“She should have been happy, yet she felt like crying.”

And surrounding her, the countryside, the wine—so much wine, the spinet for music, the soup, the stream water, the wooden table, the rustle of the pen on the musical staff paper: these are the elements weaving together realism and fantasy, the painted scene, fixed, of two lives, two souls, intertwined by fate.

This beautiful book also captures the inner, ethical framework—ethos is the habitual dwelling—of those who act and endure the unfolding of events. The psychological impact of mere happenings.

Thus: reading and writing, teaching and learning, composing and suffering, amidst “rain and Austrians, Austrians and French, and more rain,” in the whirlpool of “trivial and immediate needs,” amid transformations that progress while “retaining the sensual melancholy, the erotic restlessness of adolescence,” characterize the dynamics of this story that will hold many surprises for the fortunate reader. It speaks of the meaning of inspiration, the proper or improper use of talent, of love that ends and of that which never begins, of devotion that becomes dedication, of "true music," of expectations and constraints. And of intrusions and disappointments.

“The truth is that for people like us… happiness is not permitted. Whatever path we may take, whether we follow common sense or not, only suffering is reserved for us.”

Pessimism and optimism, grace and kindness mix, while the immobile, cyclical nature always renews itself the same: “the wind murmurs, the earth despairs.”

In an enlightening essay on The Storyteller, Nikolaj Semënovič Leskov, Walter Benjamin writes: “The experience that passes from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written down their stories, the greatest are precisely those whose writing is least distinguishable from the voice of the countless anonymous narrators.”

The Storyteller extracts from his experience, which some call fantasy, a tale that interprets while describing, mesmerizes while perplexing, provokes thought while entertaining.

"All this," Benjamin continues, "refers to the nature of true storytelling. It implies, openly or not, a benefit, an advantage. Such benefit may consist once in a moral, another time in a practical instruction, a third in a proverb or a life lesson: in any case, the storyteller is a person of 'counsel' to those who listen." And "counsel, sewn into the fabric of lived life, is wisdom."

Considering that "there is nothing that more effectively ensures stories stick to the memory than that chaste conciseness which spares them from psychological analysis," in general, "writing a novel means to exacerbate the immeasurable in the representation of human life. Even in the richness of life and in the representation of this richness, the novel attests and expresses the profound disorientation of the living."

Thus far Benjamin.

One then understands writing as a craft, as a trade, sometimes as a vocation, and this seems to be just the case.

Because at times the Narrator here is truly moving: "she was offering him her help and her unconditional affection: 'Dear maestro...' she murmured tenderly, covering him with a blanket to keep him from getting cold."

The term Maestro is recurrent: maestro in his art, maestro of life: one who teaches his art, one who teaches, while learning, how to be in the world. Maestro of music, schoolmaster, conductor, and composer of ineffable emotions.

Music makes one laugh and cry, makes one dance, draws one into joy or steeps one in melancholy, uplifts, consoles, soothes by softening or sharpens by intensifying: "when I listen to music I always miss something," says a character by Walser, sublime storyteller.

Like love: music is love.

Loving notes, in this case, then means, above the bitterness that shakes, loving THE notes, the music, the most immaterial of the arts, which frees emotion and cognition, elevates the soul, evokes memories, shows us the Beyond that is within us.

But decay is lurking, fatal, and brings with it immense sadness, because the know-yourself, the moral duty of every artist and the engine of any expression, degrades and plummets with inspiration and self-esteem.

They used to say "that my music... would be unmatched... and now who am I? What have I become? ... Nothing." Amedeo Gasperini feels destroyed. A zero, round and round. He is a fragile creature weighed down by the years and by life, he prays because among the few things he recognizes there is above all his "gradual sinking into silence," in continuous "gusts of non-sense."

Everyone is held in this narrative, everyone, albeit with tact and kindness, is enveloped in unspoken things, in peasant superstitions, in the misconceptions of not knowing.

Thus, amid exchanges of person, reincarnations, feelings of guilt, self-punishments for not having been explicit enough, one witnesses—with the safe distance that delights the spectator-reader—a progressive psychological intrigue that subverts space and time. And Amedeo continually tries to drown in alcohol, and it is unclear whether his drinking is to forget or to remember. Perhaps it is both.

A wonderful verse from a song by Leonard Cohen comes to mind:

“I can’t forget, I can’t forget, I can’t forget, but I can’t remember what.”

The loss of one’s capabilities, of one's Self, as not knowing how to recognize anymore is mental chaos: the pure tragic.

The essence of the Tragic lies in these reversals that transform a human being into a sacrificial victim: one thing for another, a premonition in place of truth, the presumed evidence over actual intent, the misunderstanding of the never-clarified, the ambiguities of assumptions, intending good but doing harm instead.

