From barbarians, capitalism and football, Alessandro Baricco returns to public life

Last January, on the eve of his 64th birthday, the Italian novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, pianist and former music critic Alessandro Baricco, author of notable novels such as Ocean Sea (1993) and Seda (1996), and essays such as The Barbarians. Essay on mutation (2008) and The game (2018), announced on Instagram that a few months ago he had been diagnosed with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia – a type of cancer that is broadly characterized by the uncontrolled increase in white blood cells – and He announced that he would remain distant from public life for a while after undergoing a stem cell transplant.

Three weeks later, on February 14, Baricco returned to the social network to announce that he had finally been able to return home and that the process of recovery and combating the disease would have to be carried out “with patience and discipline.”

It was not until October that the author was able to resume his intercontinental travels. He traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to present a conference called “Reading about time and love” at the Teatro Colón, to settle a commitment made before the pandemic.

The Turin-born writer’s second long trip was to the other side of the world, in another latitude, in another hemisphere, to the Sharjah International Book Fair, in the United Arab Emirates, as the most visible figure of the Italian delegation, Guest of Honor at the 41st edition of the most important publishing meeting in the Arab world.

Baricco en Sharjah

In the discussion entitled “Face to face with Baricco”, moderated by Ida Zilio Grand, director of the Italian Institute of Culture in Abu Dhabi, Baricco made some comments on the technological revolution, globalization and hermeneutics, topics that centrally or peripherally inhabit his work.

With the essay The Barbarians, for example, the Italian author stated from the first decade of this century that, with the explosion of technological tools, in the eyes of the perennial intellectual class, a breeding ground for a new “barbarism” was created. . This work of the Italian is usually interpreted as a militancy against that technological barbarism. However, the author took advantage of the forum to specify:

“I titled the book that way because the intellectual part of my community called this new digital community that began to take shape that way, they thought they were especially stupid, uneducated or barbaric. They called them that, because they did not expect that it would really be a vanguard, a new civility (…) and I wanted to investigate what this civility was about, I wanted to study what was really happening, without prejudice and the arrogance that characterizes us intellectuals, and I remember that it was decisive to investigate how Google worked, because beyond that prejudice, Google was fantastic” (…) and indeed, I realized the beauty of the new way of thinking, Of all the sense that this new way of reading the world had, there was a lot of hope, desire and utopia”.

Twelve years later, he said that he decided to write The Game, where he addresses another technological and communications revolution with tools such as the iPhone, WhatsApp and Bitcoin, another paradigmatic moment between the use of the Internet and human enrichment.

About Eco and football

Later, the interlocutor asked him about his 2002 book, Next: On globalization and the world to come, where Baricco, twenty years ago, questioned whether the globalized world order promised an inevitable paradise or an announced hell. At this distance she was asked: is globalization the enemy? And Baricco replied: “globalization is a great risk”.

The microphone was opened as quickly as possible for those who were present at the conference. There, the series of questions posed to the author diversified, from his opinion on Umberto Eco, through the film adaptations of his own work, to soccer and the trap music genre.

About Umberto Eco, he said: “The name of the rose is a brilliant book, it was twenty years ahead of Italian literature and marked its course. Eco became the language not only of literature, but also of pop music, cinema , comics (…) legitimized other expressive ways, made them official”.

Another reader asked him how it was going to be that an author as refined as he shared the massive passions for soccer, another of the recurring themes of his work. And the author, by the way, a fan of Torino from Serie A, replied:

“Football is fabulous. With the help of football you can better understand the world. In addition, it allows you to have a topic of conversation with anyone, except in the United States.”

baricco at the movies

Two of Baricco’s works have been adapted for the big screen: The Legend of the Pianist in the Ocean, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore and based on the play Novecento, by the Italian author, and Seda, his most popular work, directed by François Girard . In 2008, Baricco himself wrote and directed the music-loving feature film Lesson 21. At the beginning of this year it was announced that the actress and producer Angelina Jolie bought the rights to the novel Without Blood (2003) and she herself will be in charge of directing and starring in it along with two Mexicans: Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir.

ricardo.quiroga@eleconomista.mx