Querelle (english version) E-Book

Piero Buscemi

• Herausgeber: ZeroBook Edizioni
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

"A long story with an autobiographical nature, a memorial to stop the desire to escape: the story of Piero and friends, restless young people debated between existence and emptiness, between desire and disaffection, memories that unfold with a ferocious disenchantment, by slippage and temporal overlap. The sliding places of the crossing (from the United Kingdom to Rome, from Messina to the Ionian coast) offer clues to this intolerance, but it is the writing (nervous, jerky, like a photographic flash) code and fresco of disorientation: in a sort of " probation "vague thinking, a measure of Kerouachian wandering that sometimes deludes itself into rediscovering existence" (Maria Gabriella Canfarelli)

Published for the first time in 2004, "Querelle" is now available for the ZeroBook editions with a preface by Vincenzo Tripodo.

Piero Buscemi was born in Turin in 1965. Editor of the online periodical www.girodivite.it, he has published: "Past, present and future" (1998), "Ossidiana" (2001, 2013), "Apologia di Pensiero" (2001) , "Querelle" (2004), The island of dogs (2008, ZeroBook 2016), "Cucunci" (2011), "The shadows of the sea" (2017, published by Bibliotheka), Enne (ZeroBook 2020). He edited the anthology of poems Beside a glass of wine (ZeroBook 2016); and the anthologies of articles by various authors published on Girodivite: Parole rubate (2017), Celluloide (2017). For the volume of poems Iridea by Alice Molino (ZeroBook, 2019) she contributed with a choice of photographic suggestions. Winner of several literary awards, some of his short stories and poems are contained in some national anthologies. The novel "Querelle" was translated into English and published by Pulpbits Press (United States). He is one of the founders of the Cultural Association "Literary Aromas" of Messina.

Leseprobe

Piero Buscemi

Querelle

with a preface by Vincenzo Tripodo

 

ZeroBook

2021

Original Title: Querelle / by Piero Buscemi

This book was published by ZeroBook: www.zerobook.it.

ZeroBook first edition: 2021, october

ebook: ISBN 978-88-6711-209-8

All rights reserved in all countries. This book is published on a non-profit basis and is released under Creative Commons Licenses. Reproduction for commercial purposes is prohibited. The text can be quoted or developed as long as the license type is maintained, and the publisher or author is notified.

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Email: [email protected]

Preface, by Vincenzo Tripodo

- Hi Jena, I’ve a request. The new version of Querellewill go to press soon, would you like to write the preface? An A4 page is enough. 

- And what do I know about what comes out? Maybe I don't even manage to put three words in a row, or maybe I’ll start and never stop. Anyway, sure, I’ll write it. I would be honored. 

I’m trying to swallow the regurgitation of a sense of guilt that I had repressed. The last time Piero asked me to write a preface to one of his texts on theater, I answered in the same way. I would be honored. I believe it has reached its third edition and there is still no trace of my preface. But not this time. I want to keep my commitment. I owe it to him. I owe it to Querelle.

Piero has fixed on paper the subversive strength of our adolescence. It was ours, and of many others. The black sheep. Those of the opposite direction. To everything and everyone. We did not recognize ourselves in our peers and we looked for teachers among the pages of the books we devoured and in the music that was sweating inside ourselves. And where the rest of the world had chosen the oral word as its preferred form of communication, we preferred the written word. This is why we spent the nights of an entire summer - sitting at a bar, surrounded by teenagers in heat - writing dialogues, passing a notebook around, just like in a relay race. Evening after evening. And also learning to know each other.

An elective affinity - to quote Goethe. Maybe even a little aristocratic, in the worst sense of the word. In fact, with that writing exchange, we were the ones who cut everyone else out. A sort of revenge against the short-sighted hierarchies of the pack. 

But those were the years of the Red and the Black. In the sense that either the blood rose in our eyes out of indignation or it was the blackness of discouragement while we were looking at hundreds of lemmings going towards the ineluctable abyss.

