Una linea lampeggiante all’orizzonte – romanzo (Baldini+Castoldi 2022)
In una Vicenza ossessionata dall’imperativo del lavoro, dove la bellezza palladiana è un vago ricordo e la crisi morde, questo romanzo denso, nervoso e provocatorio descrive un mondo in cui tutto ciò che conta sono le apparenze, la fama, i soldi. Così, intorno al protagonista e alle sue spalle, si sviluppa una rete di menzogne, tradimenti, doppiogioco e ipocrisia che sembra inchiodarlo in quella vita che procede solo per inerzia.
«L’aspetto è cambiato, ma la mia natura non del tutto. Forse perché voglio essere beccato? O per dimostrare che me lo posso permettere? Che sono invincibile? Boh. Eppure, niente. Nessuno ha detto una parola. Tutto viene perdonato. Basta produrre, dare lavoro, far schei.»
“Una commedia grottesca dai toni frizzanti come uno spritz” la Repubblica
“L’assenza divine infine la vera protagonista del romanzo, l’unica possibilità per fuggire da un territorioabituato da troppo tempo a nascondersi da sé stesso” il manifesto
“Un ritratto impietoso del mondo imprenditoriale, del collateralismo con la politica, della violenza di un piccolo ambiente di provincia” la Nuova Venezia
“Un carosello di personaggi che racconta vizi, perversioni, vecchi rancori e eccessi nell’attaccamento al lavoro e al denaro” il Giornale di Vicenza
“Un romanzo appassionante” Aforismi
A History of Objects: a collection of short stories (Harper Collins 2022)
“The pointed humor and galloping imagination in these stories show us how to endure our ongoing catastrophe. Laughter, tears, surprise – there isn’t much more you can ask for from a short story.”
Jeet Thayil“A remarkable collection of stories which take us all over the globe – India, America, Italy – on journeys of discovery which end in the discovery of the self. Witty, wise, and elegantly written, ‘A History of Objects’ is essential reading for all lovers of the short story.”
Suketu Metha“Carlo Pizzati’s short stories speak to the social biography of things and open up for us world after world of drama, tension, urgency, making us rethink, reassess how we negotiate, in our daily lives, the things we own, and the things that own us.”
Janice Pariat“Carlo Pizzati’s stories are enjoyable, austere and filled with simple, familiar people to whom a bit of complexity occurs. You can almost hear the author’s good-natured chuckle.”
Manu Joseph
Con il suo miliardo e trecento milioni di abitanti, l’India è il convitato di pietra al tavolo delle potenze mondiali. Eppure l’immaginario attorno al subcontinente asiatico sembra rimasto ai tempi di Gandhi: una terra di bramini, pacifica nella sua povertà, divisa in un sistema castale millenario, meta prediletta per cercare se stessi e le proprie radici spirituali, e allo stesso tempo fonte eterna di manodopera a basso costo. Carlo Pizzati, che in Asia vive da oltre dieci anni, descrive invece una realtà diversa, sospesa tra un progresso sociale e tecnologico inarrestabile, una crisi climatica senza precedenti e il riemergere di tensioni religiose all’apparenza superate. Nel racconto di Pizzati, l’India è infatti allo stesso tempo un paese che ha avuto un primo ministro donna e dove in alcune regioni è in uso la pratica del rogo delle streghe, un modo per derubare le vedove dei loro patrimoni bruciandole vive con l’accusa posticcia di eresia; dove a San Valentino fondamentalisti indù assalgono le coppie che si tengono per mano, mentre cinque milioni di femministe che vogliono far rispettare il loro diritto a entrare in un tempio manifestano per strada. Tra riserve di vacche sacre e città di otto milioni di abitanti deturpate da monsoni fuori stagione e da un inurbamento inarrestabile, Pizzati accompagna il lettore in un viaggio affascinante che, dalle paludi del Bangladesh alla crisi del calo demografico in Giappone, offre un punto di vista privilegiato su un continente in cerca della propria identità.
In this intrepid and humorous travelogue, Carlo Pizzati embarks on a quest to find a cure for a backache that has tortured him for decades. Armed with his notebook and an indomitable spirit of adventure, Carlo travels from a posturologist s office in northern Italy to the rarefied mountain air of Boulder; from a trance-dance venue hidden near the woods of Cinque Terre to an exorcist-shaman s den near Buenos Aires. Eventually, he fetches up at an Ashtanga yoga centre in Mysore. In India, as Carlo engages in strenuous yogic discipline, he has an explosive insight into his past births which changes his life forever. Along the way, our sceptical, suffering but always curious narrator discovers the ways in which spirituality and technology intersect. Wry, witty and wise by turns, this is a book about facing fears and failures, and undertaking an arduous journey with an open mind and heart.
“Mappilai -an Italian son-in-law in India” (Simon & Schuster 2018)- is the rollicking story of a European living with his in-laws in urban Chennai and with his wife in the coastal village of Paramankeni. There, he finds himself in the company of fishermen and goat-herders, in a house where 3G asserts itself in a corner of the bathroom and electricity courses in fits and starts.
At one level, Mappillai is deeply personal. With beguiling candour, Carlo tells of his struggle with contradictory responses to India—fascination and suspicion—and his awkward attempts at cruising through a maze of bribery, bureaucracy and traffic. The book offers a glimpse into the world of expats in India by introducing us to a host of colourful ‘firangi-friends’—from those who are overwhelmed by this nation’s noise and colour; to those who ‘go native’ in kurtas; to those who believe that India is where they can be dreamers, yogis or artists.
