Alessandro Baricco is in hospital. He is ill, he has been diagnosed with leukemia, a long course of therapy that will start from a bone marrow transplant operation. He chose to speak from the hospital bed, communicating his illness through social media. In a few days it is his birthday, 64 on January 25th. He jokes about it a bit, plays down, minimizes, concludes his announcement by sending hugs to the reader. The photo shows his computer leaning against the hospital bedside table next to a copy of Dickens’ “Pickwick Circle”, a very dear book to him.
“Um, there is news to give and this time I have to give it myself, personally – writes Baricco – It’s not that great, I warn you. What happened is that five months ago I was diagnosed with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. I was sick, but not that bad, come on. When you have a disease like this the best thing you can do is have a blood stem cell transplant, which I will do in a couple of days (well, it’s not that simple , we’ve been working on it for months, it’s a work of patience) “.
“To give me the stem cells – announces the writer – will be my sister Enrica, a woman who in my eyes was already quite special before this adventure, let alone now. I wouldn’t want to add much more. Maybe, here, I still want to say that every moment I feel the good fortune of living all this with many true friends around, smart children, an irresistible life partner, and the best Bull since the Scudetto. These are things, the first three, that change your life. fourth certainly does not spoil you “.
On the bedside table, as mentioned, a copy of the “Pickwick Circle”, a work that is part of the writer’s life: “It is a book to which I owe a lot – he wrote a few years ago – but for purely private reasons, and therefore insignificant. I have the following curious relationship with Dickens: I adore him and I don’t particularly like his books. “And precisely at the final lines of the Pickwick Club, a young Baricco, in the Rai program conducted in 1994 with Giovanna Zucconi entitled “Pickwick, of reading and writing” had dedicated a comment on the farewell between writer and reader, between his characters and readers when it comes to the end of a novel.
What happens when you are about to say goodbye to the characters of a novel, the Turin writer said, “is a little pain”, an experience known to the reader and the author himself. A sense of nostalgia and lightness at the same time: the same that Baricco now uses to make his announcement.
On the whole, Baricco now concludes, “I see it well. Don’t count on me for a while, but on the other hand, don’t get used to it too much because the doctors who have gone into my head to heal me have all the air of being able to do it quickly enough “. Next to him in the hospital is his sister Enrica, president of Casa Oz, an association that welcomes the families of sick children. His partner, the pianist Gloria Campaner, just a few days ago had told of his lockdown in the writer’s house, between music and thoughts.
The news of the disease comes a few days after the announcement of an innovative project by the Turin writer: Alessandro Baricco is in fact the first Italian literary author to generate an NFT starting from one of his works. In the first days of 2022, in fact, Baricco launched on OpenSea, together with a team of experts, the first Italian literary work in NFT format entitled “Novecento. The Source Code”. The NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a certificate that certifies the ownership and origin of a digital asset. Baricco therefore “coined” as a single work of art, a unique piece, the recording of his own vocal interpretation of the Novecento, a novel that made him famous internationally. The Novecento Nft is already coined on the OpenSea marketplace (listenable on opensea.io/Nvcnt) and will be auctioned in March.
Just writing in Repubblica about this latest initiative, Baricco had anticipated, by the way, the theme of his illness: “So. On the first day of 2022, after the dinner was disposed of, and escaped the doctors who were marking me closely (but that’s another story) I closed myself in a small recording studio. A friend who works with sound fixed the microphone and other things that he knew.When everything was ready, I started to read Twentieth century, from the first line to the last “
Alessandro Baricco. My Novecento auctioned as NFT
by Alessandro Baricco
“There is something happening today – explained Baricco – and it is happening in the square formed by these four points: blockchain, cryptocurrencies, Nft, Dao. There is something inside that is probably destined to change our lives a lot. , as it happened ten years ago with Apps, for example. So I said to myself: I want to end up inside that square and the best way to see what was in there was to do a NFT. It seemed to me that no one had done it with the literature and this too attracted me a lot, to mess up a little the cards of my literary productive world, which are still very ancient. With the help of some experts I produced this Nft, which is both a new chapter of The Game and the ‘yet another chapter in my history with that of the twentieth century, which is probably the source code of all my work “.