Those were the books, my friend
ometimes (it must have happened to you), when we let our minds wander, a memory may appear whose origin we ignore; it entertains us for a while, challenges our ability to remember by showing us even its smallest details, and without us noticing it, it fades away into another memory, perhaps more attractive, perhaps happier, but above all one we can recognise. One of these memories haunts me. It is a clearing in the woods and it is autumn; there is a stone pond in the middle. A fifteen-year-old boy in a blue blazer appears; it could be me as a schoolboy. He hesitates and looks around. He walks around the pond, with its foul water and rotting leaves, and sits down on the edge to gaze at the grey afternoon. But I don’t know what I remember, I don’t know where the image comes from, or who the boy is. The exact repetition and the lack of association with anything I know led me to believe it is from a novel. Others we recognise instantly: the dilapidated stone mansion in the Scottish twilight; the bats coming out of the glass-less windows; the young man banging and kicking at the heavy door that no one comes to open. And I know it is David Balfour of the House of Shaw calling at his uncle’s home, and I relive his fear, his despair.
In the bright morning, the church bell has struck eight o’clock. Angel stops at the top of the hill: the town stretches out at his feet, and on top of it the brick building, big and red, and the mast and the black flag already hoisted: the executioner has finished his work. Angel kneels beside his sister-in-law as if in prayer. I condemn him, again and again: I know he is guilty of Tess Durbeyfield’s fate. In the istance and high up, between two rocky slopes, a tiny fortress shines. The horseman reins in his horse and looks at it; he gulps nervously: it is his first destination in the army. I too see the fortress up there, small and white; I too feel the uneasiness of Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo. As a reader, you may have already noticed that fiction becomes part of ourselves and allows us to live other lives, which become part of our own. The glade and the pond are stubborn, they don’t want to make themselves known; surely when I least expect it, I will find them in some unforgettable novel. It is the mysterious gift of literature: to be able to transform a scene never lived, a face never seen, a verse, into one’s own memory, into an everlasting emotion.
The Tartar steppe
As a lover of books (otherwise you wouldn't be reading this), you must have come across a book that you recognised as the book on page 2 or 3, if not on page 1. If you were that lucky, when you reached the last word and closed it with sadness, and tried to find a prominent place for it among your other books, even if you were not aware of it, you were giving it entry into your secret library, the one hidden among the volumes of the larger library that grows in spite of you.
As a lover of books (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this), you must have come across a book that you recognised as the book on page 2 or 3, if not on page 1. If you were that lucky, when you reached the last word and closed it with sadness, and tried to find a prominent place for it among your other books, even if you were not aware of it, you were giving it entry into your secret library, the one hidden among the volumes of the larger library that grows in spite of you.
For me, one of these books is The Tartar Steppe – El Desierto de los Tártaros or Il deserto dei Tartari if you prefer. Actually, I did not find it; the poet Marcelo Ortale made me find it. He recommended it so enthusiastically in this café in La Plata – Argentina – that you couldn’t help but read it. And it has been there ever since, in my secret library, as if fulfilling its mission to complete me. From time to time, I take it down from the shelf where it stands next to Bradbury and Buchan, and I leaf through its pages with the same emotion I felt when I first read it. I have even dared to read it in Italian, with a dictionary at my side, of course.
In a simple and linear way, Buzzatti tells us about the professional life of Giovanni Drogo, who has recently graduated as a lieutenant. The narrative begins on a key day in his life, just before dawn (the moment, a real find – darkness, gloom, advancing light – of which we will become aware during the course of the story). Moving through the house with the silence of a shadow so as not to wake his mother, who, like every mother, does wake up, Giovanni prepares to leave his home and go to the Bastiani Fortress, his first post. He is overwhelmed by various emotions: the nervousness of leaving the familiar world behind, the pain of separation from his mother, the illusion of a brilliant career on the frontier.
But the destination that awaits him is not what he expected. So, almost as soon as he arrives, he wants to leave, but destiny, which sometimes seems to control our lives, does not want to leave him.
Anyone who knows military life, the barracks, the endless hours, the boredom, can already imagine the routine that soon envelops Giovanni: a routine in which nothing seems to happen and yet events follow one after the other, with no bands to announce them and no applause to celebrate them. But above all, time is passing.