Over his decade-long stay in this nation, Carlo has witnessed a land in flux—from the gloom and doom of 2008 when the New India dream shattered, to the heady optimism of 2015 with promises of ‘acche din’, right up to today, marked by anti-Romeo and gau-rakshaks squads.
With wry humour and jollity, wisdom and acceptance, Mapillai offers an intimate capsule of contemporary Indian history—of the concomitant Hinduization and Westernization of India, intertwined with the Indianization of a European!
“Edge of an Era” (Juggernaut 2017 – English) is a collection of three conversations about the return of barbarism, the threat to cosmopolitan identity, the rise of nationalism, the many failures of globalisation, the increasing challenges of technocracy, and the crisis of the neoliberal elites. In the lobby of the Bauer Hotel in Venice, critical theorist Homi Bhabha speaks of the crisis of the Western paradigm, with a glance to what’s been happening in America. Pankaj Mishra, in a house facing the Bay of Bengal, expands on the intellectual dialogue between Asia and Europe. Political philosopher John Gray, at the Taj Mahal in Bombay, analyses the current European political crisis, the rise of fascism, and reminds us that the main driving force in history is human folly. The book opens with an introductory personal essay in which Carlo Pizzati explores recent historical milestones and the transformation they’ve brought about in Europe, America and Asia until now.
“Nimodo,” Pizzati’s second novel (Feltrinelli 2014 – Italian and Spanish), is a love story taking place across several Latin American countries between Italo Prazzic – a young, idealistic foreign correspondent in Latin America – and Patricia Colz – a performance artist who turns out to be a guerrilla fighter and a spy – while their nemesis, older journalist Rizzo Placati, tries to get in their way.
The fact that the characters names all all anagrams of the author’s is no coincidence. On the background of a 1997’s Latin America constantly changing but always staying the same, idealism and cynicism areintertwined with a long on-the-road adventure, where telling the story is interlaced with being the story.
“Criminàl”, his first novel (FBE 2011 – Italian), sold out the first printing in a month and a half. Italian critics have said about it: “A powerful metaphysical thriller” (Valentina Pigmei – Grazia); “A surprising literary twist” (Luciana Sica – La Repubblica); “A most beautiful book” (Daria Bignardi – Invasioni Barbariche); “Past and present chase each other on a fine thread of hallucinated and ferocious suspence” (Maurizia Veladiano – Il Giornale di Vicenza); “A literary frame shining with constant digressions and changes of narrating voice” (Leonardo Merlini – TM news); “Criminàl is a book that sticks in your mind.
It has real stylistic experimental strength and sociological inventiveness, after the era of the all too easily pre-programmed and recognisable, homogenous novel” (Emanuele Zinato – professor of Comparative Literature, Padua University).
“Tecnosciamani” (2012 Il Punto d’Incontro in Italian) is a humorous, illuminating narrative non-fiction book in which the author roams the world searching for places where technology and spirituality intersect. The driving force of the book is the narrator’s quest for relief for a bad back which has tortured him for twenty years.
Describe by critics as: “atypical and interesting” (Wired Italy); “intriguing and ironic” (Associated Press Italy); “glocal eye and subtle irony” (Sole 24 Ore); “agile and ironic writing” (Il Manifesto) and “an original mix of spirituality, technology, desire to cure a chronic backache and encounters on the borders of science, mysticism and the irrational with a flavour of an original and most ancient knowledge” (Il Giornale di Vicenza).
“Il passo che cerchi” (also in ebook format here) is a collection of short stories and photographs (Edelweiss 2012 – Italian) investigating the relationship between narrator and characters and their interchangeable identity. “A world reflected in infinite other worlds, possible and real” (Silvia Ferrari, Il Giornale di Vicenza). “The book is boiling in literature, in the shape of instructions for life”. (Kilgore Magazine) . “This writer has the capacity to make you dream, shiver, laugh and cry within the same page” Zacforever literary blog. The three sections (“World”, “Numbers” and “Cards of Identity”) explore different aspects of the exchange of identity and the relationships with numbers and codes in our daily life. In “Fibonacci Story,” a homage to the school of writers called OuLiPo, a bloody tale is being told observing the rules of the Fibonacci sequence. 
In “Time does not exist” the philosopher Zeno discusses with physicist Peter Lynds the non existence of space versus the non existence of time while precipitating from an airplane. Most of the book plays with literary references as in one of the last short stories in which we see secondary characters from a Nathanial Hawhtorne and a Goffredo Parise short story actually interact.
“NIMODO” en español.
Nimodo podría ser perfectamente el trasunto novelado del guión de una ‘road movie’ del mismo título que podría, a su vez, ser considerado también y a la francesa ‘un film à thèse’ como un milhojas en el que cada estrato se corresponde con un nivel de lectura. Así, pues, tendríamos, como capa superior del pastel, la peripecia de dos periodistas y una activista revolucionaria por toda una serie de países de Iberoamérica. Este estrato está perfectamente articulado y muestra cuánto domina Pizzati la técnica narrativa. Digamos que es el nivel responsable de hacernos reír, llorar, lamentarnos y disfrutar de las distintas situaciones en la que los protagonistas se ven envueltos. Lo que nos engancha a querer saber más y más sobre lo que será de ellos al cabo del relato. En un piso inmediatamente inferior, conocemos aspectos de la conspícua realidad socio-política de América del Sur (Mesoamérica incluída), ese continente con forma de corazón. Un corazón que sigue latiendo ante la incomprensión del entendimiento europeo y ante lo que el autor se esfuerza por huir de la toma de partido previsible o fácil.
Nimodo (traducción y postfacio de José Manuel Mercado Navas) – 280 pp.
CARLO PIZZATI 