“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“Don’t let anyone convince you that no one is interested in ideas.”
Have you ever seen “Three on the Run”? It’s a 1989 film starring Nick Nolte and Martin Short. Not many people have seen it, but we kept thinking about it while reading. In the film, an absurd trio consisting of a former bank robber just out of prison, a shabby thief who chooses him as a hostage, and his very quiet little daughter face an escape from the law with the most bizarre adventures.
In the book we chose this month, an overweight, bald philosopher with not at all hidden alcoholism problems meets an unfortunate robber who physically holds himself up with scotch tape, and together they decide to cross the south of France engaging in zetetic robbery (in the book, the recurrence of funny words with Z could equally amuse or exasperate you. A few lines at the end will perhaps provide an unexpected key to understanding it). The odd couple pursues their mission in the face of a Corsican investigator who is somewhat reminiscent of Lupin’s Zazà and with the support of an inscrutable and charming deputy bank director
The size of the book is justified by an exaggerated amount of digressions in which ex-girlfriends, philosopher friends lost along the way, the war in Afghanistan and slightly ridiculous and very resentful professor colleagues appear; seasoned with a pinch of academic life in Cambridge and countless bar fights. Are you confused? If at 16 they made you read “The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman”, the first anti-novel in history, perhaps not so much. To appreciate these pages you need a certain attitude: to failed protagonists, to indolence and to the absurd. Even with this toolbox, lovingly cultivated over years of reading, perhaps a hundred pages will be catalogued as avoidable. Alternatively, as unbearable. In short, it is not an easy book to recommend.
The most sincere note of merit undoubtedly goes to the character of Hubert: badly assembled body parts, a “fatal and very fashionable” disease, nothing to lose, more of a philosopher than the official philosopher. A very colorful scene set in a bookstore will make you love it for its picturesque sincerity: “She sells paper glued together, not books”. And rereading the underlinings scattered throughout the pages will reconstruct the thread of an ironic melancholy, an attempt to hold things together even after having set them aside as senseless, a posture in front of life’s events that leaves (enormous) fears behind and welcomes EVERYTHING that comes, no matter how crazy this everything may seem. “The thing that bothers me most is the idea of losing that handful of people with whom I can have a decent conversation. It takes a lifetime to get them. Losing your life is not such a big loss, but losing them is.”
We laughed a lot, however, while recounting some episodes, squeezing out of the sadness a few drops of disenchanted humor, perhaps the mirror of these inconclusive and terrifying years, end-of-millennium syndrome they sang, in which all we can do is turn up the collar of our jackets and proceed in a life that we don’t understand but that, perhaps, will still be able to surprise us: because, after all, there are still things to do.
Written by Delis
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Tibor Fischer, La gang del pensiero, Marcos y Marcos, Milano, 2020
Original edition: The Thought Gang, London, 1994