E 'paradoxical, but the best pages on Italy Risorgimento wrote them a Frenchman, though of Italian descent. We refer to the quartet dell'Ussaro Jean Giono. In this article a few years ago of Peter Cited Wind off moves on to the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy. We will do so in nostro, parlando soprattutto di libri e film.
Pietro Citati
Jean Giono. Gli ultimi eroi
Quali sono le sorprese della lettura. Avevo letto quarant' anni fa i quattro "romanzi dell' Ussaro" di Jean Giono; e ne conservavo un bel ricordo. Li ho ripresi in mano nei mesi passati, con un entusiasmo che non avrei immaginato. Mentre io invecchiavo, i libri crescevano, si arricchivano, si complicavano, acquistavano bellezza e profondità. Vorrei che i lettori italiani ripetessero la mia esperienza: Angelo, L' ussaro sul tetto, Una pazza felicità, Morte di un personaggio offer all the pleasures of the novel as possible, happiness, fullness of life, movement, freedom and vastness of breath, and case law, fun, light, color, highlights, game ... The four books are the wreck of a huge project narrative, which should have led Angelo Pardi and his family from 1840 to World War II. Jean Giono wrote over Angelo 1945: The 'Horseman on the Roof (Bloomsbury Publishing, translated by Liliana Magrini, note Daria Galateri, pp. 490, pounds 32,000) between 1947 and 1951: A mad happiness (Bloomsbury Publishing, translated by Maria Dazzi, note Daria Galateri, pp. 460, pounds 30,000) between 1953 and 1957, and died of 'a character (Passigli, translated by Maria Elisa Della Casa, pp. 128, 20,000 lire), which recounts the events of two generations later, between September 1945 and March 1946. Angelo, the first volume of the quartet, has not yet been translated into Italian, I recommend the wonderful year in the fourth volume of the Oeuvres complètes romanesques of Jonah, which incorporates all the cycle of 'Hussar' (Pléiade, Gallimard, edited by Pierre Citron, Robert Henri Godard and blackmail).
Angelo is a novel underestimated, because the players look at him with eyes of 'Horseman on the roof and they consider it a pastiche Stendhal. It 's a book bright, quick, straight, concentrated, while the others belong to the novels' shadow, the lentezza, alla frantumazione e all' espansione. Nella sua mescolanza di grazia settecentesca e di nostalgia romantica, ha un dono unico. E' pieno di scintillii e di sorprese, di mirabili idee romanzesche (come l' amore di Angelo per la donna-profumo), di estri, di piccoli personaggi, di straordinarie evocazioni d' ambiente (la Francia provinciale della Restaurazione, che eguaglia quella di Barbey d' Aurevilly); e possiede una radiosa perfezione classica, che forse Giono non raggiunse più nelle altre creazioni romanzesche. Angelo Pardi, l' ussaro piemontese, il personaggio che Giono immaginò subito con inarrivabile fortuna, è l' ultimo e più grandioso omaggio, che il nostro secolo abbia innalzato all' eroe romantico: l' hero of Stendhal and Balzac, Dostoevsky and Pushkin. It 's hard to say whether Giono had simply fallen in love with this picture: o thought (as I believe) that Fabrizio del Dongo and Eugene Onegin are our real contemporary protagonists of the immortal mortal modern world.
Like his father, Angelo Pardi is a melancholy suffering from boredom, and he knows he can win only in sparking a passion: love with the woman and the drivers, loving every form of 'love, surrendering to' instinct, outpouring, freeing himself generosity explosive, and almost orgiastic "bleeding". There 's nothing that he detesti più della freddezza, del calcolo, dei "meccanismi d' orologeria", e di quella che egli chiama "l' obesità dello spirito". Nella sua ricerca non c' è limite né misura: è una creatura di fuoco, un cacciatore d' infinito. Egli soffre questa condizione: le sue passioni si ingorgano e lo offuscano: si sente goffo, ridicolo, inesperto; e gli sembra di mancare di naturalezza e di grazia, il dono divino che lui (e Giono) adora sopra ogni cosa. Così, per essere naturale, fa quello che non dovrebbe fare: controlla i suoi gesti e i suoi sentimenti. In realtà, nessuna preoccupazione potrebbe essere più vana. Angelo Pardi possiede una grazia soprannaturale, come la possedevano Fabrizio del Dongo, Onegin and Stavrogin. Once you see the scene of the novel, we electrocution, with its aristocratic elegance, the ease of its hereditary saber, the 'art with which he rides, the' hussar's uniform with his helmet 's gold and pheasant feathers. Love the witty conversation, the beauty of the gesture, the gift of 'look, the frivolity of the' existence. He lives on the surface, with the "heart than skin, always outside himself, and enchants and seduces men and women, with the beauty of the body, the eyes of black velvet, and a 'naivety that could not be more unconscious and wise. Like the Romantics, has only one dream: to be happy. Happiness was born from the body: sustained by imagination, desire, from youth, from ' love of 'unreality, the taste of danger, from fast horse racing: happiness woo the world and turns it into a flash of light. However fantastic and leaves your mind in the future, its real time is this: the 'absolute present. No one is happier than him, but he did not know, and never knows if he really is. So I try in every way and in all places the happiness follows her in the duel, which gives him the cruel pleasure of killing, in the 'art of revolution and war. How it exalts the battle: she only gives him bonheur fou, fun as advance, retreat, charge, fight, to stay 'open, going hungry, pursuing a goal that the escape time. He wants to be a hero, not a mediocre modern fighter, but a hero of the 'Ariosto, Rinaldo and Ruggiero, and desires are law for us, that we see him in a halo Ariosto. We have saved for last the most modern character. The new Fabrizio del Dongo is a stranger, far from all the homelands, the places and ideals, and be lost in the emptiness and bankruptcy.
