Culture. Eat it
5 March 2018
Now you think: a piano. The keys start. The keys end. You know I’m 88, nobody can care about this. They are not infinite, them. You are infinite, and inside those keys, infinite is the music you can play.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Alessandro Baricco in Novecento.
Baricco with his words composes music for mind journeys.
From the pages of Novecento an extraordinary character emerges, Danny Boodman T. D. Lemon Novecento: abandoned as a child on the transatlantic Virginian he is cared for by sailor Danny Boodman, who after only eight years dies leaving him orphaned for the second time.
The small Novecento, however, have sticking points and these are the Virginian, the sea and the music:
It always happened that at one point one raised his head … and he saw it. It’s a difficult thing to understand. I mean … We were in more than a thousand, on that ship, among rich travelers, and emigrants, and weird people, and we …
After the death of his adoptive father he disappears and for a few days nobody has heard from him. Novecento reappears in the ballroom sitting at the piano: his life begins at that precise moment.
His skill will fascinate passengers so much that they will talk of nothing else on dry land. A legend is born, the legend of the pianist on the ocean.
The words, carefully chosen by the author, play emotions.
Here the music is the one that saves, the one that gives meaning to life even when it does not seem to have it.
The music gave shelter to Novecento who has been able to crawl in space between the notes and give the back to solitude.
Novecento is a book to read aloud to hear what beautiful words sounds like.
Reading time
one night on the Virginian
Ph. Sara Cartelli
© The Eat Culture
Author
Bio:
She is an art historian, optimistic and empathic by nature. She imagines a world where sow kindness enjoying the little things. She's in love with stories since she was a child, for the Eat Culture she eats books and arts. Per aspera ad astra says the only tattoo on her skin. It reminds her that the road that leads to her dreams is not always easy but that she never gives up.
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