“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“Being unreasonable, acting contrary to what is required, is the attitude of someone who considers other possibilities.”
We have learned, through much reading, that the books that teach us the most are those that demand a great deal from us. They ask us to go along with them, to delve deeper; sometimes they require time to sink in, or a second reading; they ask for time, concentration, and even a sense of surrender—an act of faith in the flow, like letting oneself float down a river without knowing all its bends, dangers, or sudden vistas. Yet, after all these demands, a book like
*Disappear* carves a groove, an indelible mark, even when full comprehension eludes us. Especially then. “If possible, do not assign a specific meaning to what you hear; doing so would block out other possible meanings.”
In a Venice swallowed by fog, a writer wanders in search of answers: he knows he does not want to write about himself; he knows that, for him, such a thing holds no relevance. But what *does* matter? Slowly, the outline of a story emerges from the mist—a story that is not his own, yet has something to tell him. It is the ghost of Amalia, a piano prodigy in the era of Ravel and Stravinsky who one day withdrew from the stage, leaving behind neither a trace nor an explanation. What happened? And so, with an exquisitely elegant shift in perspective, Amalia recounts her life and her choice—not by speaking of herself, but by telling the stories of the other lives that brushed against hers, much like a photograph where the photographer accidentally appears in the frame due to an unexpected reflection.
To speak of this book without betraying its poetry is nearly impossible—it is like trying to describe one sense using another; the result will always be incomplete and flawed. It would require a poetic gift that the writer himself can neither wield nor conjure. And yet, attempting to do it justice feels like a necessity. For in all the lives flowing—more or less impetuously—through these pages, we glimpse questions of meaning—inevitably unresolved—that reshape our sensibilities as readers: Valente speaks of art and talent, of audiences, of will and desire, of discipline; she writes of flight—of many flights—of teaching, and of the nature of a vocation and how it determinedly sidesteps the verb “must.” She walks constantly on the brink of madness, tracing its contours and revealing that the madman or madwoman—the one who turns their back on common sense, however sound it may be, to choose a different path invisible to most—is, and perhaps always has been, the true mad one. Such are the mad, the absent, the deviants, the vanished; those who feel too much or too little, who choose dissonance, the trip-up, the unexpected. In the labyrinth of vital digressions these pages choose to follow (like someone moving through fog without fear), we find no judgments or pronouncements, but rather uncertain epiphanies—ones that refuse to settle for the mere “refuge of a moment.”
Every line, every word demands of the reader the same care and attention shown by the author—a “piercing solicitude”: they ask to leave behind something more, something that neither stops nor can be stopped (despite a final prayer)—as Bassi Maestro sang when he spoke of “the irrepressible urge to pose myself unanswerable questions.” If there is anything good in us (we humans, we readers)—anything that builds rather than destroys—it is the act of listening to the other, the gaze turned outward, the search for what is relevant: that which uplifts us anew, that which truly matters. Moving through the fog, hoping to get lost. And, now and then, to find oneself again. Because “only in the dark hours is the soul round.”
Written by Delis
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Francesca Valente, Scomparire, Ponte alle Grazie, Milano, 2026