A great book by Giuseppe Sgarbi (1921-2018) returns, You still talk to me, five years after the first edition, for the types of La Nave di Teseo, directed by his daughter Elisabetta. A rare book in contemporary novel production. A book of feelings and memories that inspired the film with the same title by Pupi Avati , premiered on Sky this evening. The protagonist, who plays the author, and an amazing and “unedited” Renato Pozzetto for the first time in a dramatic part that surprises for the truly unsuspected skill, after dozens of comic roles, in impersonating Giuseppe who talks about his Rinato a ghostwriter who supports it. And to whom he reveals the arcana of an intense life lived for sixty-five years together.
Avati’s film bears the director’s mark, undoubtedly, but if he had adhered more to the spirit and the story of Sgarbi’s “memorial”, the result would have been more engaging for the viewer who expects something more with each change of scene. , perhaps in adherence to the book. The opening of which is immediately clear, dry, moving, passionate.
“And you, tell me: why did you go away
So soon, then. What a rush there was
Tell me”. These are the simple words of an intense monologue, a real elegy, that Giuseppe “Nino” Sgarbi addresses to his wife Rina, one year after her death. And in them there is everything: the incredulity of abandonment, the inexplicable sudden loneliness, the unreasonable silence of the beloved woman that she at least she should have “warned” him. Above all, there is an immense, very tender love in the long talk with her about a ninety-year-old who cannot do without the woman in whom he has found everything and to whom everything about himself has given. She still talks to me, which I don’t know how to define: – poetry, novel, diary, memory – and something more than a book; and a very elegant casket in which an old gentleman, cultured and refined, has placed his most precious treasure: the passion for his wife, mother of his children, total inspiration of his entire existence. As if to want to preserve it from the dust of time and keep it with you as long as it can and then pass it on, this passion so absorbing and total, to those who have the good fortune to become aware of it.
A passion with intense colors, nourished by memories that the passage of time has not faded; in short, the story of the life of two beings in love from the first moment, united by a poignant and exclusive conjugal love and by an insatiable search for beauty with which they filled their homes so fascinatingly overflowing with works of art. Passion unfolded over more than sixty years that continued to nourish Nino’s life until the end, making the survivor palpitate in speaking, filling sheets of stories to his woman as if she were still alive and present in that house of harmonies and of tenderness.
Giuseppe Sgarbi who a couple of years before this extraordinary work had discovered himself as a writer, with the novels Lungo l’argine del tempo. Memoirs of a pharmacist and Don’t ask what the future will be, with the long “letter” (we want to define this extraordinary prose poem in this way
) to his wife confirms himself as one of the most seductive author of our contemporaries. He had probably always known, or at least suspected, that he was a writer, but who knows why he waited so long to reveal himself denying us who knows how many other writings such as those mentioned, and in particular you still speak to me, arouse in us a feeling of intimate spiritual joy. thanks also to the beauty of a gentle, supervised, spontaneous, very human and delicate writing.
And his extreme homage to Rina, it will be said. Naturally. Certainly also to his children Di lei Vittorio and Elisabetta. And certainly to her land so full of humor and character. But it is also a tribute to those who reading (and rereading!) These pages rediscover what he has lost: the warmth of a vital impulse that never fades, even in the face of the inevitable difficulties of life.
The “journey” made by Giuseppe Sgarbi with his Rina seems to have no end. He talks to her and listens to her as if she were still sitting on that chair in the now desolately empty kitchen. And to those who have not had the good fortune to meet her, he recounts it in the long journey they have made together, marked by a joy that the annotated details bring out more than a search in the memory that one tries to hold back with difficulty.
Yeah, the memory. At a certain point one almost gets the impression that Giuseppe della Rina doesn’t want to lose anything, not even the smallest sigh, the most insignificant of attentions. And every gesture and almost every word wants to keep them for himself to the point of not needing to “add anything to our life”, because it was a beautiful life. So, simply.
This is not a book for literary critics by Giuseppe Sgarbi. Nobody could “technically” review pages in which you come across a phrase like this: “Till death do you part it’s a lie. The minimum wage. A love like ours comes much further. And I feel yours from here too “. What a professional critic should add
There is good air in this book; you touch a world that no longer exists; we savor ancient words that a ninety-year-old has the courage to happily put on paper and thus makes us feel poorer attached to our modernity as beggars. Thinking about it, this is probably Rina’s “miracle”. She arouses humble feelings and thoughts, she nourishes the art of life that she, together with her husband, has cultivated with the exuberance of her perennial youth, finding in him the perfect completion of herself. “You loved me with a great love. So big that just thinking about it makes my head spin. And I don’t know if I’ve ever managed to reciprocate it fully. I’m afraid not. Because you were total in everything, even in loving ”, wrote Joseph. And it is understood that she does not know and does not want to give herself peace. Yeah, “what a hurry there was
“.
