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Love-Shaped Story
A darkly enchanting tale set in Seattle in the 1990s -- the fictional life of Kurt Cobain's childhood imaginary friend! As a little boy, Kurt would insist that his mother set a place at the table for 'Boddah', his imaginary friend. Two decades later and the rock star Kurt Cobain is found dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Beside his body is a note -- addressed to Boddah. Tommaso Pincio gives life to Boddah and conjures up a darkly beautiful coming-of-age novel, set against the rainy backdrop of Grunge America in the early 1990s!
- GenresFiction
Hardcover
First published March 15, 2002
4 people are currently reading
186 people want to read
About the author
Tommaso Pincio
75 books33 followersTommaso Pincio, pseudonimo di Marco Colapietro, è uno scrittore italiano. Il suo pseudonimo è la traslitterazione italiana del nome dello scrittore postmoderno Thomas Pynchon.
Dopo aver frequentato l'Accademia delle Belle Arti, ha esordito come fumettista, ha diretto per dieci anni una galleria d'arte internazionale e vissuto tra la fine degli '80 e l'inizio dei '90 a New York come assistente di un famoso pittore; è in questo periodo che ha cominciato ad approcciarsi alla scrittura. Ha esordito come romanziere nel 1999 con M.. Successivamente ha pubblicato Lo spazio sfinito (2000) e Un amore dell'altro mondo (2002), un libro che ha diviso la critica letteraria e con il quale l'autore ha acquistato una certa notorietà. Vi si narra la vita di Kurt Cobain, leader del gruppo rock Nirvana, attraverso lo sguardo di un suo amico immaginario. La ragazza che non era lei, pubblicato nel 2005, traccia un bilancio su ciò che è andato perduto e ciò che è rimasto dei sogni di amore e libertà degli anni Sessanta. È invece del 2006 Gli alieni, un'indagine su come l'ipotesi dell'esistenza di civiltà extraterrestri sia diventata uno dei grandi miti dell'era moderna. Di più recente pubblicazione è il quinto romanzo dell'autore, Cinacittà.
Tommaso Pincio collabora regolarmente alla rivista Rolling Stone e alle pagine culturali de la Repubblica e il manifesto, occupandosi perlopiù di letteratura statunitense.
Dopo aver frequentato l'Accademia delle Belle Arti, ha esordito come fumettista, ha diretto per dieci anni una galleria d'arte internazionale e vissuto tra la fine degli '80 e l'inizio dei '90 a New York come assistente di un famoso pittore; è in questo periodo che ha cominciato ad approcciarsi alla scrittura. Ha esordito come romanziere nel 1999 con M.. Successivamente ha pubblicato Lo spazio sfinito (2000) e Un amore dell'altro mondo (2002), un libro che ha diviso la critica letteraria e con il quale l'autore ha acquistato una certa notorietà. Vi si narra la vita di Kurt Cobain, leader del gruppo rock Nirvana, attraverso lo sguardo di un suo amico immaginario. La ragazza che non era lei, pubblicato nel 2005, traccia un bilancio su ciò che è andato perduto e ciò che è rimasto dei sogni di amore e libertà degli anni Sessanta. È invece del 2006 Gli alieni, un'indagine su come l'ipotesi dell'esistenza di civiltà extraterrestri sia diventata uno dei grandi miti dell'era moderna. Di più recente pubblicazione è il quinto romanzo dell'autore, Cinacittà.
Tommaso Pincio collabora regolarmente alla rivista Rolling Stone e alle pagine culturali de la Repubblica e il manifesto, occupandosi perlopiù di letteratura statunitense.
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July 22, 2016
(This review was originally written for and posted at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's site as part of my year-long essay series, for which I purchased this book.)
A coming-of-age tale, like every other journey at its core, is a journey to death. It might exist outside the story's scope and well beyond the hero's happy ending, but it's still hovering there in the shadows beyond the last page. Tommaso Pincio's Love-Shaped Story makes no attempt to hide that its hero is positioning himself for a headlong descent to the grave, resulting in a moody, charmingly sympathetic book about heroin addiction and the delicate souls who are obviously not long for this world.
As explained in an author's note, Pincio's story initially focused on "a bizarre individual who has convinced himself that he doesn't exist... and falls in love with a stripper whom he mistakes for a beautiful alien from a forbidden planet." Realizing that the plot and its tone were best served by dropping his characters in the dreary Pacific northwest of the '90s, connecting those dots to the grunge movement and one of its most iconic figures, Kurt Cobain (featured here in a respectfully but highly fictionalized manner), was all but inevitable: That bizarre individual became Homer Boddah Alienson, a personification of sorts of Cobain's childhood imaginary friend and the sobering mirror reflection of the heroin abuse that plagued his older years.
