This is also the case for Nove who starts his story from 1967year of his birth, and from Viggiù, his country of origin:“Mother. Africa clean and lush continental basin fetus. Earth. Neurological, infantile landing and airship. Viggiù. My father.”
Nine reviews year after year his life as a childhis encounters, his affections and his obsessions that intersect with the great events in history, all filtered by the pervasive gaze of television: “One evening with our children we went out the door onto the stairs to laugh at Topo Gigio who had a cold voice and moved slowly like the men who had gone to the moon in Carosello and the thin mustaches of characters from the Mexican village of Speedy Gonzales”. He lingers on the details of those lost Nine years and does so with a prose that alternates lyrical outbursts and affected reflective periodsmixing his narrative voice with the hungry and curious look of a child who also faces pain immersed in fairy-tale plots: “The night my grandfather died on television they showed Pinocchio running away through the stone-filled streets of a town from many centuries ago. Without my grandfather my father my mother knowing four hours before my grandfather’s death Pinocchio entered the Mangiafuoco theater the lifeless puppets called him loudly they told him Pinocchio come with us into the infinite world like they did with my grandfather at night four hours later the angels of the closed stocking cabinet”.
The author’s childhood ends in 1980, with the death of Ian Curtis (“Ian Curtis, when he sang, handed over to the years the decades lost and the decades silent in the province of the empire”).
The final pages of the work traverse the decades of the author’s adult life with rapidity and desperationmixing private life and collective tragedies, Alfredino Rampi, Cannibal Youth, the collapse of the Twin Towers, Taylor Swift and the lockdown, with a questioning of today, “in which everything has become virtual, even the succession of the equinoxes, in the silence of the shootings”. It is a courageous text PulsarThat dare in formwhich moves away from the stereotyped language of much contemporary fiction and brings us back to an author with a never predictable vision of things.
The publishing house Il Saggiatore is also courageous and has not only decided to publish this title but has started it republication of all Nove’s worksstarting from that seminal text which was his debut Woobinda.
