Read Online Back to Bologna by Michael Dibdin - Free Book Online Page A

the sheet of heavy, deckle-edged Fabriano paper, rich in linen and made by hand using methods essentially unchanged since the thirteenth century, then thoughtfully replaced the solid black sculpted cap over its rhodinised 18-carat gold glans. He had chosen these writing tools as appropriate to the task he had just completed, a piece of cheap journalistic fluff designed to promote the recently-released film–very loosely based on a misreading of the superficial plot level of his best-known novel–in some American celebrity gossip rag sold to semi-literate sadsacks at supermarket checkouts.
    But as always, the choice had not been easy. Each of the rooms on the upper floor of the villa was a scriptorium, and each quite differently designed and equipped. It was a question of selecting the right one for the assignment in hand, and Edgardo always had at least five on the go at any given time. For an article due to be published in the prestigious learned journal
Recherches Sémiotiques
, tentatively entitled ‘The Coherence of Incoherence’–a play on the celebrated treatise
Tahafut al-Tahafut
by the twelfth-century Muslim scholar known in the West as Averroes, whose Arab name Ibn Rushd opened up the possibility for the type of puns on the author of
The Satanic Verses
for which Ugo was justly celebrated–he was working at an IBM workstation linked by a fibre optic cable to the University of Bologna’s Unix mainframe. Meanwhile, substantial sections of his new metafiction,
Work In Regress
, were rapidly losing shape by being sent via his laptop to a primitive on-line translation site, where they were first mangled into Bulgarian or Welsh and then back again into Italian.
    Composition of his contribution to a forthcoming academic seminar on the semiotics of text-messaging at the Université de Paris, on the other hand, took place standing atop a fifteenth-century carved stone pulpit removed from the private chapel of a now-demolished palazzo, the text being dictated in a sonorous voice into a Sony digital recorder. Yet another room was kept permanently shuttered, the only light being from a bare hundred-watt bulb dangling above the hardy, ravished desk. It was here, in shirt sleeves and wearing a green eyeshade, that Ugo banged out his weekly column for a glossy, mass-circulation news magazine on a manual upright Olivetti M44 dating from the year of his birth. It was almost impossible to find carbon paper nowadays, so from time to time he had a few dozen boxes flown in from India.
    The column generated both money and publicity, but Edgardo already had plenty of both. Indeed, despite his eminent post-modernist credentials, his whole career was living proof that reports of the death of the author had been greatly exaggerated. As for the journalism, he did it for fun, to provide an outlet for his opinions and a way of showing off his versatility. Every writer is all writers, he liked to tell his students, mentioning that Jorge Luis Borges had already pointed out in the 1940s that to attribute the
Imitatio Christi
to Céline or Joyce would serve to renew the work’s faded spiritual aspirations, adding that this
esempio
was subversively enriched by the fact that Borges, a slipshod scholar, had probably been thinking of the much more influential
De Imitatione Christi
, and would in any case have attributed both titles to the now discredited Jean de Gerson rather than to Thomas à Kempis. Nevertheless, Borges’s idea provided a powerful tool for further deconstructionist analysis. Would not our view of Samuel Beckett’s work be both deepened and enriched if it were to be postulated that he had also written a humorous weekly column for the
The Irish Times
, styling himself Myles na Gopaleen and arranging for delivery and payment through an alcoholic Dublin novelist who went under a string of aliases ranging from Brian Ó Nualláin to Flann O’Brien?
    They loved him, it went without saying. Ugo’s great insight had been that the way