When I was 54 years old, in the midst of a marriage and vital crisis, August Strindberg published ‘All Alone’ (in Catalan in L ‘Avenç), a story that wanted to be an exploration of the virtues of solitude, especially as a form of reflection. Alone in a guest house without going out almost never or seeing friends, Strindberg wanted to understand the passage of time, “come to terms with yourself and your past.” One of the ways could be through literature, and more specifically through reading Balzac: for 10 years, he explains, had read all 50 volumes of ‘The Human Comedy’ and that gave him “a certain resignation, a submission to fate or providence that redeemed me from the pain of life’s onslaught & rdquor ;. Reading Balzac, it seemed to him that he had lived “another life, longer and richer & rdquor ;, where he got to know 4,000 people —The ones who lived in those novels.
Reading as a personal mirror to understand the passage of time and the onslaught of life is also the engine of ‘Pending Accounts’, the new essay by Vivian Gornick (Sixth floor). In this case, the author rereads and re-reads herself: returning to some works that impacted her by Marguerite Duras, Colette or DH Lawrence, among others, she takes a trip to the past. It’s about understanding how you have changed over the years, if the initial impressions have remained unaltered, if you have aged or the texts have aged. If that good predisposition with which you read then, now it has not turned against you. In fact, the underlying idea is that books are like the river of Heraclitus: You never read the same work because time conditions everything, for better and for worse.
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One of the authors that Vivian Gornick reread is Natalia Ginzburg, and she dedicates a phrase to her that sums up well the constant company that books make: “It is the work of a writer who has often made me love life more & rdquor ;. Gornick speaks above all of the autobiographical Ginzburg, of the personal essays where “he can only work with his self & rdquor ;, and he learns from her that the work takes shape when“ the narrator commits himself not to confession, but to self-analysis & rdquor ;. Likewise, in the novels that he published, Natalia Ginzburg knew how to transfer that look analytical to the behavior of its characters, that is why we read them with a feeling of proximity and authenticity. Often when I get to know an Italian person well – especially if they are of a certain age – I think: “It could be a character from Ginzburg & rdquor ;. It is not that I am obsessed with finding literary profiles, rather the opposite: Ginzburg speaks of ordinary people, with their contradictions, hobbies and selfishness, often defined by the uses and customs of Italian society, and therefore it is not at all exceptional that they make me think about it. In fact, if I review the Ginzburg books that I have read (and reread) over the years – ‘The Words of the Night’, ‘The City and the House’, ‘Family Lexicon’, ‘Dear Miguel’—, I calculate that I must have met about 200 people who lived in those stories.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com