Imbuing the stuff of legend with a startling new relevancy and humanity, Baricco gives us The Iliad as we have never known it. With Andromache, Patroclus, Priam, and the rest, we are privy to the ghastly confusion of battle, the clamor of princely councils, the intimacies of the bedchamber”until finally only a blind poet is left to recount, secondhand, the awful fall of Ilium.
From the return of Chryseis to the burial of Hector, we see through human eyes and feel with human hearts the unforgettable events first recounted almost three thousand years ago ”events arranged not by the whims of the gods in this instance but by the dictates of human nature. Sacrificing none of Homer's panoramic scope, Baricco forgoes Homeric detachment and admits us to realms of subjective experience his predecessor never explored. People are afraid of the ocean, so the pianist relieves them by playing his terrific music.A bold reimagining of our civilization's greatest tale of war, by the author of the acclaimed best seller Silk.Īlessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of twenty-one Homeric characters in the narrative idiom of our modern imagination. The ocean was part of him, Novecento belonged only to it and to nowhere else. Was it just fear? Novecento wasn’t born on dry land, he was different from everyone else, so he felt he would’ve lost something important if he had left. But the world passed on that ship, with all its hopes and failures, and he watched it pass, never trying to follow it. Maybe the best.īut music was the only thing that made him happy. Novecento, with his inexplicable talent, charmed all the men and all the women with his music.
The ocean was his only home.Īt night the passengers of the ship could hear a piano playing.
He lived on it, traveling hundreds of times from Europe to America, and from America to Europe. A sailor found him and named him Novecento in honor of the 20 th century, which had just begun.Īt that time many people were emigrating from Europe in search of a better life, getting on board ships headed to America. Novecento (which means “nine hundred” in Italian, and indicates the twentieth century) was abandoned on the transatlantic Virginian soon after his birth. Lemon Novecento, with the accompaniment of some fine jazz music. Alessandro Baricco’s “Novecento” is a brilliant theatrical monologue which narrates the unique story of Danny Boodman T.D.
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