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Parole e immagini: Eight Contemporary Italian Writers
Alessandro Baricco
Key features
• Musical development: style, structure of novels, language used, onomatopoeia
• Humanistic‐philosophical approach: seeking truth, meaning of life, focus on human experience
• Experimental mix of genres, languages, media: writing, music, cinema
Bio notes
Born in Turin in 1958 Studies philosophy and music (piano)Music criticism: Il genio in fuga (1988)
Hegel's Soul and the Cows of Wisconsin (1992)
1991 first novel Castelli di Rabbia (Lands of Glass), shortlisted for Campiello award. Critics and readers’ strong reaction: love or hate ‐ never indifferentTV talk shows about opera and literature: popularityReviews for prestigious newspapers: Barnum 1995 and 1998
Bio notes
1993 Oceano mare (Ocean Sea)Viareggio award
1994 Novecento (Novecento: Pianist) 1995 founding Scuola di scrittura Holden, creative writing school in Turin1996 Seta (Silk)1998 City, experimental novel set in contemporary USA, lyrical and impressionistic
1998 ‐ TV show Totem
Bio notes: more works
2002 Senza Sangue (Without Blood), short novel about war and the tormentor/victim relationship
2004 Omero, Iliade (An Iliad), re‐interpreting the epic poem, at the same time a novel and a drama adaptation
2005 Questa storia, a celebration of the car, the protagonist tries to give meaning to life by creating the perfect race circuit, symbol of balanced existence
2009 Emmaus adolescence, faith, transgression
Bio notes: more works
2011 Mr Gwyn‐ a successful writer gives up writing books, he will end up using words to paint portraits
2012 Tre volte all’alba three encounters where suffering and compassion have unexpected twists
2014 Smith & Wesson set at Niagara Falls, about a woman who wants to jump off the falls in a barrell
2015 La sposa giovane a young woman dealing with the undisputable rules of her husband’s family
Not only a novelist...
• screenplayer• film director: Lezione Ventuno• TV presenter • literary critic, lecturer, instructor• analyst of social, cultural and intellectual change in postmodern society and globalization: – Next (2002)– I Barbari (2007)
OCEANO MAREThe Almayer inn is right on the seashore: here the characters meet while searching for their true self
They all have unlikely stories:1. Prof Bartleboom, wants to find where the sea
ends 2. Plasson, the painter who only uses sea water
to paint3. Elisewin, young woman afraid of everything
and everyone4. Father Pluche, her useless mentor 5. Ann Deverià, gorgeous woman, was sent there
by her husband to forget her lover6. Thomas/Adams, a gloomy avanger 7. Mysterious man in the Seventh room
OCEANO MAREIn the womb of the seaSome time before, in the middle of the ocean, the shipwreck of a French frigate leaves 147 persons on a life raft: they experienced pain and horror for long daysMysteriously the survivals’ destinies cross at locanda Almayer
Myth of the ocean: the sea is the protagonistEternally changing, but always the same: symbol of undetermined, elusive realityLife is a continuous stream of waves: creation and destruction
OCEANO MAREStructure of the novel
Libro Primo La locanda Almayer
Introducing characters, their stories interlacing upon arrival at the inn
Libro secondoIl ventre del mareTale of the shipwreck, the sailors’ horror on the raft
Libro terzoI canti del ritorno
Characters eventually meet: by discovering the sea they find their truth
SETA • 1861 France • Hervé Joncour, a silkworm merchant travels to Japan to get new supply from Hara Kei, an enigmatic nobleman who offers his friendship
• The journey to Japan impresses vivid memories on him, particularly Hara Kei’s beautiful young concubine who fascinates him, longing for love
• He travels again to Japan but finds civil war and can’t find neither the eggs nor the girl
• The only real clues are love messages in Japanese
SETA
• Short novel whose texture is weightless and impalpable like silk: made of allusions, gazes, unsaid words, memories, feelings, rather than facts
• Two contrasting worlds: – real, material, business/unreal, exotic, evanescent
– his French wife / dreamed girl => unexpected revelation
SILK
2007 film by François Girard
Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE7gFnuYPHw
NOVECENTO: PIANISTNovecento is a talented pianist living on a cruise ship, the ocean liner SS Virginian. He has never got off the ship, but has seen the world coming on the linerHis fame as pianist is widespread –so much that the great musician Jelly Roll Morton decides to get on board only to challenge Novecento to a piano duel
NOVECENTO
Narrator: Max, a trumpet player who becomes his great friend
Max tries to persuade Novecento to disembark the vessel and have a «normal»life, but in vain: the world is too big for his imagination.
Novecento will not be able to leave the Virginian, even when the vessel is being demolished and sunk offshore.
The Legend of 1900
1998 film by Giuseppe Tornatore, based on Baricco’s Novecento
music by Ennio Morricone
The ocean waltz:Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lBnr9RyISU
The piano duel:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XHYBcxHRDA
Characters
• Surreal, imaginary • Driven by peculiar urges, individual obsessions, unlikely diseases => always in search of their own identity, their real self
• Outlined with impressionists brushes, never fully described
Themes and setting
• Fables, magic stories suspended between reality and imagination, symbolic
• Elusive books: difficult to catch the factual plot, they’re «just interlaced stories»
• Exploring the unconscious and dreamlike dymensions
• Search for identity, for meaning, trying to recover the past, they ask questions and rarely answer
• Symbolic places for this quest: sea, city, far east
Narrative style• Experimental prose • Features of spoken language, but thorough research for highly connotated words
• Wide range of text organization: from very long sentences of interior monolog to broken‐up sentences, predicates without verbs, repetitions, etc
• Interior monolog, free direct speech and thought• Unconventional graphic layout: blank pages, unfinished lines, poetry layout, capital letters, dash, ellipsis...
• Music in prose