Vassalli: literature defeats loneliness

Vassalli did not try to understand, he knew that the world moves as it likes and not as we would like it to. It is like the Church that remains what it is, unreformable, something that not even those of great strength of spirit, such as Carlo Bascapè – the main character in Chimera, the bishop of Novara, a great moralist, of rare fortitude, a reformist-integralist, a pupil of Cardinal Borromeo, belonging to the faction of the enemies of the clergy – are able to budge. And this is for the simple reason that the true God does not exist, or has withdrawn from human affairs. On the other hand, for centuries, faith has served to kill in the name of God.

And to do this, the Church must use cynical murderers, not noble reformers. Antonia, the second strong figure in Chimera, a woman in the 1600s who is accused of being a witch and sentenced to be burned at the stake, is defeated by hatred, intolerance, special interests, the greed of priests, the fights between church officials, and the gratuitous violence of cowardly people, those weak people who need a higher justification for their actions. However, something remains: an example of the tenacity and inflexibility of someone who defended their chimera even at the cost of death. Thanks to the word, the story remains.

In this which is his best-known novel, Vassalli lays bare the meaninglessness of life governed by the inertia of matter, the chaotic world, and history driven by hatred. And he details in the novel this eternal return, which nullifies, which renders all human action useless. And most recently, in his collection of short stories, La morte di Marx e altri racconti (The Death of Marx and Other Tales), shortly before his death, Vassalli changed his style completely, disavowed grand narratives and became the anti-climax in person: with the sad smile of a playful poet, no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't take himself seriously. He remained a half-hearted writer, composing and recomposing his stories, unable to get to the end. A writer and an artist – almost a priest – who put himself in the place of God, until the heroic surrender of illusions, such as the typically sixty-eight-year-old fallacy of wanting to change the world, or the delusion of someone who, though posing in the guise of a great novelist, in the end could not even manage to finish a short story and left his stories hanging, to bleed to death.

The last Vassalli, probably undermined by depression, changed completely, but did not renege on himself; he continued to pursue new chimeras, because, as he said, “it is these illusions, which help humanity to live.”

Vassalli doesn't try to understand, he knows the world goes where he wants it to go not where we want it to go

He had done so in 2003, in the novel La stella avvelenata (The Poisoned Star), in which he immersed himself in the tale of a trip to Paris, in 1400s Europe, a destination which the protagonist, the cleric Leonardo Sacco, a student from Monferrato, will never reach, ending up embarking on another journey, in the company of a hotchpotch group of heretics and criminals, to mythical Atlantis. Did it really happen? Was it imagined? Certainly, it was an absurd, anachronistic journey against time, to a Utopia that does not exist, a land at the edge of the world: a Chimera, a literary fiction, like the Universal Flood, the Tower of Babel, Eden, the Earthly Paradise. Leonardo crossed the Atlantic to a mythical land, another world, as far from Italy as Italy is from the moon, America before it became America, but he did not find Earthly Paradise; it takes more than just crossing the Ocean to leave the world behind. La Stella avvelenata is a magical place but it is also a place where illusions are shattered and dreams are in danger of becoming nightmares.

On the other hand, what do you expect from a writer who is one of the best of his generation but is without a sense of direction: born in Genoa and adapted to life in the Novara area, so flat that even the fog deems it unworthy? It was here on this plain in the midst of the rice fields that Vassalli retired in the latter part of his life, to the Villa della Maragnana in Biandrate, a former sacristy on whose facade he displayed ceramic discs – made by him – each representing the 23 books that marked his literary output. Each disc is a sun, and as was written on the front door of his farmhouse, “suns are suns and they make light.” This was his motto. And not surprisingly, every sun, for him, is a book.