The moment the writer gets it right

Sometimes a writer is immersed in a novel, has planned its structure, has worked on the characters, and perhaps has written pages and pages of it. But at a certain moment –it could happen any day, even on one of those days when you feel least inspired–, they write a sentence and immediately realize that in that sentence “there is the novel”. It is a truly glorious moment that the author will most likely celebrate with a shout, or by abandoning writing and going for a walk, or going out onto the balcony to light a cigarette, as the case may be.

I am almost sure that this is exactly what the Italian writer Sandro Veronesi experienced when he had already written more than half of his novel Black September (Edicions del Periscopi, translated by Pau Vidal).

is a reading as agile and exciting as it is for the protagonists to navigate with the sailboat So, in a novel that portrays this transition from childhood to adolescence, there is a day when the author, Sandro Veronesi, writes this paragraph: “In reality, what began was the descent into the schizophrenic stage, that of interference and erect ears (and never again, never again, that formidable carefree attitude)”.

And after this parenthesis, I think Veronesi stopped typing and made one of the displays of absolute satisfaction I mentioned earlier, perhaps we could call it euphoria.

I had never read such a simple and accurate way to describe the moment of closing the door on childhood and entering this path that begins with adolescence and leads you to adulthood. You will never again feel that formidable carefree attitude. Perhaps, if we were warned at that very moment, we would refuse to grow up, making one last childish tantrum.

Black September is a reading as agile and exciting as it is for the protagonists to sail with the sailboat Tivatù along the coast of Fiumetto. The novel advances as the sailboat does on the rough sea, jumping and splashing us and leaving us soaked all of a sudden. By the way, what a pleasure this outpouring of nautical terms in Catalan that Pau Vidal offers us! We are a seafaring country and we know practically nothing about the lexicon of the sea. What a sadness.

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Black September, Sandro Veronesi puts his great narrator's tools at the service of a story that begins small – a pre-adolescent's first summer love – and ends up transforming into a gripping personal and family drama. And as if all this were not enough, the novel ends with a surprising and dazzling epilogue that rounds it all off.