READING ITALIAN: FABIO STASSI & ALESSANDRO D'AVENIA

    Fabio Stassi,  La lettrice Scomparsa  (2016)

La Lettrice Scomparsa (The missing reader) is a literary mystery. A book which contains an entire shelf of good books (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, John Fante, Jorge Amado, Luigi Pirandello, Honoré de Balzac, George Simenon among others),  an investigation on fiction and life, a novel wondering how much life and fiction interfere with each other. Can fiction help men and women endure life? Can life, real life, make it to a good book page? Can reading a novel be therapeutic?

Fabio Stassi is a writer I truly appreciate and whom I have already mentioned and reviewed here at FLY HIGH! His latest novels are set in Rome and deal with fragile characters coping with the harshness of reality. They are watched and described through the lens of poetry, music and fiction,  which are Stassi’s solid background.

The protagonist is one of my unlucky colleagues, one who has lost his position after being a temporary teacher in several different schools for years. Now middle-aged and unemployed, Vince Corso has to reinvent himself and to find a way to survive.  Bibliotherapy is the first thing that comes to his mind: as a teacher of literature and a book lover, book counseling is an activity he thinks he can be successful at.

THE ONLY THING WORTH SAYING: WHAT ONE FEELS - FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF TO FABIO STASSI.

“Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.” 

I love this quote from Mrs Dalloway and day after day Woolf's melancholic heroine becomes dearer to my heart.  Mrs Dalloway's suggestion of saying what one feels simply and plain  is something I can agree with. Not an easy task, though. To reveal one's own feelings makes a person fragile but,  if you think twice, it makes a person stronger as well. 

Cleverness may help you look stronger, but it may be silly on certain occasions in life. What ones? Those Woolf calls "moments of being".  It is not your brain nor your cleverness which help you through those moments. It is not a question of sentimentality, but one of honesty and truth. 

I may have become a tiny bit sentimental in my old age, I can't deny it,  and that is something,  I hope,  understandable. However, I think this is the time to say what we feel, because ...  if not now, when? How we feel is important, crucial, vital and we have not much more time to waste in lies and not much more space for regrets. 

I started writing this post after meeting,  for the second time in less than a year, a man who dares to share what he feels, not only what he thinks: gifted writer and extraordinary man, Fabio Stassi. He is highly communicative,  grounded and self-deprecative, smiling and direct, simple and astonishingly deep. 
Second meeting and second epiphany: this man and his words can make my heart melt and my brain  work out a flow of thoughts quite like ... fireworks. So many inputs that my mind's reaction is an explosion of ideas and feelings. You see?  I'm just telling you what I felt, the only thing worth saying.  

So what did Fabio Stassi say that was so thought - provoking and emotionally strong? He discussed his book, Come un respiro interrotto, with an audience of readers in a town not distant from mine and I was there with friends. He managed to surprise me with the analysis of themes, motifs and ideas which were different from the ones we had discussed when I happened to listen to him for the first time last summer. 

WRITERS & ACTORS - A HALF SERIOUS, HALF BORING REFLECTION ON WHY I AM FASCINATED BY THEM

Richard Armitage as John Proctor in The Crucible

There are two kinds of people I am particularly fascinated by, writers and actors. Not for the glamour surrounding them. In fact, I'm not interested in the extremely popular ones, the very famous. Honestly, I'm more attracted to their jobs, than to their popularity or personal life. I consider good acting and good writing the result of meticulous craftsmanship, artistry and, only rarely, art. I'm particularly drawn to these two categories of people, widely known or not,  since their professions are somewhat magical to me. 
They've got the power to create life, to give life through words.

I know actors use their whole bodies, so , let's say, mostly through words. Most of an actor's job is based on words, and they are very often essential to the achievement of the main goal: a successful performance. 

Meeting author Fabio Stassi 

Writers and actors create life through words, they give life to characters, and characters do not only represent people, they are people once the actors lend them their bodies and voices.

I love to think  that , more than stories, actors and writers create personae (persons in Latin, characters in English)  and they,  the characters, interacting, contribute their story. They are not mere fiction, they are not unreal. They live,  and they live on long in certain cases,  in our minds and hearts. Longer than the human being who created them. 

As for actors, once they are in a movie, for instance,  they never actually die. The go on living in their characters, in those frames. They go on giving them life and voice. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see ... in Shakespeare's words.

FIERAMENTE IL LIBRO - BOOKS & WRITERS, A LITERARY FESTIVAL IN MY HOMETOWN

Books and writers have always fascinated me since I was a child, as soon as I could  read and write. These days I'm experiencing a full immersion of meetings with writers and discussions  of  books which makes me proud and happy.  The atmosphere is rather familiar and intimate, the location stunning and the people I met interesting or even inspiring. Nothing of the speculation over literature, culture and publishing we see in other literary festivals. 

Fieramente il libro is an event at its second edition in my home town, among the organizers two dear friends of mine, whom I must thank for the energy and the enthusiasm they put in everything they do  and, of course, for inviting me to be part of the event as a member of the reading jury. I've read the 3  books finalists in the Narrative section and tomorrow I'll have to choose the one I liked best.

Yesterday TrainDogs and Fabio Palombo gave start to a weekend of special encounters: beautiful words and awesome music in a show called, Abracadabra. Fabio Palombo read his stories of men and women in little less than 11 lines, which he used to post on facebook at firsr. They are an extraordinary example of how words can do magic.