Francesco Biamonti

The impetus to read Biamonti came to me from a poem by Montale: *Riviere*. In this masterpiece, the Ligurian landscape serves as the occasion for memories, for regret, and also for new dreams. And Pietrabruna, too—the village perched between mountains and sea to which the protagonist returns—evokes conflicting emotions: > the hills trembled in contact with the vault of the sky, shaken by a dense, luminous blue. Yet there were lands that turned their backs to the sun, despondent (as a boy they had made him dream). The rays descended from the peaks without touching them. Lands in perpetual yearning . Edoardo is a ship captain who returns to his home, awaiting a new berth. Welcoming him are > landslides clinging to the hillside and olive groves inside luminous chasms... sea light (that) welded itself to the summits, to the ridges, all the way to Pietrabruna : a village always the same, «yet where was life, outside the sabre-slashes of the sky, outside the wind?». Waiting for him, too, is Clara, who for years has been waiting for Edoardo to settle down. Theirs is an unusual love between a rootless man (like so many sailors) and a woman who is only seemingly placid and resigned: > in her sinuous, bony face, of an irregular sweetness, restlessness and reverie harmonized . Clara is the quintessential Ligurian woman, forced to be independent, and remains throughout the novel a mysterious, inscrutable, multifaceted character. Edoardo, on the other hand, is straightforward: behind financial troubles, he conceals the urge to flee. And indeed, he accepts a perilous assignment. He must deliver a cargo of weapons to Bosnia. He finds himself in command of an old tub. Soon enough, the voyage turns out to be a trap, as they lose contact with the shipowner, and upon reaching their destination, Edoardo is forced to seek out the buyers alone, amidst snipers and clashes between rival factions. The Bosnian village may resemble Pietrabruna, yet «the hills with their white ridge were shadow blue where the sun did not strike». And the woman, too, whom he meets and accompanies, could be Clara, but she had «light, distant eyes... the marks of a withered sweetness». Could the Bosnian village, left unnamed, be the inverted mirror of Pietrabruna, and Edoardo’s journey, therefore, have taken place not across geographical space, but within his own soul? It is one interpretation, as the novel remains suspended in a final, hermetic reflection by Edoardo: > in every land lies the seed of death, it is plain to see in broad daylight..... there are bursts of sunlight on hanging lands . Biamonti possesses a markedly lyrical style of writing, better suited to poetry than to prose. When describing the landscapes and figures of his native Liguria, his style often finds a felicitous balance between narrative movement and the quest for words and consonances. The first part of the novel holds a remarkable charm, especially for anyone enamored of Liguria; in the second part, the writer loses momentum and harmony: one senses that he is out of his element. Then again, current events and history are not the author’s true concerns; he is instead entirely devoted to delving into his own world, into the relationship between the luminosity of the landscape and the torments of the conscience. Why read it? It is a splendid read, though one should not expect a compelling narrative plot.

Varì lives in Aùrno, a “dying sandstone village” on the Ligurian coast, near the French border. The olive trees, now old, no longer provide a living, and Varì works as a *passeur*, guiding clandestine migrants into France along mountain trails. In villages steeped in sun and sea salt, amid the wind and the heady fragrance of mimosa, many characters have sought a hiding place, from others and from themselves: an aging Dutch professor, his daughter who takes up with a smuggler, a butterfly collector, a gold prospector. The old peasants, the last inhabitants of these parts, and the newcomers live as if suspended, awaiting love, a different life, death. An old *passeur* is murdered and a young woman loved by Varì, Sabèl, disappears: she has gone to hide on an island near a convent in search of peace and a renewed balance. Was it she who killed the old *passeur* upon discovering she was his daughter? Varì waits for her in vain in his now-deserted village, until he realizes that his destiny is to live and die in hiding: “what life is there on those trails? None.” The subject of the book is presumably the existential angst of modern man, which manifests in solitude and the consciousness of having no future. In truth, however, what captivates about the book is its depiction of a nature that is magical, unreal, unchanged across centuries, and now unraveling. > Aùrno, six houses, had grand flights of terraces, among the rocks... a fountain gurgled all year long.... Aùrno was windy; but the winds, which lashed it, passed over the sea, which tempered them....Aùrno was dead. Luminous on account of the heights, the rocks, and the sun; yet now held in the grip of the lords of darkness . The fundamental merit of the book lies in the landscape, rendered in a style both spare and chromatic, almost like that of a painter contemplating the colors and sensations of nature. The existential anguish of the characters is eclipsed by the pursuit of pictorial effect, and their story remains mysterious, inscrutable, almost metaphysical. Why avoid reading it? To read it with full satisfaction, one would need to be in Liguria, up on those mountains: removed from that context, the story is too slight to be genuinely compelling.