Italian publishing, increasingly in crisis of authors, ideas and even paper, tries to survive itself, since it is constantly short of syntactic oxygen, with self-induced, irregular coughs; extracted, almost liberated, from a homeopathic devotion to the quality of a haggard but tenacious independent workforce.
We are relieved, for example, by the return to the splendor of the Emilian publishing house Diabasis which, founded by the visionary Alessandro Scansani, at the turn of the eighties and nineties enrolled itself at the head of the small emerging publishing house, to the point of being defined by Claudio Magris as one of the most interesting houses on the national scene. After a period of crisis, also due to the death of his parent, Diabasis for some years has been gradually reactivating a well-made narrative strand in which the memory of the glories of the "Al buon corsoero" series resounds and from which you can already extract some very pure nuggets. (conceived, selected and embedded in a propositional logic of re-education to active reading) as “Alchimia Ars Moriendi” by Davide Barilli. A book that, in just under seventy pages, gives us the pleasure of a rebellious narrative figure against prefabricated shelf-scraping schemes. We are sucked into a psychic dimension, positioned in 1540, in which the painter Parmigianino opens for us a passage between life and death, revealing indescribable mechanisms and interactions if not through the construction of a transdimensional, surreal, dreamlike scenario: the Tibetan Orthodox Tantrism. pre-Buddhist (evoked by the naked body burial) is superimposed on a purely allusive Renaissance contextualization in which the fantastic landscape awakens the emotional memory of some sequences of “The sacred mountain”. And of "Santa Sangre".
Gold, which according to alchemy can defeat cellular degeneration, is the archetype of the dream of immortality. And the spasmodic digging of gold as an element necessary for the sublimation of art is a metaphor for it. We knew about Barilli the elegant elzeviri and the novels, subtly riotous like his black curl, stylish like his cigar and unbuttoned shirt. But, in this mini masterpiece of Jodorowsky atmospheres, he bestows a writing of rare abstention, free from aesthetic intrusions, while allowing himself much more than a mannerist brushstroke: each at the strict service of the narrative system, declined on a fluid and modern, free period. from pimps, tricks and standards. Scanned by eurythmic syntax.
