Alessandro Baricco
City

I have always wondered: what makes a writer a great artist? The style? The narrative? The stories they tell? The historical weight? It depends on many things.

If the author in question is Alessandro Baricco, however, the reasons are terribly simpler: advertising, the public's tendency to indulge in a personal culture that requires the least possible effort, and not least his immense cunning.

You can already see it from the first page of this "City": a medley of clichés and platitudes proclaimed as if they were the great truths of life, pseudo-profound aphorisms with a novel-like but smooth style, the perfect form of the great story without the story, pleasing both the post-teenager searching for little phrases to dedicate to her boyfriend (9 out of 10 women will give you a Baricco book, know this) and the pseudo-cultured book lover with a lot of desire to read and very little to commit.

Baricco is a skilled rhetorician with the sensitivity of a butcher. He uses a pompous and solemn style made of endless speeches, reasonings on the absolute, on life and the universe, with which he distracts attention from the "already seen" that reigns in every line he writes. Every character he creates is a container brimming with the typical characteristics of the archetype it represents: the misunderstood genius, the shy but sensitive girl who can understand him, the math professor who goes mad pondering the ultimate truth of things, etc. It’s like listening to one of those albums where the technicality and grandiloquence of the arrangements hide solutions and ideas already tried in other genres for centuries, or watching those reissues of cars where the chassis and engine remain the same but the line of the bodywork is slightly more appealing.

Gould, the protagonist, is a child prodigy: graduated in physics at eleven, he is already in the running for the Nobel. Everyone says he is a genius and expects who knows what, while he just wants to be a normal kid. The usual drama of the child marginalized because too intelligent? Yes, but something is needed to disguise the banal, something unusual. So let's make him keep company with two imaginary friends, and every time he sits on the toilet, instead of indulging in the masturbatory art as every peer of his, he imagines a whole story about a boxer, only in his head (the boxer, the ultimate fighter, symbol of struggle, suffering and physical effort for victory, so similar to him, ah!, what introspection, ah!, what a deep metaphor). There, perfect. At some point, he'll give up everything and run away to pursue his freedom. And the decision will be taken after he kicks a ball for the first time in his life (the apotheosis of the banal, but you should know how much Baricco embellishes on it, you have no idea).

Second example. Shatzy is thirty and is Gould's housekeeper, the only one who understands him. She becomes his housekeeper after they meet in a situation so bizarre that it is meaningless, but described in grand style. And of course, one has to give the idea that these two are really different people, so they must face unusual situations. She would be the classic girl kicked around by life, sensitive and poetic, but since Baricco overdoes it, she turns out to be a logorrheic dissociate beyond all reasonable measure. She expresses herself through endless speeches that hide behind the language of "today's youth who has it all figured out in life and doesn't care about etiquette" only slogans in full Vasco Rossi style (like: "It's a strange thing. When it happens that you see the place where you would be safe, you're always there looking at it from outside. You're never inside. It's your place, but you're never there"), which pretend to comprise who knows what deep reflection on human existence.

Prof. Mondrian Kilroy, instead, who teaches statistics and is a marginal character, at first spends his time researching "curved" objects (huh!?), then elaborates the theory of intellectual honesty, according to which every idea, when expressed in language, loses contact with the initial intuition and becomes rather a weapon every intellectual wields to survive and gain respect within the society in which they live, in a vulgar game of struggle for survival. Oh my, what banality, what do we invent this time? Well, let's make him half-mad, this professor, who speaks passionately, yes, twenty pages of direct discourse in stream of consciousness Joycean style, so that this nonsense is presented as a revealed truth. Excellent. Except for one detail: why would a statistics professor develop a theory on the honesty of ideas instead of teaching statistics? Baricco, can you explain? And why should he do research on curved objects? Baricco, has anyone ever told you that professors are not paid to talk about hot air, that scientists are not quirky pranksters discussing lofty systems and only occasionally saying something that sounds good?

Having said that, the plot is simple: Gould and Shatzy are the special characters, they understand each other because they have a special relationship, they make special conversations, they express themselves in a special way, they make special plans, they even give each other a special kiss, but they do not get together because they have their own special way of being in love. I won’t reveal the ending, it's special too.

In short: the banal, but finely written. And the thing that angers me the most is not the readers who will have the capacity to realize it and take the book for what it is, but the others, the Sunday squanderers of the written word who will swallow all this mountain of exquisitely crafted nonsense and think "ah, how well Baricco writes"—the maximum their critical sense allows them— then they will flock on the net en masse, and they will manage to find some bullshit in the form of a blurb to justify it, like: "it's the expression of modern unease, the desire to escape from this suffocating society and social schemes, to describe the unfathomable depths of the human soul" (true phrases read in enthusiastic reviews found here and there).

But look how strange: the same style of sentences he used to hoodwink them. Coincidence?