Alessandro Baricco: “Maybe in 20 years I’ll write the story of a Viennese postman and tell the disease”

“Maybe in twenty years I will write the story of a Viennese postman from 1921 and there will be what I experienced in there, who knows”. Alessandro Baricco tells in an interview with the Republic how his life has changed, after a few months have passed since the announcement of the leukemia and the transplant. He starts from Mantua to present the new essay “La via della narrazione” (Feltrinelli). She tells of his astonishment at the wave of affection received, “a beautiful feeling”. And again: “It’s strange, we go through entire lives, even professionally speaking, without actually knowing what we have unleashed. There are some gifts that this experience has given me: surely one is this”. And the others? “I keep them to myself. It is not the case to talk about them too much but frankly I found it a fantastic experience. I can officially say that I am a very lucky man, because I am here preparing to go to speak in Mantua” .

In the new essay he quotes Lacan, as if writing were a psychoanalytic process. “It is commonplace to think that we only write what we have experienced and censor. In reality we narrate the missing part of us, the one that we have not been able to complete. It is the blank page of our existence that we write, the future. In this sense, the act of narrating is a tao. It is a daily ritual, like yoga, like breathing. It assumes a cure, a slowness, a patience. And you can learn it, just like archery. ”