Mico Argirò, a singer-songwriter from Campania (to be precise, from Agropoli, in the province of Salerno, in Cilento), returns to the scene.
But this time, the artist does not offer his audience a musical product, but rather tries his hand at literature, churning out the book “Le metro invisibili” (Edizioni Underground?), which the author himself defines as «a sort of metropolitan Odyssey»:
“The initial situation in which the protagonist finds himself is mine in 2017, when I arrived in Milan for work: a new city, which seemed cold and murderous. Absences to process, something to find again. Then the story gradually detached itself from my personal experience and transformed into an epic adventure, at times mythological. The models of this work, from Homer to Sanguineti, are part of my readings and rereadings”.
Set in the Milan subway system (each chapter is named after a stop), “The invisible subways” is a somewhat formative story, which follows the protagonist's growth path, from chapter to chapter:
The book is about a boy who arrives in Milan, like many today (but also yesterday). He has lost his girlfriend, and searches for her in the maze of the city's subways. This girl is a metaphor and the subways are portals to experience adventures beyond reality, deeply in reality, but so ideal and symbolic. Between these chapters, each named after a stop, the protagonist's journey of growth and education will unfold.
The most novel element of “Le metro invisibili” is the way it is written, defined by the author as “stereo writing”:
“It's a writing method that I invented for the occasion: the sheet is divided into three parts, like the sounds in songs, in mixes, that we hear in headphones, some on the right, some on the left, very much in the center. It's a musical experiment in written form where the sounds or entire scenes seen out of the corner of our eye happen on one side of our sensory perception. It's an aesthetic, pop, even avant-garde writing (I'm a fan of the avant-gardes, both historical and more modern), but all at the service of the content: the city, thus, becomes a co-protagonist of the story; the experience is immersive”.
“Le metro invisibili” has a preface by the writer and music journalist Michele Monina (MTV, Rolling Stone, Il Messaggero), who comments as follows:
“The invisible subways described (poeticized?) by Mico Argirò are invisible only to the naked eye, very visible with your eyes closed, and are, alas, much more liveable than the real subways, those in which we spend parts of our days, bottled up waiting for someone to uncork them sooner or later, allowing a breath of air to enter through that little hole, or perhaps to be able to get out. A melancholic Milan, the one that emerges from the pages of this book, of a strident beauty, because it contrasts with the anxiety of those who seek without knowing if they will find”.
BOOK INFORMATION BY ANDREA COCCO
(Edizioni Underground editor?)
Considering the obvious reference in the title to a milestone in Italian literature, one might be tempted, out of caution, to start with a negative definition, a warning about what not to expect from this book, but it would be a bit cowardly and would leave the feeling of describing a shadow by talking about the objects that cast it. Yet from this temptation we can deduce a first timid statement: the book cannot be labeled without a hitch. First of all, for the graphic originality of the “Stereo Writing” which, visually detaching quotes, memories or sensory inputs, highlights them, while leaving the main narrative at the center: it is the reader who decides how much space to give to the marginality of the environment and of thought, exactly as in real life. But even the genre is not immediate: is it an experimental novel? Educational? A travel book? All of these things, but some more than others. It certainly has an educational soul, if we look at the arrival in Lampugnano of yet another boy with great hopes and the evolution of his confidence and awareness over the course of the chapters; but this is a retrospective consideration, which perhaps we feel obliged to make to reassure ourselves that we have “understood” the meaning, the purpose, the message of the book. While reading, when the characters, the streets, the squares and the alienating mechanism of the Milanese chaos come to life before us, what we instinctively feel in “The Invisible Metros” is the sense of the journey. Many journeys in reality because, while maintaining a clear narrative line, the writing has no qualms about getting confused between memories, descriptions, dialogues, symbolisms or actions, in a morbid whirlwind of underground movements from which the protagonist cannot escape, like a sentence. It would be tempting to linger on some scenes to which we have become attached, but we cannot: the reader is forced to go down the stairs again and squeeze into an overcrowded carriage, until the next station. And after a few stops we realize that it is not only the scenery that changes: not even the protagonist is the same. Or rather, even though it is always the same individual, his facets through the chapters, or stops, reflect his psychological fragmentation, his identity doubt, the realizations that require gestations so long as to make one suspect that the subway does not travel back and forth only in space. Thanks to this protean nature, urban realism and fantastic inspiration can blend harmoniously to give life to unrepeatable scenes, such as the dreamy dialogues with the masters of the past, the contacts with the afterlife that dare circus atmospheres as a backdrop for moving and surreal encounters, the uncontrolled aspirations that fly between the spires of the cathedral together with the protagonist, and much more. All you have to do is get on the Metro, and let yourself be carried away.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Mico Argirò is a human being. As a singer-songwriter he published the albums “Tra le rose e il cielo” (2009), “Canzoni” (2010), “Vorrei che morissi d'arte” (2016) and “Irriverentə – Canzoni dagli anni 20” (2022), the first album printed on condoms and the first album in Italy with the schwa in the title. He composes music for the theater and short films, in 2020 he was among the Italian artists of the “MIT – Music Industry Talks” project of the Italian Cultural Institute of Dakar. He teaches and writes scientific articles on literature. “Le metro invisibili” is his first book: a contemporary and mythological adventure among the stops of the Milan metro, written in “Scrittura stereo”.
Article published on November 2, 2023 - 17:15
