After many years of living together, a couple begins to feel that something is cracking. At the beginning they are small signals, moments in which one perceives “the arrival of something that seemed fateful”, which manifest themselves during a holiday in a distant country. Back in the city, the two argue blatantly in a restaurant, to the point of leaving the table without even having eaten. They return to the house but cannot find an explanation. They carry on for a while longer. As the months pass, the love that had bound them fades more and more, the arguments give way to a sort of indifference which slowly leads to the definitive separation. After breaking up, the two still see each other, go out together, and struggle to get used to their new situation. The friends continue to consider them as a single entity, they are embarrassed to explain what happened. Precisely in that period of extreme confusion the man, who works as a writer and translator, receives a proposal for a new assignment from an editor. This is not a proposal like many others: we must face a new translation of an old book, an extreme novel, one of those works in front of which we cannot remain indifferent because they are able to touch the most hidden strings of our soul. That book is Under the volcano, Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece, one of the definitive books of the twentieth century. The man accepts the assignment. By one of those strange coincidences that sometimes seem to be the sign of destiny, as he proceeds with his work he sees the events of the end of his personal story increasingly reflected in the pages of that novel, largely inspired by Lowry’s life. ‘love him. Thus begins a game of echoes and correspondences between Lowry’s life, that of his characters and that of the translator called to give new life to those immortal pages…
Marco Rossari is not only the author of this The shadow of the volcanowe also owe him the new translation of Under the volcano, which Feltrinelli published in 2018. For this reason, it is difficult not to identify him in the figure of the translator grappling with the pages of Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece, at the same time as he has to deal with the rubble that the end of a long relationship of love inevitably leaves behind. Written in the form of a sort of long letter to the woman he loved, The shadow of the volcano mixes life and literature, creating a narrative in which the different levels intertwine in a game of chase where it is no longer clear whether it is fiction that reflects reality or whether the opposite is happening, whether it is not the biographical events that seek a meaning by following in the footsteps of an imaginary story. Here then Lowry’s Mexico is reflected in a semi-deserted summer Milan oppressed by a suffocating heat, in which the protagonist finds himself sinking into alcohol in the company of a friend who is a professional gravedigger, not surprisingly renamed Little Consul. Around him swirls an marginalized humanity made up of drunkards, depressed writers, couples in search of transgression, which Rossari describes with a writing that manages to remain balanced between the melancholic and the humorous, without ever falling into the easy trap of complacency as an end in himself or of the caricature taken to excess. Passionate tale of the end of a love, reflection on the strength of literature and the often overlooked importance of translation, picaresque narration of the adventures of a man struggling with his loneliness, autobiographical memory dedicated to an important page of his life: The shadow of the volcano it is a book that manages to be all this and much more and in which, under the apparent calm of the writing, the boiling of passion is strongly perceived.
