Thursday 14 December, 6pm
Sette finestre by Enrico Palandri (Bompiani)
The author in conversation with Beatrice Sica (University College London)
Critics and poets side by side, philosophy and poetry, to love people and to love words. Blake and #MeToo, Joyce according to Virginia Woolf and Svevo’s Zeno, Socraets and Montale, the Homeric gods, Catullus, Dante, Freud: a writer’s journey through the pages he has loved and his own intuitions, through the filter of life. Same as Stanley looking for the source of the Nile – not to explain, but to keep looking. Because “when we write or read, we, like Stanley, try and retrace the footsteps of the person or persons who got lost while looking for the source of the Nile. The explorers who penetrated the jungle are our readings. The search is the poetic world”. And also: “We were following Livingstone but we were soon doubting that he ever came this way. We begin to feel the dangers he incurred, the price he paid, we begin to fear that we ourselves will get hurt. Then again, literature always hurts. We knew this but here we are, and there’s no going back. Are we reading? Translating? Writing? We hope we will manage to smile to each other…”
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Enrico Palandri (Venice, 1956)’s debut novel, Boccalone, in 1979, gave him notoriety at a young age. As well as verses, essays and short stories, between 1986 and 2010 he wrote six novels. Bompiani has recently published Le condizioni atmosferiche (2020), and previously L’inventore di se stesso (2017) and Verso l’Infinito (2019).
Image credit: Jenny Condie