The author of “Oceano mare”, “Novecento,” The Game “announces on social networks his illness and the surgery he is about to face:” The doctors have taken it into his head to heal me “
A computer e The Pickwick Circle by Charles Dickens next to a hospital bed. With this image, the writer Alessandro Baricco chooses to announce in the late morning of Saturday 22 January, on his social media accounts, that he is ill and that he has to undergo a delicate operation. «Um, there is news to give – he writes – and this time I have to give it myself, personally. It’s not that great, I warn you. What happened is that five months ago I was diagnosed with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. ‘ So, he continues: «I was upset, but not that bad, come on. When you have such a disease the best thing you can do is undergo a transplant of blood stem cells, which I’ll do in a couple of days (well, it’s not that simple, we’ve been working on it for months, it’s a work of patience). My sister Enrica, a woman who in my eyes was already quite special before this adventure, let alone now, will give me the stem cells. ”
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Then he continues with an affectionate tone, and at the same time the irony that helps in difficult moments: «I wouldn’t want to add much more. Maybe, well, I still want to say that every moment I feel the good fortune of living all this with many true friends around, smart children, an irresistible life partner, and the best Bull since the Scudetto. These are things, the first three, that change your life. The fourth certainly does not spoil you. In short, I see it well. Don’t count on me for a while, but on the other hand don’t get too used to it because the doctors who went into their heads to heal me they look to be able to do it quickly enough. Hugs, AB ».
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Baricco himself writes that the diagnosis took place five months ago, a period in which, however, he did not stop. Last January 15th has in fact launched its project Novecento. The Source Code
. That is, the audio of his reading aloud of the famous theatrical monologue – recorded on New Year’s Day 2022 – that the writer has decided to make become a unique digital piece. A work certified by an act of authenticity (Nft, Non-fungible token) through technology blockchain, which uses cryptography, as happens in the world of crypto art. Collaborating with a team of experts, Baricco is thus the first Italian author to carry out an operation of this type for a literary work. The audio file of Twentieth century you can already listen for free on the OpenSea platform and will then be put on sale in March as a collector’s item, a unique and unrepeatable number zero. As if it were the original canvas of a painting.
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«I wanted to cross the hill into a new valley, a place where there is already something that is destined to change our lives. So I went to see “he said a week ago in an ‘interview with the “Corriere”. And on the choice of content, in its vast production (from novels Ocean sea e Arrow, to the wise The barbarians e The Game), he added: «For this product I thought the ideal would be some sort of Twentieth century, period and end. The text is in fact almost thirty years old and has inspired everything: in addition to the theatrical monologue it is read as a book (Feltrinelli, 1994), it has been transposed to the cinema, it has even become a puppet show … however for some time I had felt the desire to recover the sound originally from Twentieth century, the music from when I wrote it. For the past two or three years, Covid permitting, I have been going to read it myself in theaters. I did shows, a video that will be released in a few months. So when the idea of NFT came up I said to myself: “I want to record my voice without any effect”. Recover, in fact, the Source Code
of a text that is basically the “source code” of all my work. The result is an 80 megabyte audio file that lasts 85 minutes. And I like that, when it came to giving it a name, what most represented it was a computer expression. My souls and my works of years were united ».
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January 22, 2022 (change January 22, 2022 | 12:59)
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