Alessandro Baricco: biography and contribution to modern literature

The first time I held a book by Baricco in my hands was the result of chance. A colleague told me about the story of a pianist who lived rocked by the waves of the ocean. At that time, reading fanciful stories was not my favorite. However, I opened the borrowed book and began to read. With a spontaneous and messy prose, it was a monologue that narrated a perfectly spun story. Since then, I have not stopped reading the delights that this author offers us.

For Baricco, writing is an extraordinary pleasure. He says it's one of the things that keep him alive and he'll never stop doing it.His characters of him are not entirely sane and his stories are somewhere between the real and dreamlike .

For his critics he is too jealous of form and unbearably naive. For his followers, a genius of style and theme. Baricco, in any case, has developed a very personal style that places him as a relevant writer within his generation, which decided to break with the Italian literary tradition.

Who is Alessandro Baricco?

Born in 1958 in the city of Turin, his childhood coincided with the so-called Anni di piombo, a period in the seventies where there was great dissatisfaction with the Italian political situation and a war almost broke out civil. Baricco catalogs his hometown as a sad and serious place full of gloomy streets, where light was a privilege, a dream. It was precisely the world of books that helped him to understand life as a mixture of intensities of light and darkness

Although he wrote his first novel at the age of 30, from a very young age he had written very easily.He graduated in Philosophy and also studied music, specializing in the piano. At 19, he left his family and used his facility for letters to work. For ten years he wrote for everything: in newspapers, in editorials, for advertising agencies, for politicians. He even wrote instruction manuals for household appliances.

Thanks to his philosophical studies, she also wrote essays. In fact, the first thing he wrote was an essay on Rossini, Il genio in fuga, where he does a musical theater interpretation of him. He was very interested in this type of writing and it was what he thought he would do when he was older. He also worked as a music critic for the newspaper La Repubblica and La Stampa.

In the nineties, he presented a television program dedicated to poetry (L' amore è un dart). He also created and presented the Pickwick program, a program dedicated to literature, in which both writing and literature were discussed, in order to promote interest in literature.

In the end, she had tried different typologies, butshe had never had the idea of ​​becoming a novelist(at least, for many years ). At the age of 25, she was asked to write a movie and it was the first time she had written anything fictional. This was the moment where she discovered that writing fiction was something else she could do.

A genuine literary style

Baricco is a true admirer of Salinger and in his prose we can observe some of the traces that come from this North American novelist. His novels oscillate between the real and the dreamlike, always from a very personal conception, marked by a variety of twists and turns. In his work, unreal environments and characters are sometimes represented in incessant search and achievement of desires and dreams, which he uses as vehicles to explore the corners of the human being.

His stories about him are characterized by having a narrator, who, far from judging the characters, adds the surreal component. The narrator presents the characters in a delicate way, creating a certain illusion that they want to be discovered and understood by the reader, who identifies with some of the character's characteristics.

Barrico has managed to develop a personal and unique style that places him among the most important Italian writers of his generation. Specialists classify him as a genius of narrative style and of the great themes of literature.

His international recognition of him proceeded with the publication of the novel Seda (1996), which tells the story of Hervé Joncour, a laconic and gloomy character who is forced to undertake a trip to Asia in looking for an exotic cargo. It is a wise and at the same time agile book about longing.Delicately wrapped in the form of a fable and with contained eroticism, the story is born of the pebrina epidemic. Translated into seventeen languages ​​and with more than 700,000 copies sold, Seda marked its international consecration.

Breaking with Italian tradition

In his novels there is no genealogy linked to Italian literature. This is partly because in the late 1980s and early 1990s a new generation of writers appeared for whom literary tradition was the enemy, something they did not want to inherit.

Baricco himself recounts, in some of his interviews, that they were the first generation to grow up in close contact with television, cinema and music, and therefore, their models were sometimes not strictly literary. For example, one of his references when he was the tennis player John Mcenroe since his way of playing was synonymous with spectacle and fantasy.

Even so, among its referents there were also literary authors, but these came from the other side of the pond, American literature gaining a lot of influence on what they are. For the young Baricco, Salinger was more important than almost all Italian authors. In addition, it should be noted that began to describe themselves as European writers and not typically Italian

Dazzled by American Literature

But, what did North American literature have? What made it so powerful in Baricco's eyes? The style of the North American authors contrasted with the beautiful Italian writing of very elegant and rich phrases.

American novelists were more modern, in particular, because their tradition came in part from the cinema, with which they lived in close contact . A clear example can be seen in Hemingway, author of novels where his dialogues were cinematographic.

His narrative rhythms were much faster, stronger and, at the same time, simpler. While it is true that short sentences are not beautiful in the literary sense, they provide a more hectic and spectacular narrative rhythm. From Salinger he extracts the oral tale, where the narrator of the story does not stop talking and elaborates a whole monologue that brings a lot of sonority to the stories.

On the writer's trade

In 1994, founded the Scuola Holden in Turin, aimed at training writers The idea was to create a school of which Holden Caufield, the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, would never have been expelled. The school has a rather particular way of promoting growth in its students. It is taught with methods, principles and rules that are difficult to find elsewhere.

Living in their own flesh the loneliness that accompanies this job, one of the postulates of the school is to avoid the vision of the writer as a hermit.Writers are also artists, although they are the only ones who build invisible works that no one else can see until they are finished.

If writing a novel is like building an "invisible cathedral", the Holden school seeks to make the writing profession easier, since students gather there to build other "invisible cathedrals". In addition, the teachers, who have already built other “cathedrals”, accompany and guide this construction, making the job of writing more bearable.

Baricco says that writing is like running alone in a stadium full of people The stands are full, on the track, just you and your book. He firmly believes that good coaches are needed to develop this profession. Since in the same way, although we would not understand that a professional athlete was not taught technique, neither can a writer be understood without narrative techniques.

However, many people think that one should not learn to write and there are many teachers who recommend reading to learn.He takes the exact opposite position and adds that those who think that writing cannot be taught do not have a good relationship with it.

Writing is still a craft trade. It is not something of artists inspired by a divine voice. The deepest and most beautiful stories emerge thanks to the synergy of talent and technique.