Then there was the trip to England. Our dreamed Shangri-La. An imaginary place where life was better than here. Where the music was better than here. Where women were more generous than here. But then we understood that the land of Albione was far from perfect, indeed it was just the opposite. 

During the time of hedonism of the Reagan years and the Italian Pentapartito we were a bit of a fish out of water. Our readings and beliefs had a strong vintage flavor. As England, the 70s were also a myth for us. A time when people worked hard to counter stifling systems. Where they even fought physically for their ideas, if necessary. Surrounded by the mediocre indifference in which our generation wallowed happily, we tried to go in the opposite direction. I said we tried - at least.

We certainly dreamed. The dream, for example, of printing and distributing on paper our anger against those who were destroying our own homeland. Against those who allowed a man like Giovanni Falcone or Peppino Impastato to be blown up. Against those who broke the pen of Giuseppe Fava and swept away the I Siciliani newspaper. To do this, I had to enroll in the special journalists register in order to have a responsible director and be in compliance with the law. After the first overwhelming number, the reaction of the system arrived on time. I am urgently summoned by the Order of Messina and my registration is revoked. Querelle can no longer be published - except clandestinely. Too bad that the Internet was still in the future, otherwise we would have found a powerful channel for distributing our ideas - as an alternative to the mimeograph.

Despite everything and everyone, Querelle is alive and well. Almost forty years have passed from 1984 to today, but both the ad hoc associationand us are still in full swing. I continued to express myself through cinema and theater, while Piero, true to form, continued to give birth to words and worlds. I still remember sitting around a small table drinking hot beer from oxidized cans, trying to find a name for our magazine. We had came up with about fifty names, but we could not make up our minds when - after a heated debate where it was impossible to find a solution - someone stood up nervously and shouted: “this is a big querelle (quarrel), we will never get out of it! “. So that was the exact moment in which everything took shape. We understood that straightaway. We had accidentally found the name that would define our actions and our lives for years. 

Vincenzo Tripodo

Querelle

1

One day we should all stop, with our different ideas, and look each other in the eyes. We should understand our lights and our nights, our thoughts and our craziness, our desires and our fears. We should carefully manage wisdom and offer it to those who ask for it,  without having to hear that someone in his grave is better off. We should stop wanting things for the last time, obedient executors, illegitimate children of our instincts.

One day, we should only stop.

I would have done it some time ago, if I had not pondered too long on opaque verses to be hidden. If I had not transformed them into the usual song that moves the soul, exalting in a

nostalgic memorial. The usual, without its chain reaction, in the shadows that colors our days. Sung or chanted to calm my vehemence and presumption that life continued to inflict on me. I would have felt more coherent if I had told everything to fuck off. Also things that had once had a different value. I had also removed this other thought and the persons who had stayed near me. I felt nausea when continuing to waste words further. Not even time could bring me back once in awhile to feign not noticing it, even when I was forced to. 

Also in those reserved and particular moments, when I improvised an embarrassed life choice, I was a contemplative solo orator. Sitting on the stairs that lead to an unknown house, I masochist, waited for strangers to tell me to leave. Only when I found myself in a train that was taking me to my hometown, did I rediscover my existence. Time with its doubled edged sword, I had consumed lazily pondering over university texts in my destiny as a student in search of a position, forgetting those that remained to the next exam session. I did not take the exam.

I presented myself one morning, prepared and arrogant to provoke the custodian, who more bored than irritated, continued to repeat that there was no English exam on that day.

I focused him ironically not overlooking his swollen but well hidden abdomen- at least he had tried to hide it- in small ribbed corduroy trousers. Constipated brown. Two sizes too small. The zipper that exalted his masculinity with plans to escape from Alcatraz. That tightness that modeled his belly, promising one day to qualify him to join the eunuch choir at the Conservatory of Messina.