's Horseman on the Roof is, first, a great book of feelings. How hot is imposed on the world, that "barbaric splendor of the terrible summer" choke the Provence, while Angelo Pardi 's runaway horse through a few years after 1840. "The trees did not give any coolness. Indeed, the foliage of oak and hard mute reflected heat and light. The 'shadow of the forest dazed and oppressed." I rattled white thistles: the heat of the sun as if it were buzzed by a boiler continually trial pack of coal: the olive trees were crackling sparks black silence of their twisted trunks, and opened the sun in the sky of chalk, a chasm of an unprecedented phosphorescence . Everything was dead skeletons of snakes, flies banners, patches of wild pigs and porcupines, trees devoured, carcasses bozzagri. A wealth of sensations, which could not be more dense, is superbly orchestrated by a paranoid, apocalyptic, almost baroque. Soon the heat changes: it becomes rotten, rotting, cholera. The patients are attacked by a species of intoxication: staggering run from all over and crying with anger seem to be taken: the child runs after her mother, her mother runs after her son, the young couple will chase, the city is no longer a field of wild and death. The 'eye of cholera, sunk in' orbit, is surrounded by a livid circle, half covered by the eyelid. The cheeks are bare, his mouth half open, her lips glued to the teeth. Respiration, through the dental arches approach, it becomes soundtrack. The language is soft, a little 'red, covered with a yellowish patina. Patients are thrown into the Rhone, or hang themselves, or rip open his throat with a razor, or cut his wrists with his teeth. The whole of Provence is full of corpses, bits and devoured by dogs, rats and birds: bluish bodies, reduced to skin and bones, her mouth filled with a material similar to rice cooked in milk. Giono explores all the possibilities of disease, death and decay: Bring your imagination to 'extreme' s excitement and fury, as if to fix the Raft of the Medusa by Géricault and the horrors multiply, erasing the penalty marble. We wonder if the cholera, which raged for months about Provence, is a symbol, and if behind it, like behind the plague of the Betrothed, who certainly knew and admired Giono, should be seen a mysterious oltre, una ignota mano di Dio, come una pagina ci fa immaginare. Non lo credo. Il colera è nient' altro che natura, furibonda e stravolta. Ma è accaduto qualcosa di straordinario. Giono aveva sempre affermato, grazie alla forza delle sue metafore, la profonda solidarietà tra l' uomo e la natura; e ora questa solidarietà viene distrutta. Nell' Ussaro sopra il tetto, la natura specialmente animale prepara una atroce congiura contro l' uomo. Gli uccelli assalgono i vivi. Le galline e le api mangiano i cadaveri: i corvi si gettano sui moribondi: i piccioni e le farfalle assorbiscono il fetore dolciastro dei corpi. Perfino gli alberi sembrano partecipare all' ostilità contro l' uomo. Nulla potrebbe essere più atroce. Eppure, mentre affondiamo sempre più nel cuore della putrefazione, siamo assaliti da una specie di felicità musicale, come se la morte emanasse gioia e una spaventosa vitalità. Tutte queste sensazioni grondanti vengono trasformate in un romanzo di avventure.
Le sensazioni continuano a accumularsi e a gonfiarsi: il fondo del libro resta monocromo; eppure a poco a poco siamo trascinati dagli eventi, come se leggessimo La Chartreuse de Parme. Tutto diventa avventura: la traversata di un tetto, la discesa di una scala, l' incontro con un gatto, la descrizione di un ripostiglio, l' esplorazione di una casa. Anche qui Angelo è un eroe cavalleresco, che cerca l' amore; e noi lo inseguiamo di pagina in pagina, appassionati come him, dreaming of adventures as he imagined, challenging and fulfilling that 'unlikely that Giono adores. We share every feeling, every object, every touch of the brush of fascinating and eccentric Giono, and meanwhile, in imitation of Angelo, walk on roofs, towers and mountains, looking at everything from 'high, more and more from' high, as Ariosto and Stendhal, for all things - including cholera and death - can be watched and told from an aerial perspective.
