Le attitudini

In an age when being young has more to do with one’s disposition than one’s age – with results that are often far from heartening and almost never pleasing to the eye – Alberto Rollo has decided to take literary action at a time when youth was first felt and perceived. Le attitudini, set squarely within the Romantic era – with its guiding figures ever-present, from Johann Gottlieb Fichte to Friedrich Schlegel, and of course Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who appears almost as a silent mentor – is the story of how youth, then newly discovered and brought to light, caught fire, setting everything around it ablaze.

“Le attitudini” is built around the relationship between the young Bruno Röder and Marianna Di Dio, whose story is brought back to the present thanks to the involvement of a third character, the elderly professor who uncovers their secrets. Inevitably, the lives of these two young people from the past thus influence the professor’s existential reflections. A three-way exchange in which romantic love, the sense of time and its passing, and the permanence of memory become the cornerstones around which Alberto Rollo – right from his literary debut – brings to life a crystal-clear body of work and a powerfully original voice. The literary quality of "Le attitudini" extends far beyond the narrative elements and manifests itself as a form of steadfast resistance. A resolute opposition to time, which wedges itself into memory, producing a historical past from which no direct benefit—let alone peace of mind—can be derived, yet which serves to rekindle the drive for a possible and active struggle in the present. What the old professor is in fact pursuing is a sentiment capable of restoring a sense of civic and moral balance. Another central theme of the book is that of abandonment, which manifests itself in the rejection of difference, taking the form of an irreducible diversity that is, at the same time, extremely complex to understand and subsequently to accept. Alberto Rollo employs the past and history with great mastery, not to construct a historical novel, but to offer the reader a possible interpretation of our contemporary world. Exploring who we once were is essential to trying to understand and perceive why the present is permeated by an absence-in-presence that is both consistently hostile and seemingly irreducible. Thus, the exchange of letters leads to an introspective exploration that resonates with our present-day sensibilities. In that romantic nineteenth century, the very existential journey of the elderly professor is played out; in the words of the two young people from the past, he rediscovers the strength to face a solitude that is now no longer quite so truly inevitable.

Alberto Rollo
, "Le attitudini
", Neri Pozza, 300 pp., 20 euros