The narrator visits Trieste and London, searching for old friends of a certain literary individual who never wrote a book. The central mystery here — why someone of a “bibliocentric” disposition/milieu would not end up writing anything himself — was moving to me for personal reasons.  It also occurred to me that the novel, with its sustained air of ambiguity and paradox, is inverting quintessential narratives that stand for the romance of reading/writing: the search for the missing writer behind the book, the search for traces of the past animated by/dissolving into longing for what is irretrievably lost. Instead, what the narrator is trying to understand is why there is no book/trace, and (unlike, for instance, a Patrick Modiano protagonist) his emotional state is not nostalgia but something more ambiguous that almost imperceptibly dissolves into indifference. Given when the book was published (1983), postmodernism may be lurking in the background of this search for the modern writer manqué (it’s not just that the author is dead, he wasn’t even an author), yet Daniele del Giudice’s approach to the question of the relationship between writing and life feels sincere, if inconclusive.

Something else that got under my skin here was the oscillation between precision — del Giudice seems fascinated by all things schematic (maps, navigational instruments, flight trajectories, etc.) — and its various opposites: aimless wandering through unknown streets, the soft blur of rainy days, drifting off into sleep, shipwrecks and plane crashes. This distinctive movement into/out of focus makes the book pleasurably disorienting and also (I think) a worthy entry into the canon of books about traversing cities.

Incidentally, the English translation (A Fictional Inquiry) is clearly marketed towards bookish types, but how wonderful would it have been to discover all this in a book called Lo Stadio di Wimbledon with an airplane on the cover?