An earthquake: human suffering leaves you “breathless, mute, and dismayed”.

Lives lived, lives ruined by vile malice and immense naivety, lives, despite everything, saved by love and a love for life.

But naivety is genuineness, and in kindness, there is always, or almost always, something that saves. In a look of sympathy, in a smile, in a generous gesture, in calling each other by name, in offering to a person things never experienced before. Like self-love, gratitude, and the beauty of what is disinterested.

And in this amiable yet difficult path rolls the narration, the reader is joyfully wrapped in the coils of the story and runs curious toward the ending; they really want to know how the story will end.

What Destiny has in store and what the Narrator has in store for us when the reading is paused is like when pausing the viewing of a film, everything is suspended, the characters stop, the actions freeze and the reader, in joyful anticipation, knows that those Personae wait for him, in turn, to resume the drama, to move again in the theater of their story.

One returns to the book, and one finds the stench of a violent body

Or one encounters again the scents and colors of a Mediterranean land, amid the deceptions and disappointments of humans and still to the immobile shining of nature. There is always conflict between nature and human nature, if nature—the two natures—are not blessed by culture. But nature always regenerates: “the silence of the fields. The sky was clear.”

“People who are worth something are usually rich,” says the very unlikable antagonist in the book, but there are those who are sufficient unto themselves, who know that happiness is desiring what one has, as both Saint Augustine and Oscar Wilde teach. And it is precisely this that keeps hope alive.

One lives on “slow habits and silent expectations,” on stammers that are the gesticulating of the soul, shyness, reticence, hesitations, fatalistic and momentary inebriation and for this always reiterated.

“The creation is... is a wo... wonder”: an old man needs a wall, a solid support, where he can lean. 

Rising and climax, in a well-dosed alternation of hope and despair, of frantic searching and compassionate attitudes, between acceptance of the existing and irony that dissects: You don’t work? It is said, harshly and with contempt to Amadeus: “No… I teach.” “Well, at least you do something…”

The Location: in the 1700s, Selva, Medicina, Romagna “solatìa, sweet country,” the Po Valley, up to Bologna. And, above, a sky that crushes you—the meteorology is the low part of mythology—“the countryside was still dark and threatening.”

But the righteous is the spokesperson for all creatures, and then come into action the ‘significant dynamic structures’, which Lukács in The Theory of the Novel calls ‘forms’, privileged modes in the relationship between the human soul and the absolute. They are precisely categories of feeling: among many others, for example, “the stubborn cheerfulness that sometimes hides suffering”.

Formulas of Pathos that have roots in myths.

The spirit of competition, the will to excel, and the power of competition, all this, and much more, is condensed in the musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, a god and a satyr, who had picked up in the woods the aulos, a double-reed flute, thrown away by Athena. The goddess had thrown it away, cursing anyone who picked it up, because the gods of Olympus, always too human, had mocked her, who had deformed her face—Dizzy Gillespie!—to play it. Apollo wins the challenge, with a trick, and, having tied Marsyas to a tree, skins him alive. Satyrs, nymphs, and fauns rushed weeping. From their tears flowed a river.

“You strip me of my persona!” says the satyr, under torture, to the god of the Sun, Music, Science, and Prophecy.

To fully understand the mythical and allegorical meaning of this blood myth, Titian’s painting on this subject is perfect.

Among the many psychic issues this book reveals is also this.

There is the Mystery of reincarnation, besides the worldly mysteries of the Double, the Mask, crossed fates, influences and the traffic of influences, the knot between imitation and mimesis. Lived experience becomes all the more a story “the more purely psychological intuitions express the succession of real psychological facts, even if complicated.” Wilhelm Dilthey writes this, who made the study of the experience of life the origin of every theory, of every interpretation.

Happiness lasts a moment, but true happiness is being—almost always if one can—non-unhappy, not attached to things, aware of what one has and never desiring what one does not have. This is the true meaning of the proverb “who is content enjoys”: being almost-happy, calm amidst passions, and capable of resisting and not suffering, faithful to life, despite everything. Gottfried Benn explains it in a flash: “Life is tragic but is rendered serene by measure.”

In a surprising Epilogue, cataclysm and revelation, there is everything: transvaluation of values, liberation of the woman, fall of the Ego, total mimesis, dissolution of evil into good, and even extraction of good—this is the will-to-love—from evil.

In one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, made absolute by the voice of Van Morrison, Have I told you lately (that I love you), the deep sense of love is said: you fill my heart with gladness, take away my sadness, ease my troubles, that’s what you do. Almost everything here.

This fiction is very true, its Author, authentic and sincere, touches universal feelings and combines talent with dignity, in the measured flame of knowing how to tell.

It is, as Bertolt Brecht teaches us, “the simplicity that is difficult to make.”