Review: Alessandro Baricco experiments wildly in ‘Abel’, a light-hearted and catchy western

The job is called shooting and Abel Crow is damn good at it. Especially in the Mystic, that particular shot where you both draw your revolvers to hit two opponents at the same time. Most gunfighters prefer to draw with their preferred hand and then fire at both targets in quick succession. But Crow isn’t like the rest. So when he suddenly saw Roth’s three facing him on Main Street, their revolvers pointed at two hostages, he didn’t hesitate for a second. He did the Mystic and that day Abel Crow became a legend. He was 27 years old at the time.

In Abel, the tenth novel by the Italian success author Alessandro Baricco, you immediately have the feeling, from page one, that you have ended up in a spaghetti western by Sergio Leone; one where the men narrow their eyes during duels and you hear an Ennio Morricone tune whistling in the background.

Where in the Wild West the story takes place is unclear and actually irrelevant, because as Baricco himself notes in his subtitle: Abel is a ‘metaphysical western’. This means that on the surface the book takes place on silent plains where Indian tribes such as the Dakota roam and where cowboys talk in sentences such as: ‘Putting your hand on your weapon was a natural reflex at the time, an automatism, like scratching a wound. ‘ But underneath that, Baricco has tried to add a number of layers.

For example, Abel Crow learns to shoot from a blind man pistolero who everyone calls the Maestro. In exchange for those shooting lessons, the Maestro would like to be read from the work of great philosophers such as David Hume. When, during such a session, Abel reads Hume’s doubts about the operation of causality (according to Hume it is impossible to prove that one event arises from the one before it), two things suddenly happen in the book.

No longer chronological

One: even in Abel’s own life, time no longer runs linearly. For example, during a duel he sees his opponent fall to the ground, shot before he has drawn his revolver. And two, the same thing happens with Baricco’s narrative style, which from then on becomes achronological. Suddenly, in other words, the chapters are no longer in the correct order. Content and form become one.

In the Italian newspaper La Repubblica Baricco recently explained why he is in Abel, unlike his previous novels, that is why the word ‘end’ was not included on the last page. When he arrived at that last page, he did not stop writing, but continued writing a new first chapter. ‘A never-ending book’, he called his own novel and that qualification is quite correct. As a reader, you also have the tendency to immediately turn back to the first after the last page in an attempt to understand more of what you have just read.

Innovative

It is not surprising that Baricco (1958) tries to enrich the Wild West genre with a new narrative form. In addition to being one of Italy’s most successful writers, he is also the most innovative. In an interview in de Volkskrant he explained in 2019 that he wanted to be a writer from an early age and therefore took on whatever jobs he could get. “I’ve done everything,” he said, “journalism, music reviews, advertising, political exposés, drug inserts, everything. During those ten years I learned that it is best to study as many story forms as possible.’

The result: since his novel debut in 1991, in addition to novels, he has also produced theater texts, collections of essays, speeches and novellas, and he also founded a writing school where his students are presented with all forms of ‘storytelling’, taught by directors, film producers and game developers. , journalists and so on. He also experiments continuously with online storytelling forms and recently had the audio recording of his theater monologue auctioned as a non-fungible token (NFT) and collaborated with a French pop group, with Baricco reading his lyrics to their music.

If it’s never been done, Baricco is interested. “At one point I even got sick because I kept waking up at 3 a.m. with new ideas,” he said in the same Volkskrant-interview.

Light-hearted and infectious

That also happened Abel – suddenly Baricco had the word combination ‘metaphysical western’ in his head – and so his cowboys don’t tell each other cool stories in the evening around the campfire, but they read Confessions from Augustine. And immediately after that Symposium from Plato.

That’s a shame somehow. Baricco describes the classic Wild West so light-hearted and infectious – he plays excellently with the clichés of the genre – that you would also like to have crossed the prairie with his gunslingers without all those outright existential questions in their saddlebags.

It is also only during the philosophical reflections that Baricco sometimes goes too far in his language, for example when he has people sit next to each other ‘like two syllogisms on the pages of an Arab thinker, in a chapter devoted to the soul’. However, during the parts in which he describes dour men on their ranches consumed by the dizzying loneliness of the prairie, all his sentences are as spot on as Sheriff Abel Crow’s shots during a duel in Sant’Obispo.

What if Baricco had not woken up at 3am this time with an innovative idea, you sometimes secretly think, but simply at 7am with the plan to write a conventional western? Then was Abel perhaps one of the best novels in the genre.