Disappear

Few cities have been chosen as a stage for literature quite like Venice. It was here that the narrator of Henry James’s "The Aspern Papers" pursued the letters of a dead poet; it was here that Aschenbach, in the throes of a creative crisis, arrived in "Death in Venice"; it was here that Iosif Brodskij returned almost every winter to contemplate its waters and mists. For centuries, the lagoon has inspired literature as a space of exploration and transience, of contemplation and stillness. But what happens if, amongst the narrow streets, it is a pianist at the height of her success who vanishes? And why should a talent disappear just when the world is ready to hear her?

It is September 1984 and a writer unable to write sets out on the trail of Amalia Falier, who disappeared from the limelight for good in the 1920s. Thus begins the second novel by Francesca Valente, winner of the Calvino and Campiello prizes for her debut novel "Altro nulla da segnalare" (Einaudi). In the caìgo – the lagoon mist that blurs the outlines of things – the woman appears to the narrator on a bench in the Zattere and begins to recount her story: her Venetian childhood in a complicated family, her formative years in the Paris of Ravel and Stravinsky, and her years of study with Nadia Boulanger – in a sort of story within a story that winds its way through the landscapes of memory, setting out from Venice and returning to it.

Just like the city – more a space to be ‘listened to’ and ‘felt’ than a backdrop to be ‘looked at’ – the book itself is structured in the form of a musical score, in five movements where voices enter, overlap and fade away, and themes recur at intervals. The writer and Amalia, who share a sense that their art is impossible to realise, carry forward a story which, through her, takes the form of a memory, a biography, but also a meditation on music – which in turn serves as a device for questioning the meaning of art itself and of ambition. Whilst the narrative is structured on a complex level in which the musical notes and the paratext forcefully intrude upon the text’s meanings – as if they were Amalia’s inner voice, punitive and absolute – her story centres on the freedom to renounce a talent that her family and society, on the other hand, regard as a duty.

Through elegant and measured prose, rich in names and references, Valente crafts a short, multi-layered novel centred on absence. In short, it is not so much the story of a disappearance, but a reflection on the right to withdraw at a time that seems to demand nothing but visibility. 

Disappear

Francesca Valente

Ponte alle Grazie, 176 pp., 16 euros