When you begin a mad happiness, Giono had in mind to write the 'last historical novel of nineteenth-century tradition, fusing all models of the past in an unprecedented setting. Many small outline lead us to his models. Now show us La Chartreuse de Parme Stendhal hours Tolstoy's War and Peace: Now L 'Flaubert's Sentimental Education, and now Dumas and Stevenson's Scottish novels. The multiplicity of sources and makes it more colorful and evocative resonances in this beautiful book. Like Tolstoy, Giono read many books on the 1848 and the Italian Risorgimento: documents, ancient remains of the Austrian and Italian, recent publications drew precious details, but eventually they merged, manipulated them, defiled them, shifting the locations and the history of brigandage in the South 'northern Italy. Acquired a unique familiarity with the historical figures: eighty Radetsky, in slippers, which he grew a mustache, seems as close as Kutuzov. But, in general, adopted the method of Stendhal: building character, that he had invented, in times and places of great history, people who do not understand what is happening, in order to see events with fresh eyes and strangers.
As it is Giono, the Risorgimento was shocked Francesco De Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. It is a 'comic opera, with very few air of Verdi and Rossini: theater and nothing' more than theater, and Jonah loves so at no cost would swap it with something more serious. Carlo Alberto intrigues, the Carbonari intrigue, the Austrian intrigue: they are all allies of their enemies and kill their friends: c 'is corruption, betrayal, stupidity, cunning, courage, incompetence, some great passion, a lot of blood shed in the plains, but above all a celebration of tricolor ribbons, plumed hats, twirling his mustache, golden shoulders, cordelline scarlet. Giono loves this 'operetta Italy: its squares, taverns, small theaters and buzzing and smelling the real and fake passion, vanity, the melancholy, the' emphasis, the staging, the whim. When we close the book, we seem to have gone through a huge mess: we do not understand anything we do not know what they have plotted the Liberals, Carlo Alberto, the Austrians, but perhaps the story, not just on the plains of 'Italy is always an inextricable tangle.
How 's Horseman on the Roof, A mad happiness is a journey. In the first book, following and fleeing the cholera el 'Love, Angel had crossed on horseback Provence, and now Angelo left France, runs through Turin and Piedmont, fights in Milan in Five Days, dates back to walking and riding north along Lombardy and Trentino, and then returns, recounts the Lombardy, in Turin, he fled to France ... With wonderful invention, the geographical space becomes a narrative space. In his early dreams, Giono had wanted to emulate the 'Ariosto, Mozart and Stendhal. But in Mad happiness, has not been trace of this dream. There are no bright lines as the rapids of the mind, but a construction of large networks and fragmented, which closely resembles the Scottish novels of Stevenson. The scenes are broken: the narrative proceeds through a thousand little touches balenanti and irrational, infinite random data, evocations almost free, subjects left without fusion, sweepings and broken, but does not stifle the breath of adventure. In the end, Angelo Pardi, the bell 'hussar from the helmet' s gold and pheasant feathers, is disappointed. Of all the hopes, that had spurred the horse race through the streets of history, there remains nothing. Neither revolution nor liberty nor the 'bonheur fou Italy nor the war. "You months ago, he says, I would have killed for my ideas now, if I do kill, it will be my pleasure. "But what pleasure? even personal happiness resists - perhaps the only melancholy, and a song which are not catch the words. Nothing is reached. Everything is failure. "I realize - commented Giono - that almost all my heroes were, in different ways, Captains Ahab."
A mad happiness closes abrupt and rapid: as La Chartreuse de Parme, which casts a final, beautiful tribute. Pardi Angelo returned to Turin, sees his mother killed in a duel cruelly foster-brother, and walking down the road that should lead to France. What accade veramente in queste ultime righe? Angelo raggiungerà la Francia lontana? O le misteriose ombre, che scivolano alle sue spalle di arcata in arcata e gli vengono incontro, uccideranno l' ussaro, che finora era scivolato indenne tra le maglie della storia? E, giunto in Francia, Angelo troverà veramente l' amore di Pauline? Non possiamo rispondere. Una sola cosa è certa. Nei romanzi di Giono, l' amore pieno non può venire rappresentato: subisce una paurosa elusione; o non si compie. L' amore è impossibile, anche se ciò che muove tutti i tre romanzi è appunto il sogno dell' amore impossibile. Angelo, il cacciatore d' infinito, non poteva attendere altro. -
(Da: La repubblica, 13 novembre 1996)
(Da: La repubblica, 13 novembre 1996)
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