“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“No more bones, no more muscles, no more veins: inside himself Octavio had autumn.”
There are three pages, almost at the beginning of the book, three pages that introduce us to Octavio: it is practically impossible not to want to reread them at least twice. It is the painting of a destiny, nuanced and prophetic, like those paintings that the more you look at them the more hallucinatory details appear, faces hidden in the foliage, incongruous mise en abyme, infernal sabbaths, altered revelations. Octavio is an opaque character, this is important – even when we are granted a glimpse of his thoughts we will never have the feeling of fully understanding them; we can approximate interpretations but it is in this opacity that the story lies, much more than in what actually happens during his very strange journey. The magic circle of the story folds in on itself leaving us with that precious feeling of not having understood everything. It is annoying to always have to bother Byung-chul Han, but it is truly in the unsaid, in the incomprehensible, in the suggestion of the images that the Narration rests, peace to his soul. We are increasingly accustomed to reading to know, to understand, to be able to explain (legitimate), but when we assimilate information and data our brain can, if all goes well, create connections, if all goes badly accumulate them like folders in an archive. When instead we find ourselves immersed in a story like this, where causal connections escape and nature erupts without the weight of meaning, the enchantment remains alive in its ineffability and, navigating by sight in the sea of our emotions, we are forced to create meanings. We must force ourselves to decipher the path to which astonished impressions have led us, we learn to know ourselves in the reflections that the story leaves in us, in the way it modifies our gaze.
At this point you might want to know something about the book.
We start from a small village in Venezuela, born from the plague and a lemon tree. Here Octavio is born and grows up, a strong and vigorous young man, vigorously illiterate (his severed hand always bleeds so as not to betray “a religion that does not require confession”). Octavio meets love and writing, takes one of those risks that only fear can explain and then runs away, starting his journey. Obstacles, encounters, returns. The fulfillment of a destiny. Poetry, poetry everywhere. In every line, in every step. Here too there is magic, the most ancient witchcraft, the one that springs from certain combinations of words, from the musicality of propositions, from the solidity of punctuation, definitive.
“The idea of a new departure took hold of Octavio without anxiety or noise, like an obvious fact.”
Those who read a lot will find in these pages the rare gift of simplicity devoid of banality; those who read little will be able to take a path that will lead them to unknown peoples and unknown landscapes. The so-called “magical realism” is not a genre that satisfies all readers, some might find it cloying or inconclusive, and yet – and yet – when Coleridge spoke to us of suspension of disbelief, didn’t he perhaps want to lead us right here, on this thin border, to the limit of the concept of truth? Let’s test the very human ability to transport ourselves to an elsewhere that we co-construct together with the author, active senses, open heart, ready to receive all the intangible that everyday life sometimes deprives us of: spaceships in our idiosyncratic universe.
After so many lines you will still know nothing about this journey, but we hope that you will want to meet Octavio, the silent giant who learns the language of the world to transform himself into the extraordinary incandescence of time, of life, of narration. We promise you will not be disappointed.
Written by Delis
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Miguel Bonnefoy, Il meraviglioso viaggio di Octavio, 66thand2nd, Roma, 2015
Original edition: Le voyage d’Octavio, Rivages, Paris, 2015