This year I would like to reread the Iliad and then move on to a couple or so of the recent retellings, such as those by Madeline Miller and Pat Barker. His transformative achievement is certain to delight and fascinate all readers of Homer's indispensable classic. Imbuing the stuff of legend with a startling new relevancy and humanity, Baricco gives us The Iliad as we have never known it. With Andromache, Patroclus, Priam, and the rest, we are privy to the ghastly confusion of battle, the clamor of princely councils, the intimacies of the bedchamber”until finally only a blind poet is left to recount, secondhand, the awful fall of Ilium.

From the return of Chryseis to the burial of Hector, we see through human eyes and feel with human hearts the unforgettable events first recounted almost three thousand years ago ”events arranged not by the whims of the gods in this instance but by the dictates of human nature. Sacrificing none of Homer's panoramic scope, Baricco forgoes Homeric detachment and admits us to realms of subjective experience his predecessor never explored. As befits a show produced under the auspices of the Donmar, and which mostly takes place in First Class, this has swanky written all over it, from Paul Wills's design to Fergus O'Hare's ghostly soundscape and Paul Keogan's evocative lighting.A bold reimagining of our civilization's greatest tale of war, by the author of the acclaimed best seller Silk.Īlessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of twenty-one Homeric characters in the narrative idiom of our modern imagination.

The musical duel between the two men is at the heart of Alessandro Baricco's monologue, a neatly turned, self-consciously musical piece that riffs on the complications of desire and an original life lived out to the music playing in your head rather than the constraining choices of the real world. Further even than Jelly Roll Morton, the man who claimed to have invented jazz.

He might not have been able to bring himself to disembark, but his mind and his fingers could go anywhere on the 88 keys of the piano, and then a little bit further. Novecento never left the liner, and so never officially existed, but when he played the piano his imagination had no limits. It's about a jazz pianist called Danny Boodmann TD Lemon Novecento, who was found on the first day of a new century in a cardboard box atop the grand piano in the ballroom of a grand ocean-going liner. I f you turned the rumpled, care-worn trumpet player standing in front of us upside down, nothing would come out of his pockets, but he has a rich story to tell.

Novecento alessandro baricco english