«Tall, mild-mannered, with relaxed shoulders and a perpetually amused gaze, he was like an older brother to me. It was a kind of huge gravitational field – for all of us, actually. The immobile center around which we have always revolved, even if in increasingly larger orbits…»: this is how Martino Gozzi, in his novel "The Book of the Rain" (Bompiani, 2023, pp. 204, also e-book) introduces us Simon.
Simone playing left handed bass like Paul McCartney, who had a band, wrote music. Simone who was so good as to be bound to success, in life and with people. Simone who left too soon. Between past and present, between memory and inner reflection, the narrator-author then tells us about the slow and heroic farewell of a special young man and the trace he left in the life of his friends. Because Simone, in life and even after his death, remains the touchstone, the point of reference, the indispensable yardstick against which to measure the stages of a life: transfers, Ferrara, Turin, writing, marriage, fatherhood, music, changes. Simone was there, is there and will be there as can only happen to people who have the gift of knowing how to love and be loved.
Novel-memoir in continuous comings and goings from the light of youth to the shadows of adulthood, "The Book of the Rain" is both a literary and personal adventure as the author, Martino Gozzi, tells us:
«I started writing "The Book of the Rain" seven or eight months after the death of a close friend, Simone. In those first months I was too confused, too disoriented, to imagine new projects, but I was already looking around me for someone to talk to about Simone, someone to exchange anecdotes and memories with. At that time I realized how difficult it is to express pain and share it with others: I, for example, was afraid of being overwhelmed by emotions, and then I perceived a sort of social prohibition around mourning, a taboo. We don't talk about it because the most important thing is to be strong and move forward, move on. That's why I started writing: I felt the need to find a space for that pain, for that bewilderment, albeit in the flow of life that inevitably continued to flow».
What was it like writing such a personal book? Have you ever felt like giving up everything?
«No, I never thought of giving up everything, even if it is true that it took me some time to find my voice, my stride. I had never written a mémoir and I had never laid bare, so to speak: before finding my way I had to proceed by trial and error. I almost always wrote in the evening, after putting my daughter to bed, when the working day was over and the emails stopped. Gradually, that became the most beautiful moment of the day, the space where I was free to feel like myself. Diving into the book, night after night, I had the feeling of traveling through time, of finding Simone and our group of friends each time through the seasons we have lived together, like everyone else: childhood, adolescence, studies, work, adulthood. I also happened to cry at my desk, and I said to myself: what's wrong with that?».
Was the final text the result of a lot of revision work or did it emerge, so to speak, spontaneously?
“Everyone has their own method. I proceed very slowly and I re-read the pages I wrote aloud very often. Unlike others who advance quickly and then make a large number of revisions, for me each chapter is built very gradually, through infinite micro-adjustments. I've never had the good fortune to write out of hand, I must say: for this reason, usually, during the long gestation of a book, I keep three or four notebooks in which I write down everything that could be useful to me. Names, ideas, details, quotes, memories, expressions that have remained with me».
What did this book give you and what did this book take away from you, whether it gave you or took away something?
“Here I have to make a confession. It's something I've never even confessed to myself, but at some unconscious level, as I wrote, I was convinced that the enterprise I'd embarked on would sooner or later allow me – I don't know exactly how, thanks to the magic some stories, I guess – to get in touch with Simone. That is, to overcome 'space and light,' as Battiato sang, to meet him again. Then when I finished the book I realized that this had already happened, actually. It had happened while I was writing, during all those evenings. And this is what I hope will happen to those who open the book to read it: that, at least for an instant, they can find themselves facing Simone, in all his vitality and overflowing enthusiasm».