

Why would a man firmly rooted in the literary world of his time never write a word of his own? This is the question Daniele Del Giudiceās debut novel Lo stadio di Wimbledon sets out to answer. A spare, quiet, meditative book, it is an inquiry into another individualās life choices that ultimately becomes an inquiry into the writing life itself, and an apologia on writing.
The novelās narrator is a young man who, considering his own life choices, questions why a certain literary figure, now deceased, never wrote. The name of the individual is mentioned several times, and it is clear that he played a unique role in the cultural life of the city of Trieste. From other indications in the book, the reader knows that the man at the center of the inquiry is Roberto āBobiā Bazlen, who served as an advisor to leading publishing houses of his day. The book echoes, with a few references, what was in fact an unfinished novel by Bazlen involving a captain who preferred to remain at sea, and a shipwreck, published posthumously in Italian as Il capitano di lungo Corso (Adelphi, 1973) and in English as The Sea Captain in Notes Without a Text and Other Writings (Dalkey Archive, 2019). āIt is,ā wrote publisher Roberto Calasso in introducing these writings, āa part ā and a decisive part ā of Bazlenās work not to have produced any work.ā Both Bazlen and Del Giudice deliver an explosive silence: Bazlen with the implications of his refusal to write, and Del Giudice in his way of creating āLiterature that does what it’s supposed to do, explode and be silent at the same timeā (Gianni Montieri, āIl dolore e i libri. Lo stadio di Wimbledon di Daniele Del Giudiceā).
One of the most persistent themes in the book and throughout Del Giudiceās work is the nature of memory. The narrator of Lo stadio di Wimbledon comes to realize that memory, though essential to our understanding of ourselves and the reality around us, is a fragile and imperfect instrument,Ģżconstantly evolving, mutable and subjective. To find out why Bazlen never published anything in life, the young man seeks out individuals who knew the man, all of them now quite old. But how accurate are the memories? The result is a range of perspectives, which offer different angles of the same person. Viewed and recalled by other people, an individualās character or personality becomes kaleidoscopic, ever-faceted and therefore uncertain, never fixed or determined. The volatility and unreliability of memory turns on the passage of time, impermanence, and change, and challenges the idea that the object of the inquiry in Lo stadio di Wimbledon might have a cohesive identity.Ģż
Rappresentanza, representation, another key element in Del Giudiceās work, is considered by Del Giudice himself to be the signature of Lo stadio di Wimbledon. In āLa zona del narrareā he writes: āI emphasize the term representation (forms, including the novel, are born and die, and such deaths are essential); representation was what I cared about, and that is the theme of Lo stadio di Wimbledon.ā He goes on to say that he was sending the book āto the publisher with the title Mercator’s Map. It is well known that the second name of that sixteenth-century map, the basis of modern cartography, is precisely Representation.ā
Italo Calvino had in fact presented the text to Einaudi with the title Carta di Mercatore, describing it as a āvery simple book, straightforward to read, but at the same time possessing great depth and extraordinary quality.ā The publisher opted for Lo stadio di Wimbledon, however, a reference to a final scene where the narrator stops at the museum at Wimbledon Stadium and while there reflects on how objects are removed from emotions, indeterminate, like photos. Nonetheless, in Lo stadio di Wimbledon as Calvino observes in his Note to the volume, the young man, whom some consider to be an alter-ego for the author, ultimately chooses rappresentanza, deciding to portray people and things on the page and devote his entire attention to representing the object.
The visual image is an essential element of rappresentanza. As such, it is central to Lo stadio di Wimbledon and Del Giudiceās other work. In A Movable Horizon, for example, the author tells us that he is not sure he has much to write about his journeysāfictional and actualāto Antarctica because āit was mainly a story about landscape.ā The photographs he took, he says, were like āvisual notes.ā ĢżElsewhere, in an article significantly entitled āThe eye that writesā (āLāocchio che scriveā), Del Giudice, referring to Calvinoās novel Palomar, emphasizes visuality as the distinctive feature of narrative: āIt is precisely this experience of ±¹¾±²õ¾±±¹¾±³ŁĆ , pushed to its limit, that determines the form of the book.ā Indeed, at the time a film version of Lo stadio di Wimbledon was being produced, and Del Giudice shared several polaroid pictures with director Mathieu Amalric: photos of Ljuba Blumenthalās house and the stadium, taken during a visit to London. Underscoring the importance of the image as a departure point for his narrative, he said in an interview: āItās curious, a notebook, a few photos that become a film, that become a book.ā
There is a scene in Lo stadio di Wimbledon where Gerti Frankl Tolazzi shows the narrator a series of photographs. Here the power of the image is so strong that the fear of seeing the man he does not want to see (perhaps fearing that the manās silence might be contagious, as with the sweater Ljuba Blumenthal later gives him āfrom Bobiā) requires the narrator to squeeze his eyes shut:
This time Iāve had a while to prepare myself; in fact, Iāve devised a technique of my own. Itās impossible not to look at the photographs, but each time she turns a page I blur the image, crossing my eyes and focusing on the tip of my nose. I stay like that until she says something. She always says something about the photos in front of usā¦ She turns the page; I wait as before. She says, āMontale, next to Faramondiās gramophone.ā … A new page, the usual routine. Only this time itās a little longer ā¦ I wait, not looking. Occasionally I worry that she might notice. Then I decide thatās impossible, we are completely in profile. Then, āHere he is!ā she says. Itās unmistakable, and I blur it as hard as I can.
