“A ticket to Texel” is released today by Ronzani Editore (236 pages, 16 euros), a novel by Lucia Valcepina that blends the syncopated rhythm of jazz with the restlessness of a Europe in the balance. It is an intense emotional investigation that develops on a double temporal track: between the summer of 1999 and the present, twenty-three years later. It is a story written like a musical score, where the music is conceived as an urgency and the atmospheres resonate in a synesthetic way.
Lisa, a jazz guitarist with a restless soul devoted to freedom, with her “soft and alien personality” and an obsessive dedication to art, suddenly disappears from Milan, leaving only a note. It is not an escape, but an encrypted invitation to a real meeting: a series of letters and enigmatic clues intended for his brother Nicola and his friend Giulia, designed to force them to reflect on their past life together and on the precariousness, even emotional, of the present. Nicola, firm and pragmatic, and his ex-girlfriend Giulia, the narrator’s mirror image of Lisa, embark on an apparently non-sense journey at first, which winds through Central Europe, passing through Füssen, Nuremberg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam to reach the final destination, “the island of birds”, Texel, which has left indelible marks on their lives.
Giulia, who loves Lisa deeply and who searches for her soul in the love of music, thinks of her friend as if the guitar, perhaps a Telecaster rather than a Les Paul, were an extension of her body. During the trip she returns to think about the enthusiastic utopia of her youth lived with her friend, who faced difficulties in work and socialization. The trauma of the Covid-19 epidemic, the deaths, the reality of closed theaters and then again the bombs on Ukraine loom large. Lisa’s anger at a “low-definition life” and Giulia’s desire for “a residue of poetry” in soul-numbing years take center stage.
Musicophilia is the connective tissue of the work. Musical quotes are a bridge that crosses very different trends, apparently irreconcilable genres, from Iron Maiden to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, from Bruce Springsteen to Pink Floyd, up to Schubert’s compositions and the classical repertoire. The beating heart, however, remains Jazz, icons such as Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk, Mahalia Jackson, up to Italian masters such as Cerri, Cifarelli and Fasoli.
The author explains: “The novel explores the life of a musician in the contemporary world, in her aesthetic and existential choices, in a context historically dominated by male figures. Among the great names of jazz guitar such as Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass and John Scofield, the protagonist ideally takes up the threads of the artistic discourse started by Rosetta Tharpe, Mary Osborne and Emily Remler. She collects their legacy and shadows in a historical phase in which, following the pandemic emergency, the condition of female musicians becomes more fragile. Lisa, tired of negotiating her own identity and totally alien to the logic of the mainstream, obstinately tries to identify her own horizon of meaning, in spite of a saturated and competitive market. The novel is thus configured as a broad reflection on what music can represent in a disillusioned and hyper-technical society and on the value contribution that, never before in these times, it can give, when artistic research becomes the expression of a life choice”. In this labyrinth of suggestions and in a constant asynchrony with the events they have to experience, Nicola and Giulia will try to bring order to the chaos in an ending that is not at all predictable.
Lucia Valcepina, author and performer, writes in the cultural inserts of “La Provincia” of Como, Lecco and Sondrio. He has published dramaturgy essays for the magazine “Comunicazioni sociali” (Vita e Pensiero), reportages on the world of contemporary art, the audio story “Alfred and Jack” for Fabbrica dei Segni (with Lux Bradanini), and edited some volumes, including the collection of short stories by the Russianist Milli Martinelli “Ancora e semper April” (Biblioteca dei Libri Perduti), and the collective novel of the Schiribìz group, for the Library of Bormio, with the related writing workshop. He has created and staged monologues and theatrical performances on the themes of postmodernity and the literary voices of the twentieth century. In 2022 he published his first novel “The oxygen paradox” (Dominioni ed.), and in 2024, for the same publishing house, the fictionalized biography “Primordiale beauty” (Bertacchi Award) dedicated to the multifaceted figure of the abstractionist Carla Badiali. (by Paolo Martini)