The Boy I Was (Enlarged) (Italian Edition)

It had long been wondered whether Sergio Zavoli would tell his life story, which had been marked by being a protagonist during the happiest years of radio and television, as well as by the evidence of his talent as a writer and poet. And now there is a surprisingly modern book that, in a game of continuous temporal, thematic, and psychological references, combines the tension of the narrative with the solidity of the style and the versatility of the narration, confirming both creativity and rigor. The title alone reveals not only a link, but even a sort of contiguity between the years of adolescence, youth, and maturity and the moment when the author decides to "rake himself inside," as he put it, "the boy that I was": a mixture of published and unpublished memories and history, the alternating of rare and everyday matters, concrete and inner themes, elegiac, ironic, and tough tones, all marked by the dilemmas of a splendid and tragic contemporaneity, measured against the arcane privilege of being born into it and the weighty obligation to live it.

A long chapter of our lives has emerged, reconstructed and investigated through "a richness inspired by imagination, authenticated by reality," as Carlo Bo put it, adding: "It is evident - in much of what this 'master of scenarios and inquiries' writes, shows, and says - the intention to maintain within the framework of brightness, even expressive and stylistic, the force and jolts of consciousness, until it touches an even more eloquent, civil, and moral, ethics." This is so that there may remain, from seasons and common paths, that kind of counterpoint that is the unrepeatable existence of every man: small, hidden, yet a fragment and a symbol of the same humanity that has made, makes, and will make history.

It is the "lesson" that Zavoli, telling his own story, symbolically offers to a child, a tender nephew in whom he sees a sort of continuity not only of affection. It is a young book, with mixtures and intransigencies, sweetnesses and sorrows, disillusions and hopes, that involves many ages; and it is meant to be read - as Calvino said of authentically unusual books - "in one breath, and then again" and this is because, Bo wrote, "Zavoli inclines to give voice to his greatest speculation, let's say to his intelligence of the world, which for years has been scrutinizing and questioning in all directions." The boy that I was, the author tells us, "is in the end the attempt to understand what memory, from the most distant to the most impending, can leave to a child who seems, as I was at his age, on the path to becoming a writer, a word saved for a long time, in silence, by my mother's innocent imagination."

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