I «ricordi di Pietro». La prima intuizione luttuosa di Emanuele Trevi

Abstract

The mourning portraits in the work of Emanuele Trevi, from Senza verso (2004) to La casa del mago (2023), including the better-known Sogni e favole (2019) and Due vite (2020), may be read as a “mournful intuition”. The usefulness of this formulation lies in its ability to bring together two characteristic features of Trevi’s work: his engagement with meditation on death, already crucial to his first novel I cani del nulla (2003), and his affinity with an initiatory conception of literature. Senza verso marks the first work in which the portrait of an exceptional individual (the poet Pietro Tripodo) also becomes a device through which the author recounts the painful process of working through a personal bereavement. This trajectory appears to follow the constructivist models of contemporary psychology, grounded in the survivors’ need to elaborate a meaningful discourse around loss, often through the practice of writing.