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 Giudice’s debut novel Lo stadio di Wimbledon sets out to answer. A spare, quiet, meditative book, it is an inquiry into another individual’s life choices that ultimately becomes an inquiry into the writing life itself, and an apologia on writing.
The novel’s 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 “Bobi” 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). “It is,” wrote publisher Roberto Calasso in introducing these writings, “a part – and a decisive part – of Bazlen’s work not to have produced any work.” 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 “Literature that does what it’s supposed to do, explode and be silent at the same time” (Gianni Montieri, “Il dolore e i libri. Lo stadio di Wimbledon di Daniele Del Giudice”).
One of the most persistent themes in the book and throughout Del Giudice’s 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, constantly 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 individual’s 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.
Rappresentanza, representation, another key element in Del Giudice’s work, is considered by Del Giudice himself to be the signature of Lo stadio di Wimbledon. In “La zona del narrare” he writes: “I 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.” He goes on to say that he was sending the book “to 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.”
Italo Calvino had in fact presented the text to Einaudi with the title Carta di Mercatore, describing it as a “very simple book, straightforward to read, but at the same time possessing great depth and extraordinary quality.” 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 Giudice’s other work. In A Movable Horizon, for example, the author tells us that he is not sure he has much to write about his journeys—fictional and actual—to Antarctica because “it was mainly a story about landscape.” The photographs he took, he says, were like “visual notes.” Elsewhere, in an article significantly entitled “The eye that writes” (“L’occhio che scrive”), Del Giudice, referring to Calvino’s novel Palomar, emphasizes visuality as the distinctive feature of narrative: “It is precisely this experience of visività, pushed to its limit, that determines the form of the book.” 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 Blumenthal’s 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: “It’s curious, a notebook, a few photos that become a film, that become a book.”
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 man’s silence might be contagious, as with the sweater Ljuba Blumenthal later gives him “from Bobi”) requires the narrator to squeeze his eyes shut:
This time I’ve had a while to prepare myself; in fact, I’ve devised a technique of my own. It’s 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 us… She turns the page; I wait as before. She says, ‘Montale, next to Faramondi’s gramophone.’ … A new page, the usual routine. Only this time it’s a little longer … I wait, not looking. Occasionally I worry that she might notice. Then I decide that’s impossible, we are completely in profile. Then, ‘Here he is!’ she says. It’s unmistakable, and I blur it as hard as I can.
Like Del Giudice’s other books, Lo stadio di Wimbledon is marked by introspection, reflection, isolation, and meditation. In his quest for answers, the narrator’s 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 one’s thoughts, to watch for the other’s 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, “… he was no longer spontaneous,” she says first, “he was already very set in his ways and therefore less intelligent.” “Maybe he’d just changed,” the narrator suggests. “Or had something happened?” he asks. The woman “doesn’t answer right away; she thinks a moment, then says, ‘It may be that he realized that he had failed.’ And after a brief pause, she adds, ‘He was a failure all along, though.’” The narrator is taken aback by the reversal: “I would need a lateral, parallel time to be able to continue the conversation while simultaneously musing about each of the things I’m hearing, which she says with chilling precision and softness.”
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: “He rests his crossed arms on the table; he accentuates everything by bursting through the silence, then sinking back into silence.” The narrator tries to adapt, and uses the pauses as a time to think of a reply: “During the long pauses he looks at me as if he were talking, and it’s not always easy to think of a response.” The man’s words “pop out like a cuckoo…” Adjusting to the rhythm, the narrator lets “a fair amount of time go by” before responding. Then “the usual silence, the usual staring at each other, smiling.”
The silence evidenced in Lo stadio di Wimbledon is a very different kind of silence than that represented by Bazlen’s 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 Bazlen’s silence and renunciation. Enrique Vila-Matas considers such “artists of refusal” in his novel Bartleby & Co., which is written as a series of footnotes—a kind of non-work itself. He observes that Del Giudice’s “narrator proclaims a moral directly opposed to Bazlen’s,” and quotes Patrizia Lombardo—who elsewhere coined the term the “terrorism of negativity”—as saying “Almost timidly, Del Giudice’s novel contradicts … all those who revere Bazlen for his silence.” The title of an article by Paolo Marcolin in Il Piccolo – Trieste (Sept. 2, 2021) following the author’s death is telling in this regard, as it bids farewell to the writer who was not among those who adhered to the Bazlen mystique: “Addio a Del Giudice, lo scrittore assente all’inseguimento del mito Bobi Bazlen.”
There is a video entitled “Roberto Bazlen – With a backpack full of books”[i] in which Del Giudice states that “Bazlen is the only figure of the Italian Novecento who officially declared that writing books is no longer possible.” I cannot help wondering what he might have thought or said to accompany those words spoken so equably about Bazlen’s belief that “Almost all books are footnotes … I write only footnotes.” By contrast, Del Giudice’s conception of the writer’s role and that of literature itself is said to be inspired by Joseph Conrad’s essay “Outside Literature” (1922), in which Conrad reflects upon the nature of Notices to Mariners; unlike literature, these Notices are motivated solely by the ethic of “Responsibility.”
In the end, the focus of the book’s 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 people’s lives on the page or to act on them as Bazlen did—to write about life or to live it. A writer’s life is his work, and vice versa, the narrator recalls the deceased poet’s mother saying in the film Suddenly Last Summer, although Sebastian Venable had not written a single poem. “Writing isn’t important,” the young narrator thinks, “however, one cannot do anything else.” By choosing to write, the narrator’s 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: “Daniele Del Giudice sets out to write the shipwreck of writing; saving it, by the very act of writing about it” (Massimo Donà). 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 “a new space in which to fulfil a small, personal shipwreck.”
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.
Lo stadio di Wimbledon will soon appear in English from New Vessel Press as A Fictional Inquiry.
Lo Stadio di Wimbledon
By Daniele Del Giudice
Publisher: Einaudi
Paperback / 151 pages / 2021
ISBN: 9788806252397
[i] https://vimeo.com/506207913
Published on August 15, 2024.
