Ho always felt great esteem and great affection for Pierluigi Battista. I’ve never seen a journalist read as much as him, except perhaps Domenico Quirico. He wrote beautiful books: my favorites are the most personal ones, My father was a fasciston the story of his father Vittorio, e The end of the dayon the premature death of his wife Silvia.
The last book is related to another of his works, Doctor Zhivago’s guiltin which Battista – we friends call him Pigi – had told the life of Boris Pasternak, a writer persecuted by the Soviet regime.
In the bookstore you can find it now My heroes, published by the Ship of Theseus. Battista’s heroes are Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, George Orwell. Writers trained in the climate of the anti-totalitarian leftand for this reason they found themselves alone in a century, the twentieth century, in which the left often found itself entangled in the web of totalitarianism (Orwell, for example, fought the Francoists but was horrified by the Stalinists who had their own comrades shot) .
Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
But politics is not the real key to understanding the book. It is existential loneliness, illness – both Camus and Orwell died of tuberculosis -, love that is not fully requited. Among the thousand ideas that this book made of books offers, there is one that struck me in particular.
“My heroes” by Pierluigi Battista (The Ship of Theseus).
Battista defines his heroes as “beautiful souls”giving the expression a positive reading, in line with that of the writer who had coined it, the Goethe of Wilhelm Meisterand in antithesis to the negative reading that Hegel instead gives it Phenomenology of the spirit.
A beautiful soul is perhaps naive, certainly pure. There is a beauty in the soul of each of us; and it is to her that books like those by Pierluigi Battista speak.
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All articles by Aldo Cazzullo.
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