Jean Echenoz
Lampi

"Only an idiot would get between Ahab and his whale," Gregory House

useless and wishful introduction (as usual)

Lightning flashes in the sky. Particles vibrate, coloring the darkness before settling. A process that repeats until its climax. Lightning strikes everywhere. If you happen to be caught in the middle by mistake, you hurriedly seek shelter. But if you seek them and want to master them, then it's a whole different story.

Gregor not only coveted them but mastered them. And with those flashes, he illuminated the world until he became blinded by it.

"Our successes and our failures are inseparable, just like matter and energy," Nikola Tesla

(I foreshadowed it) now it begins...

Jean Echenoz published “Lightning” in 2010. His fictional account takes us by the hand into the life of Gregor. What a time, folks. In those days, the world was still living in twilight, only small portions were lit by Edison's direct current. And there were wires everywhere over New York, but they were too big, inefficient, and certainly, the current could not be transported over long distances. It all started there. Something was missing, and Gregor arrived with his fixation for electricity. That invented name is simply a useful device to take liberties, to build a biopic fiction around the figure of the scientist Nikola Tesla. The pages turn in one breath; as if it were iced tea in August. And so I wonder why, what's Gianni's secret? Meanwhile, the use of the verb in the present projects us into the action. There are authorial concessions where he occasionally addresses the reader, seeming to read their mind, engaging in dialogue. The language is certainly rich in words, but it's not a show for its own sake. When needed, Echenoz also offers us delicacies in the construction of sentences. But then there's the rest, which is substance. How Echenoz sketches Gregor. And it's the most important part of the trick. The Gregor most likely magnifies, like a lunar binocular, the peculiarities of Nikola Tesla. He becomes a misanthrope, obsessed with numbers divisible by three, pigeons, counting things, but egocentric above all. Are they self-defenses? Partly yes. After all, his imagination is vivid. Feverish thoughts give him no peace. He invents, but it's all in his head, sometimes he then forgets he imagined (as he rarely writes, leaving the heavy task to his collaborators). Except for realizing that he patented the radio (thirteen patents filed), only for it to be... let's say... adopted by Marconi. He's certainly egocentric. After all, he only changed the world with his alternating current and yet wanted to make it even better with other ideas, but its inhabitants were not ready and probably not even up to it. The thing that should surprise in the end about this story is how all the inventions listed in the book are real, how his imagination traveled through time (literally). It leaves one breathless to know he was inventing the internet at least a century earlier. And the fact that he imagined energy free from constraints, without costs, should make him a hero of the highest order.

In the end, Echenoz's masterful construction is dizzying (it starts like AC/DC's 'Thunderstruck') and becomes more and more obsessive, smaller, more intimate, as our hero becomes a victim of both his obsessions and his superpowers, as well as the imagination he theorized but did not conclude (it ends like Radiohead's 'Pyramid Song'... already in the dark recesses of the ocean, where dark spirals are swallowed by the void).

"I am Tesla, and who the hell are you!" (semi-quote)

Ranting epilogue

At the end of the reading, you wonder, but how much of what you read is true? I'm not an expert on Tesla's affairs, but I tried to document myself, reading articles and watching videos on the subject. Despite everything (and it can't be different), I don't have a definitive answer, except for the one derived from common sense that tends to mediate the extremes. Like in other biographical fiction (that "Open" that paints Agassi as a depressed person, him too making a scene on Fazio... oh well... okay, he walks as if he spent a month in prison picking up soap, but it didn't go so badly for him in tennis or life...) there's a tendency to exaggerate the tones... not that he was a moderate one; there's an article reporting Tesla's statements that Einstein's theory of relativity was rubbish, when questioned about it, the German genius sarcastically glossed over with a "if Tesla says so", (followed by a letter of apology from Nikola, reiterating that while the theory is not rubbish, it remains an undemonstrated fake). There are various testimonies that depicted him as a kind person, even humble. It's likely that he actually had quite a character and at times (and with certain people), but especially when entering his sphere of competence, it was better to stay away from him. However, he wasn't just one thing (egocentrism and obsessions), as Echenoz tells us. In any case, we must remember that despite everything, it is not a biography, but a re-reading of Tesla that tends to distort reality just enough to create a strong, almost impressionistic picture that remains alive in the reader's mind. If someone wants to know more, there are various documentations on the matter.

"It was wonderful to discover America, but it would have been even more wonderful to ignore it," Mark Twain

bonus, curiosity

Tesla was friends with several famous people; among them was also writer Mark Twain, who might have dedicated a character to him in his novel “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”. Twain was fascinated by the induction motor and more generally by Tesla's science, even experimenting on his own skin with some of his friend's ideas. After an experiment that was supposed to "recharge" his batteries, he ended up instead unloading in the toilet bowl... he had been stimulated a bit too much. Science is not always an exact thing. Bowie would say.

"If your ideas are a hundred years ahead in the future... what do you do? Rest for the remaining 99?", The Stranger