Chiudo la porta e urlo

There are verses by Cesare Pavese that stuck in Paolo Nori’s memory: “Stunned by the world, I reached an age when I threw punches at air and cried to myself.” They stuck with him and made him want to be in that condition. “But who do you think you are?” he would also ask himself when he wanted to write. Paolo Nori’s novels are filled with questions and voices, with statements and their opposites, and also with excellent “chaperones” (such as Akhmatova and Dostoevsky). This time around, he conjures up one of the greatest Italian poets: Raffaello Baldini, the poet who wrote about life’s obsessions in the dialect from Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna. Thus, Baldini’s obsessions melt into Nori’s, characters and events (as many as the densely populated small-town paradise can contain) open the door onto the abyss of existence. Between thrusts and counterthrusts, between “let’s begin” and “let’s continue” that punctuate the rhythm, we learn that Nori’s writing is progressively focused on a character, his own: his being a “dumbass,” his being a “contrarian,” his crying like a Russian, his watching life unfold with every unexpected turn of being in the world.