TO
utobiogrammatics by Tommaso Giartosio is an autobiography that appears in a time in which autobiographies have their own force of attraction, but if we think that they have it because of the immediacy, of the fact that in them the path between experience and its narration is more direct than in fictional narrative, here we are faced with a denial. Nothing is immediate in this book, in which every chapter, every page offers games with words, semantic dizziness, qui pro quo. This beautiful volume can be well enjoyed, as long as you play along.
Autobiogrammatics by Tommaso Giartosio is a book so dense and varied, so packed, so rich and immoderate and fat, that it is even difficult to catch its tail. Of course, we are told, it talks about a life, the life of the person who wrote it, told through alphabets and words; it talks precisely about the age of formation and the role that a family and its lexicon had in formation, but it doesn’t just talk about this. It’s instinctive to evoke Family lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, the author also does it, between the lines and even outside the book, in interviews. Giartosio tells how after the release and reading of Natalia Ginzburg’s most famous book, in her family, as in many others from every part of Italy and from every social class, a beautiful notebook was raised as a repository and treasure chest of the lexicon familiar.
It’s certainly about playing, but few things are more necessary, inscribed in the flesh, than playing.
All true, as it is true in reading Autobiogrammatics and then in having read it, we find ourselves listing in our minds the words from the family lexicon of us readers, which are sometimes the same, sometimes different, that happened in our family, deposited and then remained there, those still vital, those almost dissolved (if Tommaso Giartosio and I agree stelaa northern word that fondles every creature, zuca baruca It’s in my family and it’s not in yours.) But the lexicon of Natalia Ginzburg’s book was able to accurately describe that Turin family, its networks of relationships, a world, it was a representative lexicon, a lexicon capable of directly illuminating reality. Here we are in a slightly different world.
I remember a journey within the Campagna Romana project by the group of Roman architects and artists Stalker, it involved walking along a stretch of road which by car took just over a quarter of an hour; it took hours and hours, and the attention was no longer on the starting point and the arrival point, but precisely on the world of things that was in between. In narrating an out-of-place joke in the land of the mafia, in telling about his father’s lexicon, adequate and invisible, about his mother’s multilayered and explosive lexicon, about meeting friends, about the aporias of the alphabet, about the English language, Tommaso Giartosio makes all the same, pay attention to what lies in between the word and its meaning.
What is between the word and its meaning? If you go by car almost nothing, just the sensation of a residue, of a dust, of something that remained first around and then behind, if you go on foot, however, as Giartosio chooses to do, boundless worlds open up before you. The further meanings, the sounds, the graphic effects produce an entire inhabitable galaxy through slips and suggestions, so “salvolima” stops Almost of having to deal with the Sicilian politician and it becomes a joke, takes on a connected and alternative meaning, then slips into its sound and re-emerges illuminating; thus the last word of a verse by Dante ends up indicating the light again, but that which manifests itself in a luminous and unknown boy named Luca; thus the flourishing of obsolete words in the mother’s lexicon tells the whole story of a dead social world that lingers for a moment in the center of the living room, thus dialect words, idioms, reinvigorate, crackling here and there due to the need to sweeten, and we forget easily what they wanted to say while we are enchanted by the accents, the sounds, that smooth, innocent, mischievous air of someone who is hiding something, which reminds us of the Butter Man from Pinocchio; so finally the names of animal species make an entire army of allies swarm.
Right in the heart of the family lies a threat, covered, concealed, pampered, approved from the familiar lexicon.
Giartosio’s other explicit reference should be cited here, The grammar of fantasy by Gianni Rodari, who together and perhaps more than Ginzburg shows us the trail. It’s certainly about playing, but few things are more necessary, inscribed in the flesh, than playing. If this wonderful world that extends between the word and its meaning has manifested itself, freeing the ability to see what is in the volatile and airy stratification of maternal language, recognizing English itself as a terrain removed from its social nature, a there is reason. This book is much more linked to the work of JM Barrie than it explicitly states, if we free ourselves from the labels that have crystallized its meanings and let the story of Peter Pan begin to flow again. Peter Pan, when the window of his mother’s house is now definitively closed, he is no longer a bird and no longer a child, he is a “Between and Between”. We know how Peter became one, but Thomas? The names of animals, the totemic identification with them, were a homeland of choice for him, he was able to inhabit the world that lies between words and their meaning. But what had happened? How had Peter been locked out? or was he hiding? Did he land on the island by fleeing?
Here we enter the most mysterious area of Giartosio’s book. Because right in the heart of the family there is a threat hidden, hidden, coddled, approved from the familiar lexicon. There are two characters in Giartosio’s book who don’t speak, they don’t even seem to have a lexicon, in any case it isn’t recorded, perhaps they aren’t even characters but real black shadows, what he leads And what he looks at. At the table they are one with the others, mother, father and three boys, they also react to thehello paternal, but when the narrator’s gaze lowers a few heads, when the adults return to their distracted little world, then those two manifest themselves. One leads, eh, that does; and the other? the other looks. Is it in an attempt to escape it that one accidentally stumbles into that other boundless world? Or was that world already there and came in handy when it was time to escape? The fact is that the island was torn apart in relation to these two. Their existence raises a series of questions: is the pain felt under blows really worth shouting about, so why is it colored with elements of attraction? Is the one who looks better than the one who leads? And why is it that as soon as you leave home, at school, you find new and continuous incarnations of it?
However, in the meantime the strength manifested itself and manifested itself by fleeing, the door of a closet opened and from there all it took was a leap. Living in the land “Tra e Fra” turned out to be an excellent idea, perhaps this world of ours cannot be seen from there Betterbut without a shadow of a doubt it shows moreover and in another way. You’ve probably already guessed it, Autobiogrammatics it is the story of its author’s poetic vocation, like another work dear to him, Life by Vittorio Alfieri, to whom he dedicated his first book, Double portrait. There is much more in these pages, a road very rich in things to see and listen to, just as the road between A and B is very rich when it is generously crossed and told.
