Vite immaginarie - M. Schwob

I finished reading it a while ago and thought it was worth reading it again before putting down some notes and the book away, un giorno mi sono svegliato con la serena consapevolezza that I am not going to pick it up again anytime soon. So I decided to buy a shelf, so I can put it there while it waits for its time to come.

Notes: I bought the book because the author was flagged as inspiration for Borges and Tabucchi sulla quarta di copertina, and I really like Borges and Tabucchi. One might try and draw a parallel with Le Città Invisibili, but really should not. Similarities with Borges are clear, what I thought is that it would be really hard to learn to write like this - there is clearly a lot of research that went into studying the biographies of the characters, squeezing them and enriching parts of it. Somebody said, more or less, che una persona che è capace di scrivere in venti pagine qualcosa che può essere espresso in venti righe è capace di ogni altra cattiveria, I often think that more than cattiveria it’s incapacità. There is this character in a book by Baricco who is an artist obsessed with the sea and does these two things:

• Puts his cavalletto sul bagnasciuga and paints with sea water, painting the sea with the sea. You read this and it’s like the part in La Grande Bellezza where the holy woman says she eats a lot of roots because roots are important;
• After having written a huge book about the sea every day reviews it trying to have at the end of the day less words than what he began with, with the aim of getting to just one word.

I am trying to say that negative action is especially hard when one tries to do something creative. These considerations of mine would for example fit entirely in twenty words or something, but it would be so much harder to find the right twenty words, as opposed to directly eject from my head to the screen whatever is floating through. I am very impressed with the biographies in this book. They are made to be read out loud.