Ninth meeting of the seventh edition of the Reading Group "The Garden"
"The Colored Mind" by Pietro Citati
Reading and commentary by Giuseppe Baldassarre
The work:
Once Greeks, gods, heroes and men lived together. But in the Odyssey this blissful condition has come to an end: Odysseus no longer belongs to the historical time of the Iliad, but to our own. Although his life is inconceivable without divine intervention, the gods are long gone. Ulysses is just a man. While other warriors dream of repeating the exploits and tragic fate of Achilles, Odysseus adapts, bends, accepts limitations and learns to overcome them. Back in Ithaca, he teaches Telemachus his art of living: forbearance and honeyed words, which transform our misery, the shadow of our dream, into a harmonious construction. Born under the sign of Hermes, the Odyssey ends under the sign of Apollo. In the multiplicity of refractions and mirrorings, Pietro Citati moves with the precise and sharp eyes of his character, implying with affable wisdom the infinite mosaic of interpretations. In the end, with the wave of that sea where Odysseus traveled so much and suffered and loved, he brings us a new hero and a new myth, so close to us.
Author:
Pietro Citati (Florence 1930 - Castiglion della Pescaia 2022) is one of the Italian writers who has contributed most to the renewal of the genre of biography, since the 1970s his work is marked by the mixture of fictional biography and biographical novel until it arrives at a mutation of the nature of biographical work, in which the author himself becomes a character in a literary work. He himself makes this clear in the endnote to The Stabbed Dove: "although it contains pages about Proust's life, The Stabbed Dove is not intended to be, and is not, a biography." His books: Goethe (1970), The Mad Hatter's Tea (1972), Images of Alessandro Manzoni (1973, reprinted in 1997 under the title The Hill of Brusuglio), Alexander (1974), The Spring of Cosroe (1977), Short Life of Katherine Mansfield (1980), The Best of All Possible Worlds (1982), Tolstoy (1983), The Dream of the Red Room (1986), Kafka (1987), History First Happy Then Most Sorrowful and Mournful (1989), Portraits of Women (1992), The Stabbed Dove (1995), The Light of the Night (1996), The Harmony of the World (1998), Absolute Evil (2000), The Colored Mind (2001), Israel and Islam (2003), European Literary Civilization (2005), The Death of the Butterfly (2006), The Sickness of Infinity (2008), Leopardi (2010), In Praise of Tomatoes (2011), The Don Quixote (2013), Ancient and Modern Dreams (2016), Silence and the Abyss (2018).
Texts and event by The Garden Social Center