La tentazione del moderno. Gesualdo Bufalino e il romanzo europeo del primo Novecento

The work of Gesualdo Bufalino relies on a permanent dialogue with the great modernist models of European fiction. A whole network of allusions, innuendos and micro-quotations from the great novels of Mann, Kafka, Proust, Musil, Joyce, Woolf, is scattered among the pages of Diceria dell’untore, a novel which was conceived as a “serious game” using previous textual materials and recombining them in order to create a new architecture of meaning. In Bufalino’s following books as well, the central position assigned to the Ego coexists with a plot in which the inner experiences of the characters count more than the objective facts. There is an urgency of truth and meaning. The fact that this truth is fluid, relative and always renegotiable does not really matter: page after page, the author keeps betting on the meaning of living and writing. The existential predicament turns itself into a meta-literary predicament that is nurtured by the traditions and structures of the modernist novel.