Time pervades everything, actions, facts, men, and you are reminded of it by the obstinate dripping of the well, the regulated pace of the sentries, the changing of the guard and its strict passwords, the footsteps that climb the stairs and run through the corridors, the voices and their decisions; the light that does not rest. And the Tartar Desert.
The desert stretches out in front of the fortress, ahead, like the future, and the eyes of all men are turned towards it. They all hope that from its depths, where sight cannot reach, something will emerge to justify not only their presence there, but their whole lives.
The desert, the physical desert, is, at bottom, time. Buzzatti’s success is precisely to have succeeded in making time become space, and, once made space, desert, not only describable, and thus visible to the reader, but also scannable to the soldiers, and even audible and tangible. And the reader sees, feels, hears, the passing of hours, days, years.
When the decisive moment of his life arrives, we understand that Giovanni Drogo’s destiny is not only his destiny but, with some variations, the destiny of all men, and you feel that you are one of them.
good reads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83017.The_Tartar_Steppe
internet archive (library) https://archive.org/details/tartarsteppe00buzz_0/page/n7/mode/2up
The dark
by Leonid Andréiev
For those of us who are used to browsing Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/), it is no surprise that we occasionally come across authors who fill us with joy, even though we have never heard of them. It is natural: different times, different languages, different cultures, sometimes thousands of kilometres and even political distances hide them from us. On this occasion I came across Leonid Andreyev, who soon ceased to be a complete stranger when I heard Anoushka, a Russian student I had in my class at the time, talk about him with great enthusiasm.
Burning Secret
by Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig is one of those writers I heard praised at home when I was a child, especially by my father, who also recommended several books to me, all of which suited my taste (genetics, perhaps). So, at an early age (maybe twelve, maybe thirteen), I opened the pages of an old, worn and faded book that some daring dog had already read: The Tide of Fortune: Twelve Historical Miniatures (German: Sternstunden der Menschheit). A jewel. And Stefan Zweig was already listed as one of my favourite writers. Over the years I would learn that this author was not only those ‘Miniatures’. I have read several of his works: some more than others, but all to my taste. I recently returned to one of them, downloaded from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45755: Burning Secret, which you may know from the film of the same name (1988), an excellent remake of the 1933 Austrian-German original, with Klaus Maria Brandauer, Faye Dunaway and David Eberts.
Borges – All Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Ever since I had the idea of writing a small article on Borges, I wanted to pick out one of his books: impossible. Borges is all Borges. I don’t know if this difficulty of choice is due to the fact that we both walked the same streets, I don’t know if it is due to the fact that we had acquaintances in common (three times I was offered to meet him and three times I refused, not out of contempt but out of admiration), I don’t know if it is due to the fact that some of his stories are set in the area where I grew up, south of Buenos Aires, although years ago.
The first book I read by Borges was Fictions. I was about thirteen or fourteen and, except for the story The Garden of Forking Paths, I was historically bored; yes, historically bored, because I still remember it. The second reading, I was already twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, was The Aleph, and I became a Borges fan, just as I could be a Real Madrid fan, a Boca Junior fan or a Liverpool Football Club fan. I returned to Fictions: it was a literary miracle. Certainly years and maturity helped me to make this discovery. I suppose my friends began to hate me in silence, because no one could celebrate a birthday without receiving Fictions, The Aleph, Doctor Brodie’s Report or The Book of Sand as a present from me.
Two Stories to history
Olivia Howard Dunbar
It wasn’t long ago that I discovered Olivia Howard Dunbar. I was browsing the net, albeit systematically as I usually do, when the name jumped out at me. I inspected it, opened the online reading version and there it was: The Long Chamber (1914). An absolute unknown author and a title I had never heard of. I read the first lines: ‘There was perhaps no warrant for the vaguely swelling disquiet that possessed me from the moment that, late in the sultry August after noon, there arrived the delayed telegram that announced the immediate coming of Beatrice Vesper.’ ‘…disquiet…’, the central word in the first paragraph, gets to the reader: the author has achieved her goal. And we will be narrated Beatrice Vesper’s experience in that long room. The ‘Long’ of the title, in my opinion, is an excellent choice, because it can be applied both to space and time, as ‘prolonged’, and Beatrice Vesper’s stay, in that room, becomes prolonged, and so her change, which becomes absolute, takes place. Beatrice Vesper’s experience is unique, and the narrative is wonderfully direct. I think it is one of the best stories I have ever read.