“We have already been halfway around the world: so why do we feel like we have never traveled before?”
Paolo Rumiz confirms himself to be, also in this book, the pen of the wandering traveler that we would all like to be. A fluid prose that at times borders on poetry, due to the pool of words in which it invites the reader to immerse themselves.
The text is a reportage of six stories that report various journeys undertaken by the author in Eastern Europe between the 1990s and early 2000s. Stories that are disconnected from each other in time and space, but which manage to stay together in harmony in the book, and indeed seem to have been written for each other. The rediscovery of traveling slowly, without rushing, where we saw the reverberation of another masterpiece of the genre such as “A fortune teller told me” by Tiziano Terzani.
Traveling without taking airplanes and appreciating the weight of distances, the desire to cross the lives of men and territories, which feel close because they are still Europe, but distant because they have been forced to live on the other side of a political border for too long fictional.
Similar to other works by the same author, reading is a pleasure that must be enjoyed so as not to immediately reach the ending. We wrote only one quote, but we could have reported many others equally intense and significant, thanks to the writer’s ability to summarize concepts as ancient as man in short periods.
The writer of this review was lucky enough to have traveled in Eastern Europe in the same period as the author, and we found ourselves in his descriptions, and perhaps even more so, in the nuances of the words used. Different currencies as the kilometers pass, incomprehensible languages that change as soon as you start to memorize a couple of useful phrases, uncontaminated nature.
A very timely book when it came out in the first edition, and which two decades later makes us look with tenderness at who we were, at the unfulfilled expectations of what Europe should have been.
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Paolo Rumiz, È Oriente, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2003