M. Campagnoli, S. Graziani
Dispacci dai Caraibi

2 October 2015

Take a journey and recount chiefly the state of abandon, the sense of permanence that prevents any possible and in any case unwelcome return. Matteo Campagnoli writes from the Caribbean region, i.e. from a foreign land from which he has ended up completely inseparable. Dispacci dai Caraibi [“Dispatches from the Caribbean”] is the latest volume in the fine series of Travel Books published by Humboldt: a series that stands out for the care with which it has been produced and that with each new publication seems to up the ante on the basic idea without ever exhausting it, but on the contrary continually redefining its boundaries. Matteo Campagnoli’s writing is essential and at times telegraphic, but able to convey the sense of an encounter (as in the case of his conversation with the Nobel prizewinner Derek Walcott) through an implacable questioning of his own point of view. The farther we go into the narration the more the vision grows rarefied: St. Lucia, Trinidad and Martinique are the places on which the author casts his gaze, in parallel to meetings with Earl Lovelace, V.S. Naipaul, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. The story proceeds along a dual course that goes from reportage to memory and from the memory to the eyes, permeating the form of the book itself. Its coauthor is the Bolognese photographer Stefano Graziani, who makes his own contribution to the most authentic sense of the text, communicating its spare realism with a white light capable of illuminating and blurring the places at one and the same time. Dispacci dai Caraibi presents itself as a guide for a journey that envisages no return: you go to the Caribbean to be captured by it deep down.

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