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Rating: "At the display of affection, there were many signs. That morning the sun was high, and the seven dwarfs were extremely envious as usual, not just of the sun, but also of the winds because there were more of them. They were all flipping through the magazine Casa Dolce Casa, the only magazine for Patisserie Furniture Decoration..." A.B.
Today I want to tell you about this absolute genius of nonsense, of comic irreverence, of literary tightrope walking that corresponds to the name of Alessandro Bergonzoni (born in 1958!)
His is a nonsensical humor, stitched together by the skillful use of words, used, mistreated, distorted, stretched, elasticized, and genetically modified, which serve as the leitmotiv throughout the book "Le balene restino sedute" (published by Garzanti), a dazzling literary debut by this Bolognese author, already awarded, with this work, the Palme D'Or in 1989 at the literary award of the Bordighera Humorous Book Fair.
Humor and pure, hard comedy, unbound by any restrictions of logic and sequence, bringing to the extreme a mad and visionary humor, full of surreal and intelligent inventions, jumping from one theme to another, chasing the glimmer of an idea, a word, a phrase that freely associates with other ideas, phrases, and words without limits and without brakes.
A book whose chapters, for instance, are titled: Violin and violence, Ricotta and Henry VIII, All inside that whore of a horse, It's already Wednesday and I'm not, Willing against unwilling, Boiling the sound of certain eggs, The epic of the stern, etc.
A book, I repeat, overflowing with inventions that, and here is its limit, in the long run, can even become cloying given the difficulty of continuously following these logical/temporal leaps from one sentence to another, which slow down the sense of the whole and exhaust the attention, which in the end, captures a game too often an end in itself.
For this reason, the book comes with the DVD of the show with the same name (which I saw live in Bologna!) that at least amazes us in a different way, offering us an author who also knows how to move and put on a show.
Today, I feel like Alessandro has burnt out, or I even believe he has retired. After all, it would have been truly impossible to continually create and churn out calembours and hilarious quotes like the hundreds collected in this book, which has now become a cult!
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