“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“…and then I held in my hand a story that was no longer true.”
The “Re-Verso” Fridays are dedicated to little gems from a few years ago; this time we want to highlight a more recent one: “The shadow of the volcano” by Marco Rossari. Not a rediscovery therefore, for some, we hope, a new happy meeting.
Reading this book was a summer. Not a summer of beers and fluttering flowered dresses, no, rather of heat dripping down your neck, fear of dying, fear of not dying, eyes fogged by the heat, even the pages sweaty, a dull pain all over your chest but , above all, to the heart. The heart. “The heart is a mystery” – “literature is a mystery”. There is actually something more than simply understanding why we went through it. It’s like taking a trip again but with a different companion, the landscapes are familiar and new at the same time, a nostalgia in reverse, for things that haven’t happened yet. It has a lot to do with the way of handling words, as if they were solid objects: everything in this book is a solid ready to melt, and makes reading it a physical experience before a mental or emotional one.
It’s the story of parting ways, with a book in hand. THE book: “Under the Volcano” by Lowry, whose translation was actually edited by the author. You are dying on your feet, everything around you is less real than your memories, you have to work on a book, on the (double) story of another, but it can only be your own, kaleidoscopic spiral of existences.
Every step forward in translation is a tiring, muddy step, out and at the bottom of a story that doesn’t know how to end. Yet it must end. It’s already finished. Yes, but how. “When love is gone, where does it go?” Arcade Fire sang… it remains in the humid air of a ghost Milan over which two volcanoes loom, so close, so still, they could only touch by erupting but that moment has already passed.
There are pains that are like earthquakes, they leave cracks in the walls, the rubble is cleared away but the ruins remain; the act of rebuilding requires an imagination which, if you don’t even know why you’re getting out of bed, is really hard to find. Sometimes then the books become vicars of forces that we don’t have, going through them gives us back some piece of us and some piece of that reality that we are unable to decipher.
Rossari wades through a city, a love, a story, the magical border between reality and fiction disarmed like the last of the anti-heroes: a good friend as a squire, a few watermelon Martinis become an unlikely potion, the bicycle a steed to defend . Milan becomes a land of wanderers, the Baracchino an inn for lost and sad, very sad souls. The body and its worries translate the heaviness of thoughts, “alone you have to relearn everything.”
Reading “The Shadow of the Volcano” is a bitter medicine – poison and antidote together – which accompanies us to the end of an end, you will not find the next beginning here. The heart is a mystery, literature is a mystery, the crow on the back, lovesickness, leaving ourselves to get lost, leaving ourselves to find ourselves, finding the words, never finding them: we will always be left with more questions than answers, inexplicably standing, inexplicably alive. And with a book in our hands.
Written by Delis
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Marco Rossari, L’ombra del vulcano, Einaudi, Torino, 2023