‘Black September’ by Veronesi, Gigio Bellandi’s last summer in Versilia

Sandro Veronesi is a great writer. He knows how to keep the reader suspended throughout a novel, he knows how to make him vibrate in anticipation of an ending announced as shocking. He knows how to create pathos, complicity with the reader, empathy and anxiety. And so it also happens in his latest novel, ‘Black September’, published once again (the thirteenth, to be precise) by La nave di Teseo. A story in which the protagonist, Gigio Bellandi is an elderly man who remembers when he was 12 years old and she lived her last summer in Versilia, in Fiumetto, with her Irish mother and her sister Gilda – both very delicate, white and with red hair, sensitive to the sun to the point that the 9-year-old girl could stay on the beach, at Bagno Stella, only in the less hot and sunny hours – while his father, a great sailing enthusiast and owner of a boat, Tivatù, with whom he traveled by sea whenever he could, went up and down from Vinci and Florence where he worked as a criminal lawyer, before an event that would change everything forever.

While waiting for this, announced from the beginning and chronologically already framed – even in the title – in one of the most dramatic and shocking historical moments of the 70s, the Palestinian terrorist assault on the Munich ’72 Games with the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes and the murder of a German policeman, Veronesi tells the emotions of a teenager who discovers love and believes he has finally achieved happiness. Thanks to his mother, little Gigio, a native English speaker (when he grows up he will become an interpreter and a translator), manages to become inseparable from the most beautiful thirteen-year-old girl on the beach, Astel Raimondi, daughter of a Tuscan entrepreneur named Lucido and a beautiful Ethiopian.

Through Gigio’s memories, Veronesi retraces a historical period that he lived through and that excites him a little: the marbles on the beach that run on tracks shaped with the backside, the music of David Bowie, Joe Cocker or Procol Harum, the Olympics and the various sports heroes, from Merkx eternal winner above Gimondi to Mark Spitz, Klaus Dibiasi or Novella Calligaris, the passion for Juventus or Jacky Ickx’s passion for Ferrari. He does this by trying to look at life again with the innocent eyes of a child, despite knowing that, at the end of that summer, there is an event looming that will change everything and, we know right away, will happen at the same time as the tragic one. of Munich.

And so, suspended between the wait for an announced event and the discovery of life, love, the adult world of an adolescent, the reader is transported to the summer in Versilia of 1972. Not content to keep him on the gridiron, the writer he also delights in a misleading and equally important digression to heighten the pathos: he returns with the story to the protagonist’s recent past, to his life as an adult with his wife who witnesses a tragedy on the beach.

An event that upon closer inspection does not concern anything about past history, but manages to make it even more distressing and anxiety-inducing the scene in which he talks about Gigio’s game of crawling under the cabins, digging in the sand and advancing belly-up in a claustrophobic and apparently dangerous environment. Veronesi’s writing, as always, is engaging, capable of attracting the reader and capturing his attention even when he recounts normal situations and describes simple images. Because, in reality he is never completely honest and does nothing to hide this aspect of his narrating face: even if he talks about a 12 year old in love, if he talks about a father with a maniacal passion for his boat, of ‘uncle’ Giotti who out of habit always leaves the last morsel on the plate or of a 9 year old girl who is more mature and independent than her older brother for whom she feels a sense of protection, deep down she leaves something unfinished.

The situation or character remains floating in a world under which a parallel reality travels. The real one that is destined to rise to the surface and take over. And this is always there, even when there is nothing underneath. And so the wait for the event, which is a looming presence throughout the novel, becomes explicit in the end and it’s truly amazing. Because, if you look closely, it’s not surprising at all. Veronesi deceived us and transported us into his game by making us ‘write’ an ending imagined several times during the 290 pages of the story. An ending that has changed several times in our minds and which in the end is not what we had imagined.

‘Black September’ is a book where Veronesi does not reach the literary heights of ‘Caos Chaos’ nor does it create a superb narrative structure as for ‘Il hummingbird’, but plays with the reader with suggestions, more or less true information alongside authentic misdirections (from Gigio’s mother’s invective in English against a “bastard” who looks through binoculars” to tragedy witnessed by the adult Gigio’s wife), promises of imminent twists that never arrive, until the final epilogue in which the revelation of the event that changed his life leaves one amazed and Throughout the book we wait for the moment in which the narrative will change pace (as in ‘The Hummingbird’ with the death of his daughter), but this time Veronesi changes the game and, despite the title, this time the narrative flows linearly without jolts or narrative tears.