A Few Things I Can Say from Afar About This Novel

Which is titled Anarchic Death, of course. As is evident from the cover.
And that I wrote it imagining myself as another author, Argentinian, from the early twentieth century.
Pre-contemporary, I would say; more than postmodern.
Balthazar Páramo.
A alienonym, I feel like calling it, more than a pseudonym or an eponym: one that allowed me to tell an apocalypse that had already happened through a formal music of syntax.
A music of form exactly as I saw it.

An apocalypse that has already occurred

Why.

It’s as if I had found, in the Library I carry in my head, a novel titled Anarchic Death (I see the shelf, the binding); and then from there, after reading it, fascinated by the style and the author: I had decided to take possession of all the works described in the “Cronology” prepared by its curator.
That equally imagined Roberto Dalcò who I had already met as a poet and a devotee of Bob Dylan when I had used some of his lines for the lanch of a theatrical reading of mine.

A apocalypse that has already occurred; yes. Like in the acted play of Lorenzaccio, or in Pablo Vicario’s remark in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cronaca di una morte annunciata: “it’s as if it had already happened to us.”

And in the end, however, possessed by Páramo’s score and guided by the feigned cares of Roberto Dalcò.

Irony, the final awareness of a laughter once impossible

I simply wrote what I wanted: how I wanted it.
Even though I knew, from the start, that irony could only be a suspended component and often seemingly absent (as a sharper presence, conversely); and to incarnate it, given the premises, only in the final awareness of a laughter that was previously impossible.
A laughter in which absence of irony, precisely, fed on certain folds hidden in the parchment of Rabelais, in some escapes of Giordano Bruno (or Schopenhauer, paradoxically): in the eternal lessons of certain buffooneries in negative of the Don Quixote; in Mercutio — if not exactly in the formal witticisms of Puck or Queen Mab.

I wanted an author who could tell of an apocalypse eternally past and in progress

I wanted, in short, an author who, alien to me as he is human with me, would deem it possible to tell an apocalypse eternally past and in progress (in progress, perhaps) because it is eternally present.
And who, meanwhile, would remind me of the scattered (and lost) ache of certain loves.

The Straight Story and The Seventh Seal; The Tree of Life and The Elephant Man and Brazil: Ghosts in Rome and 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita and A New World and Brigadoon. And The Road.

And that he could fuse the images with the pages of William Butler Yeats and Jorge Luis Borges; Stephen King and Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and James Joyce and Gabriel García Márquez; Robert Graves and Olga Tokarczuk and Jon Kalman Stefánsson and William Shakespeare.
And then the discursive precision of Javier Cercas, the polycentric swagger of Pennac. And the philological rigor of Folena; and Contini reread by Carmelo Bene in a silent dialogue with Carlo Emilio Gadda. Cortázar; and Bolaño.
And Don Quixote together with Don Quixote (naturally).

In Anarchic Death I poured the memory and recollection of every line that has made me fall in love

That is what I wanted and what I asked of Páramo. What then came of it: this, in fact, concerns me.

Which, in the object, is also the incipit of my surname.
A sound.

It is a music; and a game, Anarchic Death.

In which I poured the memory and recollection of every line that has made me fall in love — as I remember it.

The verses of Dante, the tercets beneath the Majesty of Simone Martini, Salgàri; the spiral prose of Bouvard and Pécuchet, the historical genius of The Name of the Rose and of The Betrothed, T. S. Eliot, Orlando, The Hare and Caproni. Pavese and Pasolini. Oscar Wilde.

Nella idea della traslazione (più che della traduzione) per righi di prosa delle loro musiche.
Non parlare, canta: così parla Zarathustra; ed è un po’ quello che ha fatto anche Balthazar Páramo.

Con lo stesso rigore incosciente e infantile di un Joyce che esclama, secondo la leggenda, «ecco, scoppia la guerra: nessuno leggerà il Finnegans».
Del resto – pare l’abbia detto Einstein – tutti sono sicuri che una cosa è impossibile. Finché non arriva uno sprovveduto che non lo sa: e la inventa.
Etimologicamente: la trova. Ci s’imbatte. Ci inciampa da un universo all’altro.
Magari nutrendosi di tutte le musiche che Balthazar Páramo avrebbe potuto ascoltare, mentre scriveva. Per cui il Parsifal di Wagner s’è fuso a Domenico Scarlatti; e a Mozart: e alla musica medievale (che accompagnava per iscritto le navigazioni di San Brandano e il reditus di Rutilio Namaziano che s’intrecciano nel romanzo).
E poi, naturalmente, il tango di Carlos Gardel.

Anarchic Death is a game and a bet

Here it is.
Anarchic Death is a game. And a bet; a roll of the dice that will never abolish chance anyway.
The idea that all the art loved through time can be danced in a music of words. Secret, perhaps; but at the same time universal for anyone who wants to dance it page by page.
The idea that one can fall in love with the dream of another universe; and listen to it until the end.
As something that until it appeared did not exist; and as soon as it is read it feels as if it has existed forever.
At least: since that distant, non-existent yet alive 1937 in which Balthazar Páramo published his novel.
This is what now—if you like—you can read too. In fact. You can read also you. (Whenever you like).

Giordano Meacci
(also in the name and on behalf of his alienonym
Balthazar Páramo)

THE AUTHOR AND THE BOOK – Giordano Meacci was born in Rome in 1971. He has written, among others, The Boar Who Killed Liberty Valance ( finalist for the Strega prize 2016, published by minimum fax), Cittadino cane (Industria & Letteratura, 2022) and Acchiappafantasmi (minimum fax, 2023). With Einaudi he published in 2018 Lui, io, noi together with Dori Ghezzi (long-time partner of Fabrizio De Andrè) and Francesca Serafini; he also contributed to the screenplay of Fabrizio De André – Principe libero (2018).

Anarchica è la morte is his new novel (published by La Nave di Teseo). While a woman walks in the far South of the world, a man, Vasco Natal Montero, waits for her in a strange inn where he lives among ruins, books, paintings and memories. But who is the woman really? And what is the relationship between them?

Their story seems to have already been told in a dream long ago by a rebellious and romantic Argentine poet, Balthazar Páramo, in the 1930s of the 20th century…