“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“What ever gave me the patience to persist until I learned to read the words of a book?”
We wonder how this book isn’t required reading in every school. It deserves a place on children’s bookshelves between To Kill a Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451; if you haven’t already, read it now, before they all burn them.
Categorising Mime as science fiction seems risky, to say the least: reading this book today means shuddering at its relevance and crying, crying a lot for all the love the author declares for literature. Yes, we could perhaps say it’s a long love letter. To books, to the other, to life. To men who try to destroy everything—to the madmen who refuse to give up.
In the frighteningly realistic future Tevis paints, there are a man, a woman, and a robot: three actors in a zombie society governed by Orwellian slogans that invite us not to think, to be self-sufficient (alone), anesthetized to pain (and therefore to pleasure), to forget the past, to fulfill ourselves through conformity. People don’t eat real food, but synthetic, they don’t make love (“Quick sex protects”), and above all, they don’t have children. Family, relationships are a risk; looking each other in the eye is a risk (obligatory courtesy prohibits it); reading, writing, and chatting are forgotten acts; desire is taboo. And what happens if a man, a single man, learns to read again? And what if a woman stops taking pills and regains her sanity? The poor robot, designed to serve humans, to prevent forgetting and dying, already wanted to kill itself before, now sees its inescapable existence as a sentence that truly will never end. Because in the devastating biblical parody that Tevis orchestrates, these two new Adams and Eves decide to fall in love and reproduce. But what is they thinking?
Why? Because in Bentley’s books, the man rediscovers his curiosity, his past, and thus manages to imagine a future. Sharing and connection restore to him a lost humanity, made up of “confusion, desire, restlessness, desperation,” contradictory components of life that only apparently conceal their fertile, ambitious, luminous counterparts, the beauty of error, of imperfection. In the crystalline, polished writing that accompanies us on this journey, we rediscover the irrational, powerful drive for life, which is not life if it does not allow for healing, freedom, truth, and ultimately: death—as a gift of meaning and a foundational limit that the robot, an inexact copy of both the human and the divine, cannot savor.
Inside you will find the outline of a path we have already taken, made of privacy and lobotomy, screens and alienation. You will see it clearly, and something buried inside you will want to scream, to shout that it loves, that it thinks, that it feels all the bad but also all the good. That doubt fertilizes us, enriches us, makes us fragile and risks breaking us into a million little pieces, and yet, without wanting to repair ourselves at all costs, in those cracks and fissures new blades of grass will always be ready to sprout.
“Others have felt what I feel and, sometimes, have managed to express the inexpressible.” Others, like Walter Tevis.
Written by Delis
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Walter Tevis, Solo il mimo canta al limitare del bosco, Mondadori, Milano, 2024
Original edition: Mockingbird, Doubleday, New York, 1980