Good commentary

I suppose every writer hopes to have readers, people who will take the time to go page after page unraveling the mystery of language and its ability to communicate in reading what was created in writing.

Like a music score in front of the interpreter, the literary text waits for the reader to play its melody and recreate with it the world of concepts, actions and emotions, impressions and images every literary work composes with only words, the words of our everyday language.  

Good interpreters, enthusiastic readers are what every writer hopes to have. Few are the ones who know of their readers or hear from them; none can be sure that someone has not only read, but enjoyed the experience as a personal enrichment, as an added wonder to their lives.

I should consider myself lucky to have received the following comment from someone who actually took my Under the Walnut Tree and for a few hours revived on her own mind the characters and their actions and desires. Someone who belonged for a short while to the world of my fantasy.

"I really enjoyed your novel--wrote this reader--, and have talked to NN, who was at your book reading the same evening I attended and we had a nice discussion over your novel. Have you started at least thinking of your second novel?… I sure hope so."

And, to be truthful, I also hope for the same.

Hopeful Fantasy

Reading should be fun and a source of joy. The intellect and sentiments should be engaged with ideas and emotions.

Both are very much present in my  novel Under the Walnut Tree, together with exhilarating flights of hopeful fantasy and an impressive geography.

A Novel of Youth

My novel, Under the Walnut Tree, was published some years ago.

I wrote it a year or so before as an exercise in evocation of an age most people remember as much better than what it was: the fleeting age of early youth.

In the novel reality is reproduced slightly differently as our everyday reality. The fictional characters, actions and places are more than representations of reality, the figurations of fantasy, as memory of the past has also transformed what it was in a dreamlike world of an ideal age, untouched by time.

In this, the novel follows a long tradition of narratives of youth.

A form of decency

Although in my novel one could read a negative, escapist view of humankind into a fantasized ideal world of nature and its creatures, deep down I find impossible to deny the value of the human species as a highly evolved animal whose self consciousness might work against its own desire of perfection.

Humanity might be to many condemn to a bleak future as no answer seems available to solve the question of the imperiled collective future.

Fantasy is not an answer, although it provides a symbolic representation of a better world. A world in which naturally decent, purer beings live in harmony with nature and themselves.  

The following quote from Cultural Amnesia, a book by Clive James, seems an appropriate approach to the problem:

"The only answer comes from faith: faith that the rule of decency--which at last, and against all the odds, looks as if it might prevail--began in humanism, and can't long continue without it." (851)

A Poem

UNDER THE WALNUT TREE

When I face what has left my life,

I bow.  I walk outside into the cold,
rain nesting in my hair.
All the houses near me
have their lights on.  Somewhere,
there is a deep listening.
I stand in the dark for a long time
under the walnut tree, unable
to tell anyone, not even the night,
what I know.  I feel the darkness
rush towards me, and I open my arms.

This poem by Lynn Martin has the same title

of my novel. It suggests a lot of what the novel means

and it could explain why I chose such title.