Finished reading on: June 27, 2009
Broad wind
Title of the original version reviewed: «Vento largo»
AI Translation Notice: This review was translated from the original Italian using artificial intelligence. Book quotes and excerpts are translated interpretations and will not match the author's original English phrasing or official published translations.
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.