“The passengers are recognized by the excitement that invades them.”
It’s not narrative, it’s not poetry, at times it’s a real travel story but in verses that alternate with lines and images ready to show the reader what is explained by the words, as if it were possible to grasp them…
It is a journey by sea, from Brindisi to Greece, and – let’s say it better – to ancient Greece, therefore not only a physical journey but also a temporal one: we pass from Greece in 2023 to that of the fifth century BC. in a few steps.
It is the story of a journey and it has all the characteristics of it: there is a departure port and a landing port, there is a pre-established route, someone to look for and adventure companions, only that among them we also find Ovid … yes that Ovid;
The whole spirit of the book, iridescent in form and tone, is dreamy and at times has precisely the same characteristics of a dream: scenes that overlap, which push us beyond the pure reality characterized as usual by the always identical mechanisms that they are already known. There’s more here: the full moon is not only that process according to which the moon is totally darkened and then regenerated, but with Tuena there is another explanation: it is the God Pan who totally possesses Artemis-Selene.
Let’s return to focus on Pan and therefore on the title: the whole company goes in search of the satyr, but the real peculiarity lies in the fact that everyone knows that Pan is dead. So what’s the point of looking for someone who is no longer there? Among these pages we can understand who Pan is and what functions he can perform in our lives.
What is most striking, beyond the narrative nucleus itself, is the encounter with the book… the typical reader of the latter must be ready to accept its particularity, lightly and with a dreamy spirit. Of course, having done classical studies helps to understand and appreciate some passages of the text, compared to those who are completely ignorant of them, but don’t let that discourage you.
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Filippo Tuena, In cerca di Pan, Nottetempo, Milano, 2023