a pretense, to probe the abyss of the self, and thus meet his destiny. When one fine day a mosaic of vivid colored reflections like enamelled miniatures appears to him in a veil of lustral water, he will finally be able to recognize it. According to Pasolini’s Tot, in What are the clouds?, the truth is that thing which one must not name, because as soon as you name it, it is no longer there. The writer does not need to pronounce it because he knows that whoever has read it, within himself, has come to find it.
The tour of presentations throughout Italy (and also online)
the program of presentations of the new novel by Emanuele Trevi, The house of the magician (to be released on Tuesday 5 September from Ponte alle Grazie) is rich. The writer will speak on Saturday 9 September (7.15 pm) in Mantua, on the occasion of the Festivaletteratura, in dialogue with Francesco Piccolo (also a Strega prize), for the meeting entitled Things from the past exist. The day after, again in Mantua, Trevi will take part at noon in the event The Sacred Fire of Writing with Christian Mascheroni. Digital presentation on Monday 11th at 6pm: the writer will talk to Ilaria Gaspari from the Facebook profile of Il libraio, while Tuesday 12th he will be in Rome, at Spazio Sette (6.30pm) with Vittorio Lingiardi and Paolo Di Paolo. The appointment in Milan for Thursday 14 at 18 at the Feltrinelli in piazza Piemonte with Antonio Scurati (another Strega prize); Friday 15th in Riva del Garda (Trento) for the Intermittence Festival (6pm, with Emiliano Visconti). On Sunday 17th the author will be a guest at the Pordenonelegge review (3pm): Alberto Garlini will be with him on stage, while on Saturday 23rd at 6pm Trevi will arrive in Narni (Terni) for the Umbria Green Festival: conversation with Andrea Cortellessa. Finally, on Sunday 1st October, Trevi is expected at the Torino Spiritualit festival (4.30 pm) where he will discuss with Massimo Mantellini and Chiara Alessi.
The author and the volume
Emanuele Trevi (Rome, 1964) son of the Jungian psychoanalyst Mario Trevi (1924-2011), a figure to whom La casa del mago is dedicated. Writer and critic, Trevi made his fiction debut with Dogs of Nowhere (Einaudi Stile libero, 2003). With Two lives (Neri Pozza, 2020) he wins the Strega 2021 prize. He collaborates with Corriere e la Lettura. Emanuele Trevi’s novel, La casa del mago, will be released on Tuesday 5 September from Ponte alle Grazie (pp. 252, euro 18). Di Trevi Ponte alle Grazie has also published the novels Something written (2012, finalist at the Strega), Dreams and fairy tales (2019) and a new edition of the essay Musica distante (2012)
September 3, 2023 (change September 3, 2023 | 1:57 pm)
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#magic #magicians #son #time.news