Like Del Giudiceās other books, Lo stadio di Wimbledon is marked by introspection, reflection, isolation, and meditation. In his quest for answers, the narratorās visits to Trieste and Wimbledon Park are solitary sojourns. The tenor of the novel is thoughtful, the pace leisurely. Throughout the text the dialogues are punctuated with pauses and what at times seem like omissions; the elliptical quality creates an air of ambiguity that leaves you wondering if you missed something. These are not awkward silences, no one seems uncomfortable with them, nor are they pregnant silences, intended to make the situation more dramatic or impactful. The silence itself is a presence, sometimes piercing, sometimes waiting, listening, but always full of meaning. At times it is an uncertain silence, to buy time to think, to decide. The pauses allow a breath, and are an occasion to consider or reflect, to weigh, to take note of oneās thoughts, to watch for the otherās reaction and measure their words, sifting them through a sieve of possibilities. The result is a quieting effect that tones things down, defuses the drama and contributes to the unhurried tempo, while exploding with what is left unsaid.
Here, talking with Gerti Tolazzi, the silence introduces a shifting, whiplash effect, a turnaround. Referring to Bazlen, āā¦ he was no longer spontaneous,ā she says first, āhe was already very set in his ways and therefore less intelligent.ā āMaybe heād just changed,ā the narrator suggests. āOr had something happened?ā he asks. The woman ādoesnāt answer right away; she thinks a moment, then says, āIt may be that he realized that he had failed.ā And after a brief pause, she adds, āHe was a failure all along, though.āā The narrator is taken aback by the reversal: āI would need a lateral, parallel time to be able to continue the conversation while simultaneously musing about each of the things Iām hearing, which she says with chilling precision and softness.ā
In another dialog, this time with a friend of Bazlen, a man who appears addicted to long pauses and whose conversation has its own pace: āHe rests his crossed arms on the table; he accentuates everything by bursting through the silence, then sinking back into silence.ā The narrator tries to adapt, and uses the pauses as a time to think of a reply: āDuring the long pauses he looks at me as if he were talking, and itās not always easy to think of a response.ā The manās words āpop out like a cuckooā¦ā Adjusting to the rhythm, the narrator lets āa fair amount of time go byā before responding. Then āthe usual silence, the usual staring at each other, smiling.ā
The silence evidenced in Lo stadio di Wimbledon is a very different kind of silence than that represented by Bazlenās rejection of rappresentanza and his refusal to write. Much has been written to suggest that Lo stadio di Wimbledon expresses a viewpoint that stands in opposition to Bazlenās silence and renunciation. Enrique Vila-Matas considers such āartists of refusalā in his novel Bartleby & Co., which is written as a series of footnotesāa kind of non-work itself. He observes that Del Giudiceās ānarrator proclaims a moral directly opposed to Bazlenās,ā and quotes Patrizia Lombardoāwho elsewhere coined the term the āterrorism of negativityāāas saying āAlmost timidly, Del Giudice’s novel contradicts … all those who revere Bazlen for his silence.ā The title of an article by Paolo Marcolin in Il Piccolo ā Trieste (Sept. 2, 2021) following the authorās death is telling in this regard, as it bids farewell to the writer who was not among those who adhered to the Bazlen mystique: āAddio a Del Giudice, lo scrittore assente allāinseguimento del mito Bobi Bazlen.ā
There is a video entitled āRoberto Bazlen ā With a backpack full of booksā[i] in which Del Giudice states that āBazlen is the only figure of the Italian Novecento who officially declared that writing books is no longer possible.ā I cannot help wondering what he might have thought or said to accompany those words spoken so equably about Bazlenās belief that āAlmost all books are footnotes ā¦ I write only footnotes.ā By contrast, Del Giudiceās conception of the writerās role and that of literature itself is said to be inspired by Joseph Conradās essay āOutside Literatureā (1922), in which Conrad reflects upon the nature of Notices to Mariners; unlike literature, these Notices are motivated solely by the ethic of āResponsibility.ā
In the end, the focus of the bookās inquiry and of the book itself centers on the dialectic between literature and life, which plays out below the surface of the text: the question of whether it is better to portray peopleās lives on the page or to act on them as Bazlen didāto write about life or to live it. A writerās life is his work, and vice versa, the narrator recalls the deceased poetās mother saying in the film Suddenly Last Summer, although Sebastian Venable had not written a single poem. āWriting isnāt important,ā the young narrator thinks, āhowever, one cannot do anything else.ā By choosing to write, the narratorās inquiry becomes a vindication of writing and what it means to be a writer. Or as one essayist in Luce e ombra: leggere Daniele Del Giudice put it: āDaniele Del Giudice sets out to write the shipwreck of writing; saving it, by the very act of writing about itā (Massimo DonĆ ). Del Giudice himself, in the collection In questa luce, described writing as navigating in a sea studded with shipwrecks of many other authors and finding āa new space in which to fulfil a small, personal shipwreck.ā
Anne Milano Appel has translated works by a number of leading Italian authors for a variety of US and UK publishers. Her work on Daniele Del Giudice has appeared in Translation Review and Massachusetts Review. Her translation of his final novel Orizzonte mobile is currently seeking a publisher, and Lo stadio di Wimbledon will soon appear in English from New Vessel Press as A Fictional Inquiry.
Ģż
Lo stadio di Wimbledon will soon appear in English from New Vessel Press as A Fictional Inquiry.
By Daniele Del Giudice
Publisher: Einaudi
Paperback / 151 pages / 2021
ISBN: 9788806252397
[i] https://vimeo.com/506207913
Published on August 15, 2024.