Alessandro Baricco
Castelli di Rabbia

When you are a child, and you know little about life, you "fall in love with everything."

That's the beauty of it, there aren't many filters.

The brain is like a heart-shaped sponge, it just wants to learn, fall in love, get excited about everything possible.

To give you an idea, consider that my daughter can't wait to wear braces in a few days...

A while ago she was even excited (only to regret it later) about having a cast on her leg (sic).

Perth, a boy friend of an eccentric fellow for whom music was everything, and one day mine too, was thrilled to wear, like a destiny, a jacket twice his size, inside which he would grow, and which one day would help him, but also somewhat force him, to understand the arrival of adulthood.

But that's another story, indeed, it's the story..

In short, you can be "children" in many ways and towards many things, and at all ages.

Usually, you get excited when you need fuel for the race trying to bring the real world closer to the dreamed world, even if you don't yet know its face, like when you are truly children.

When the fuel is about to run out, and you no longer have the childish curiosity pushing you, the race ends, and the distances remain unbridgeable and final.

At that point, the little fuel you have left can still be used to at least try to illuminate it better, to understand and accept that real world.

So you must forgive me if I personally have been a "child," and I don't regret it, towards this Castelli di Rabbia, the first book by Alessandro Baricco, called "the show-off plagiarist" by many of his critics.

And I felt it was mine, of the true child now mostly gone, as well as the adult one, residing in me.

What to say, besides the story of Perth, I still have in my eyes, and in my ears, various episodes from this first novel of his, traversed by a single main "theme."

Thus, there are the two fanfares that meet along the main street of the imaginary town of Quinnipak, gripped by the people's enthusiasm, just to meet in the center, magically, in a definitive and longed-for explosive musical embrace.

Thus, in a unique and unforgettable moment, awaited a whole year.

A magical crossroads of destinies in procession.

And the trombone player (or something similar) who dies from emotion just a moment before it all happens.

The brilliant architect Hector Horeau who sees his wonderful crystal palace torn down, just a moment before it becomes reality, by the envy of the financiers towards those who believe in dreams.

The novel, despite its variety and multiplicity of stories (told with a citationalism never self-serving and never self-congratulatory, as Baricco does lately inexorably), always and only speaks of one thing.

The Rage against the destiny of so many dreams that, like sandcastles (hence the title), are knocked down by the often blind sea, which is life.

Buzzati, Marquez, Celine, ... George Berkeley (for the omnipresent Idealism in his early novels) .... and my tinnitus, stand there as godfathers, respectively of Baricco's novel and this my "review."

Last night, as I listened to my left ear hissing, the character of Pekisch came to mind (I hope it's spelled this way..), the musician who saw and heard music everywhere, friend of a boy, who built instruments, like the "umanofono," unimaginable to all other human beings.

Who believed in a musician God.

Who one day reaches death at the end of a long crescendo of melodies chasing each other in his ears, only for him, like my tinnitus for me, with no one in the real world actually playing them, absolutely private music.

Rest in peace, Pekisch.

May "the earth be light upon you, as you were to her."