Fiction
May 2005
About Astolfo
by P.M. Pasinetti
"In America you lose sight of each other. In fact, you get lost everywhere and not only in sight. Especially us who move frequently between distant places on the planet. But the greater the distance, the more we continue to think of each other when we are alone in the evening.Every now and then we meet according to unexpected coincidences. Magical coincidences according to some, not according to us who consider them the most natural things in this world.That is, either everything is magic or nothing is. "What is the point of asking whether Astolfo is intelligent or not? Like all Astolfi in today's world it has nothing to do with the physima of intelligence, it is something else, it is something secret that emanates waves of its own. [...] Astolfo possesses magic, he has magic". Speaking of Astolfo, a journey around the active inertia, the ambiguous indolence, the guilty innocence of a humanity, sometimes provided with "flat affective encephalogram", depicted between the end of the second and the beginning of the third millennium in what we would biologically identify with the strength of its future: the unconscious and restless youth of its heirs.Astolfo, a child "of staggering beauty and full of vitamins & minerals", is the "Histrionic and brilliant" representative of him, a child "of staggering beauty and full of vitamins & minerals", who gathers in himself mystery and fascination, innocence and wickedness, a fundamental non-will and at the same time a mediocritas aura deprived of Horace's common sense.In the destiny of this child born in the mid-sixties, orphaned of a father, defined as a "swirling visionary" possessing magic - which, not by chance, bears the name of the noble paladin from Ariosto who flew to the moon to recover Orlando's lost wits - in the silhouette of this elusive and charismatic boy facing the door of a new era, glistens in various places a shadow of despair.The vain deeds are narrated by Hugo Alexander Blatt, a cosmopolitan scholar of Hapsburg origin, who feels and pursues Astolfo as a disturbing ghostly presence, an involuntary demiurge and defenceless victim, a permanent engine of actions and passions always evoked with vague detachment, with light and sometimes tragic irony.The universe in which Hugo Blatt and Astolfo move is a world without borders, ensnared by globalisation, without a geographical or cultural centre - "The centre doesn't hold and why should it hold, the centre? Indeed, why should there be a centre?" -, a boundless planet, after all extremely small, in which there is a frantic crowd of mothers, cousins, ex-husbands and lovers, bound by affectionate and at the same time detached relationships, who chaotically cross paths in the four corners of the continents.However, a geographical and emotional centre can be seen in the novel and it is Venice, "magnet city for the world", a natural convergence of latitudes and longitudes, a point of catalysation of movements and thoughts, the only place where some of the characters reach one of their rare certainties, that in this world "to express the truth at least about oneself" is "the only thing to do, to try". "I like to think that reading this novel will make one want to go back to Pier Maria Pasinetti's narrative path, to reopen his novels so unusual and precious, apparently arduous and difficult, in reality so rich in humour and life, so carefree, painful and profound. Because, as with Astolfo's A proposito di Astolfo, behind the ostentation of his own artifice, the relationship between verisimilitude, fiction and reality appears clear and well governed and the adventure of the narrator-girl of words and destinies immediately becomes the adventure of his reader".From the preface by Silvana Tamiozzo Goldmann
