A few days ago I finished The
Anonymous Novel. Sensing Future Torments by
Alessandro Barbero. Judging by the dedication you weren’t quite sure who to
give it to; the evidence of your indecision plainly on view. Anyhow, a couple
of weeks ago I picked it up and began reading and continued reading helped by
the fact that Leah was overloaded enough for her return journey to Norwich that
the weight of an extra book was 542 grammes too much. And helped by the fact
that this novel was enthralling. It was hard to believe that the writer was not
a Russian – it has such an insider feel to it. Set in Gorbachev’s about to
crumble USSR it manages to tell the story of the Russian attempt to create a
better world, a socialist people’s republic, and the failure of that attempt
through the eyes of a cynical narrator, a chorus, against which ‘his’ cast of
characters, from Moscow to Baku trace the fractures of failure and the
emergence of the forces that will dominate the shift from a brutal socialist
and comically inefficient economy to a brutal market economy plus for added
value the development of the radical Islam that has dominated our news for the
last ten or fifteen years.
It’s a book that marks those of
us lost in anonymity – not famous, not celebrities, not wealthy, not powerful –
and has been published this year in the UK (it was published in Italy in 1998)
by Vagabond Voices based on the Isle of Lewis. Vagabond – a word which we also use – to
define a position that we might or might not occupy at different times, in
different ways – suggests wandering, homeless, beneath the radar, disreputable
even criminal, on the margins, and what about ‘not to be trusted’? At the same
time it is a position chosen by, say, George Orwell (another disreputable Old
Etonian) in his Down and Out in Paris and London. A position which holds that those with power, wealth or celebrity to
defend cannot be trusted, we have to look down and from underneath, from where it’s
mucky, to see what is really going on, or to put it another way, that truth
might well be born homeless, amongst the animals.
A book I’m half way through
reading at the moment is William Fotheringham’s Fallen Angel The Passion of
Fausto Coppi. The story of the great
Italian cyclist who rose to international stardom amidst the wreckage of
post-war Europe, from a desperately poor northern Italian peasant background, to
outrage conservative Catholic opinion, and die young (40). And, yes, there’s
the heroism and the grandeur of the rags to riches story, but there’s also the
messiness, the betrayals, the pettiness, the sheer falleness of our hero who
rides like an angel, with the gods, over the high mountains.
What are those whispered words
and who is whispering?