with the “Corriere” at the “Castelli di rage” kiosk – Corriere.it

Welcome back to Quinnipak, where it all began. Here, in this imaginary city, Alessandro Baricco set his debut novel in 1991 dominated by a bell tower that strikes the hours, “as if these bells cut the night into segments, it is time that is a very sharp blade and dissects eternity”. Castles of rage it later appears in the series “Corriere della Sera” ocean seathe second novel from 1993, which clearly registered Baricco as an original voice – it is not an exaggeration to say unique – in the Italian literary landscape and brought him legions of enthusiastic readers.

But the break with the classic stylistic features of storytelling was already evident in the first novel, which was chosen among the top five of the Campiello Prize and then translated in France (Castles of Wrath), where Baricco is one of the most famous and popular Italian writers and won the Médecis Étranger Prize. An unusual novel from the start, with these three pages of dialogue, a question and answer without an introduction or description. The quick and direct editing suggests a strange vision of the narrative, one Tell stories what will set Baricco apart from his contemporaries. It is the beat of a musical tempo achieved through a fearless use of language (“the breath grazes, rattles, rolls and blinks”), with an exuberant and brash rhetorical arsenal, sometimes of conscious and self-deprecating virtuosity, as when he writes: “It was three in the morning and the city was drowning in the bitumen of its own night.” In the foam of your dreams. In the shit of his own insomnia. Etc”.

Baricco puts all this at the service of a timeless reality (Castles of rage takes place in an indefinite European country of an indefinite nineteenth century) and of unconventional characters who combine their lives with their talents, their visions and their utopias. Dreams are so powerful that they can sometimes replace reality, like that of Mr. Rail, one of the bizarre, crazy, enigmatic, paradoxical protagonists who owns a train even when there is no railway, because “the only true meaning of a train is that man gets on and sees.” world , as he has never seen it before, and he sees more of it at once than he has ever seen in a thousand carriage rides. If this machine now manages to transport a bit of coal or a few cows from one city to another, all the better: But that’s not the important thing.”

Mr. and Mrs. Rail, the orphan Pehnt, who wears a jacket that is too big, and his friend Pekisch, who plays the humanophone and acted like a father to him (“Pehnt is strange,” people said. “It’s life, that is strange,” people said to Pekisch), Old Andersson and Widow Abegg enter and exit the pages as if they were on a stage.

The wonders of technology, the power of imagination and the search for the impossible characterize this sequence of stories that fit together, even if they are sometimes strained by banal reality and everyday life. This is what happens to Pehnt, who, after leaving Quinnipak, becoming an insurer and starting a family, writes to his friend Pekisch: “Who said you really have to live outdoors?Always looking for the impossible and always looking for loopholes to escape reality? Is it really mandatory to be exceptional?

Baricco experiences the work of storytelling as a civic task, convinced that people need stories not only to impart knowledge and knowledge, but precisely to feed themselves, to live. When his writing followed, welcomed, and went through developments and changes over timewho, like Pehnt, grapples with reality, with that sense of wonder, that enchantment that engages writers and readers looking for the “new” in narrative (as well as in essayistic analyzes of the digital revolution). In Barbarianet al The game) is something that Baricco always experienced in the following novels, faithful only to the dictatorship of the stories. “I was born to tell stories,” I couldn’t have done anything else,” he often repeated.

Founding cities (like Quinnipak), giving life to their inhabitants, mapping places, inventing dialogues that subverted literary etiquette, went hand in hand with the search for a syntax with an irregular but lively rhythm and a lexicon with its own precise sonority. He is always guided by the conviction that writing novels is “a domestic, onanistic, moving way of being God,” as he said at the Turin Book Fair last year where he announced his new narrative somersault, the metaphysical western
Abelin which, as he confessed in the podcast created with Matteo Caccia, “is the man that I have become over time”.

Each work costs 7.90 euros. The twelve-volume series

The “Corriere della Sera” initiative continues and offers twelve selected works by Alessandro Baricco (Turin, 1958), including novels, essays, monologues and collections of articles. The series, created with graphic design by XxYstudio, will hit newsstands on March 22nd Castles of rage, the novel with which Baricco debuted in 1991 (each volume for €7.90 plus newspaper costs). It was a novel that was also formally innovative, challenging the literature of the time and highlighting many features of Baricco’s style. To continue, the novel will be available on newsstands March 29th Seta, from 1996, a love and travel story, one of the writer’s great successes, on which the film of the same name by Frenchman François Girard is based. The series continues on April 5th with the provocative essay about the digital revolution The gamepublished by Einaudi in 2018. Fifth volume of the series, on April 12th, one of Baricco’s theater works, the monologue Twentieth centuryfrom 1994, which inspired the 1998 film The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore and starring Tim Roth. Telling the Homeric epic in a narrative that is closer to our culture: that is the idea of ​​the long story Homer, Iliad, which will be available on newsstands April 19. In the following weeks: the novels Without blood (on newsstands April 26), City (3 months), This story (10 days), Smith and Wesson (May 17) and the tetralogy The bodywhich collects the four novels Emmaus, Mr. Gwyn, Three times at dawn e The young bride (on newsstands May 24); Finally, the first historical collection of articles and interventions by Baricco on contemporary society, The new Barnum (31. May)

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