Gianluca Morozzi, "Mortimer Blues"

Opening at random a book, belonging to the undergrowth of our contemporary fiction, with one hand covering the title page, it becomes difficult, by now, to distinguish one male author from the other by style. Leaving aside, of course, those who don’t know how to write, even among the good there is a kind of transversal language that many writers have in common, partly borrowed from their frequentation with Americans. This, without detracting from the effectiveness of “Mortimer Blues”, a long story, rather than a novel, by the musician writer Gianluca Morozzi, born in 1971.

Although even the content does not differ much from the trend of the youthful inner confession accompanied by background music, Mortimer blues stands out for two elements: the undeniable musical competence of the author and that tremendously universal sense of failed aspirations.

The protagonist is called Vincenzo but we only learn about it halfway through the work, with a fairly original technical twist. His name is doubled and then tripled in Vincent and Vega, marking the pace of an incipient mental alienation. He is a progressively more and more cultured and experienced musician but, in reality, incapable of great inspiration. He spends his life trying to write the “opera”, the one that will differentiate him from all the others, which will make him immortal, which will remain in the history of music. He is advised to study, before producing something new, and he starts doing it with an obsessiveness that sucks him in. He frequents everything, classics and contemporaries, and then again new contemporaries, because, in the meantime, time passes and he is no longer a teenager who puts together two notes for the girl he is in love with.

In this, Vincenzo / Vincent is a metaphor for all artists, composers, sculptors, painters, poets. Vincenzo is the singer who enrolls in the talent, he is the failed writer who reviews other people’s books hoping, by dint of dismantling texts, to learn how to write a masterpiece. And the search is prolonged, it becomes infinite, an end in itself, the means takes the place of the end.

“I’m not going crazy, I’m studying to write records, the symphony of the gods, the opera of the century, I’m not crazy, how many great artists were judged crazy by their ignorant contemporaries? They weren’t crazy, they were beyond the understanding of those louts! I will write the supreme work, the definitive work. When I’m done studying and listening to everything, of course. “

We do not know what Vincenzo lives on, perhaps with the job he was doing as a boy, but certainly, contrary to what his friends reproach him at the beginning of his non-existent career, he did not “replace the dream with concreteness”, he did just the opposite, he condemned himself to an eternal artistic youth without the maturity of a talent that does not exist.

“In the end we have to give up opportunities because you have nailed yourself to the real world in these absurd ways and we never take off, you know? Because you have chosen the concreteness of the dream. This is what I mean. “

And, in fact, all that Vincenzo will do in his slightly paranoid life will be to hide his lack of talent, except to admit it only when drunk, destroying by hammering the poor works produced.

The tone is easy, ironic, funny, but Morozzi’s story is steeped in nostalgia for a time in which all possibilities and hopes were still open — the time of adolescence — and where the bitter truth has not still surfaced. The story is pervaded by a cruel sense of failure, incompleteness, waste, and also by a spasmodic desire for redemption, so well expressed with the image of turtles running towards the sea.

“But the thing we care about is the fact that getting to the sea isn’t entirely impossible. Someone gets there in that damned water, so it can be done, so it can be done, right? “