The cover of "Verderame" (Einaudi 2007) is an old picture of Karel Thole - an old cover of Urania (I say this for the fans of Michael Mari (*))
" Verderame "is a short novel pseudoautobiografico. It takes place in the country house of the grandparents of Michael Mari (Mari pseudo Michele, the better), must be transformed to the narrative by the author and his love for a certain kind of amazing. It takes place in 1969, since then, both the protagonist, Michelin, which the author, Michele Mari, 13 years old.
least one other story by Michele Mari takes place in the same space, "Eurydice had a dog"; But the grandparents' house has a completely different aspect, in that story, they are different narrative needs. The grandparents' house is located at birth ("Verderame"), or to Scalna (in "Eurydice"). Both names, as I understand it, do not exist in Varese, and are almost anagrams of each other.
[I do not think this style will hold dry / easy for all post-AG]
I'm not doing the fleas to the data contained in the autobiographical novel, the fact is that the transformation of the facts through a conscious use of the imagination ( literary, visionary, children) is one of the central points of " Verderame, as well as a leitmotif of the work of Mari.
The story told in " Verderame " is in fact the survey research of the past thirteen Michele Felice, 60 year old farmer, handyman's grandparents' house, semi-literate and lonely, who is losing his memory.
The Felice, a perfect example of Betis benevolent with its "monstrous" (it's a big man with an ugly scar and a large birthmark on his face, and with impunity handling poisonous and beautiful crystals of verdigris for the screws), provides clues Michelino product that already works to help him find the things in his memory fade away (vanish or turn into fantastic belief, bordering on dementia).
In a sense, "Verderame " is a thriller, as noted by Stefano Giovanardi (I think) on the Republic a week ago.
The progressive revelation of Felix are true to the fantasy of sorcery Michelino, already madly in love with the worlds of Stevenson, Melville, Hoffmann, Poe. And also the source of these revelations - the "monster" Happy - and the language with which they are told - a Lombard dialect rural, narrow but understandable - to give those secrets unveiled a further aura of myth.
Michelin is also the narrator of " Verderame," but it often emerges as the voice adult who remembers and recounts the events, namely the pseudo Michele Mari. In one of these points the true storyteller speaks of " my stubbornness to stay young and never grow up, I want it now let alone at age thirteen and a half ... "
It is in this dual identity and the latent patologicità the cornerstone upon which to be set " Verderame "but the two doubles that are perceived in the narrative voice is not the 13 year old and the pseudo Michelino Michele Mari adult, but the child-adult and imaginative dreamer and his alter ego which he developed with rational logic and concreteness his investigation by looking to discern what is real and what is fantastic in the words of Felix.
This duality between imagination and reality recurs in other works of Mari: it is found in several types of "All the iron Eiffel Tower", starting with the main character, Walter Benjamin, is the source of conflict in adolescent Giacomo Leopardi " I came full of anxiety to gaze " - that leads to a conflict " monstrous and fantastic disease, lycanthropy, is embodied, that duality in the characters of Captain Torquemada, immobilized by gangrene, and Second, I mention, cruelly and stupidly materialistic, and even in " Swallows on wire " another pseudo Michele Mari narrator has two faces, one of which is marked by a morbid, pathological jealousy and visionary. In
" Verderame " the explicit double figures are more of one: the same Felice itself at the same time the farmer and the concrete and pragmatic "madman" who has built a world populated by terrifying entity (the Great Rabbit, the voices of the French buried in the garden, the "snails French "than those sent to spy Felix, chthonic presences in the basement). For Felix, also, there are people who have a double who is dormant and buried one of those people is the grandfather of Michelin, which has twice replaced the "grandfather of the first" for years, but also el Michelin confesses Felix has a double "dead" that could at one time or another take over and replace the Michelino who is a friend of Felix.
This topos of Doppelgänger (in respect of which lacks Michelino not remember the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers ") is accompanied, in the books of Mari, than the disease: Felice has a degenerative mental illness, as was said, even the characters from other works of Mari that I have cited all of the diseases, real or fantastic. And in "Eurydice had a dog," the story unfolds on the change marked by illness and hospitalization of Flora: Michele, both linked to its neighbor and his dog Taboo, you decide never to visit her in hospital, almost afraid to see broken the spell which saw in rural and Flora in her home country, until Flora died and Taboo there is no news: and the guilt of the protagonist is a boulder.
Returning to " Verderame and reflect, in common with other works of Mari, it should be noted that the 13 year old Michelino is the only character, including those fought in the duality between reality and imagination, living in perfect balance in the two records, without disease, without conflict. Recalling (Goya) that " the sleep of reason produces monsters " for the boy avid reader of novels, those monsters are very beautiful and seductive, as if for him could tip the aphorism: the monsters are the reason to dream.
Maybe it is in this sense that the pseudo Michele Mari wants to remain a child.
last record for anagrams: in addition to (l) Nasca / Scalna, in " Verderame " there is a passage where the narrator thinks of the mother of Felice ("the man of verdigris ) completely erased from the memories of his son: "... verdigris, sea green, real mother, real shit ... . If there are others, of anagrams, I have not found.
(Ah, I liked the book very much.)
(*) See "The covers of Urania," in "You, bloody children"
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