Homer, like so many drug addicts before him, had an unhappy childhood punctuated by his parents' casual neglect and his compulsive, joyless need to own duplicate after duplicate of various mass-produced toy spaceships, which he boxed away almost immediately upon acquisition (unbeknownst to his younger self, he'll later sell these piece by piece to the "nostalgia geeks" whose desperate clamor for his now-collectible childhood trinkets he abhors). He grows up lonely but not morose, emotionally stunted and a little naïve from a lack of interest in experiencing life and other people because at the age of nine, Homer becomes deadly certain that he is alone in a world of "differents," people who aren't who they seem, ranging from the garbage man to his mother who, in a very Invasion of the Body Snatchers way, have been slowly replaced by the pod people who will subsume Homer if he betrays his humanity with hot-blooded outbursts or any telltale signs of emotion. So he disengages from the world and stops sleeping for nearly two decades, until one of his beloved nighttime walks introduces him to Kurt, a kindred spirit carrying around the kind of damage instantly recognizable to Homer as his own, and Kurt introduces heroin to Homer's life.
Prior to this, Homer had become recently preoccupied with the question of love, namely what it is. His journey, at first, seems to be his search for love; in actuality, love is just one last thing he has to do before he goes. Homer is too steeped in paranoia (the caliber of which is on par with what one would expect from a writer whose nom de plume is a nod to Thomas Pynchon) to fully give himself to another; however, opening himself up to the possibility of love's presence in his life is his final atonement before giving himself entirely to the thanatos that has been creeping over him for decades.
What Homer discovers on his quest to find out what love is is Kurt, in whose friendship he finds both a long-awaited connection and the drug that will become his world entire for the remainder of his life. From their fateful meeting springs a habit that Homer lovingly fosters, ceremoniously introducing the substance to his body and giving himself up to it completely, all because Kurt, who also feels like an outsider wherever he goes, said it would help kick Homer's 18 years of self-imposed sleeplessness. With the melodic white noise of movies and the occasional visit from Kurt to slice the days into significant chunks of passing time, Homer carelessly crosses over the threshold into the land of modern-day lotus-eaters.
As Kurt's band--known to the everyone who lived through the '90s as Nirvana but unnamed in these pages--begins its ascension to fame, Homer imagines himself giving a televised interview that goes from bad to worse as he rambles on to the hostess's annoyance before she outs him as a junkie and he spectacularly voids his stomach all over her. Homer can't even see himself as someone worthy of others' attention and regard inside his head, serving as nothing more than a trove of before-he-was-famous Kurt stories and having his mind rub his own nose in the problems he doesn't want to face; the talk show inside Homer's strung-out head serves as the first real indication that his drug problem is getting away from him while quietly signalling that the damage inside us is capable of delivering hurtful blows just as effectively if not more so than any combination of violent external forces.
When Nirvana goes on tour, Homer departs for Rachel, NV, a town that makes its living on the tourists who come for the possibly extraterrestrial light shows, a town whose population is a little extraterrestrial itself. There, having already faced the challenges of a depleted heroin supply and the unwelcome revelation that his drug problem is less about using to get some sleep and more about just being a junkie, Homer the outsider is a welcome novelty: The locals and tourists alike come to greet him in an E.T.-esque manner (as in, "E.T. phone Home-er") and soon he is paid to be a fixture at a local dive bar where he tells his story, from being a mail-order vendor of childhood memories who sells off his own childhood with every immaculately preserved toy spaceship to his friendship with Kurt to his ongoing search for love. In Rachel, the recurring theme of Homer's alienation comes to a head, as he is finally an outsider in a place where it's acceptable to feel out of place, rather than feeling disconnected from his hometown and his own head, both being spaces in which he could only comfortably exist with the help of a drug that lets him turn off and tune out the world so he can cope with living in it. After a life of living among the differents, a town of legitimate strangers is a welcome, almost hopeful, change.
As the lines separating Homer from Kurt blur in inverse proportion to the growing physical distance between them, they ride out their respective rises to reluctant celebrity, with Homer's being the journey laid out here in excruciating detail: He becomes miserable, with his dwindling stash being the only thing that keeps him afloat. When he uses the last of it, knowing no one in the desert from whom he can score, withdrawal hits him hard (as it is wont to do) and in his agonizing transformation from daily user to stone-cold sobriety, a woman comes to him and changes everything. Touted by the dive bar's barkeeper as the love from another world to maintain Homer's mystique and make a few dollars while Homer's sweating and shaking out the worst of his withdrawal symptoms in solitude, the woman, Molly Resident, supplants the now-absent heroin as his heroine. Homer, paranoid and self-defeating as he is, is torn between getting to know Molly and doing something about what he thinks is love for her (she being the only woman he's ever talked to for any length of time, as uncomfortable as their conversations are), and winds up sabotaging his big chance to reveal his jumble of feelings. Fearing that Molly, too, has been claimed by the body snatchers, Homer runs.
And he is not heard from again 'til days before Kurt's suicide and the discovery of his body; when Homer reads the letter his friend addressed to Boddah--to him--he puts that very same Remington shotgun in his own mouth and pulls the trigger, Homer and Kurt being connected as they were like the arms of a clock: One moves with the other, occasionally coming together but mostly tending to their own peregrinations, and one stops when the other ceases to move forward.
Homer, a harmless, self-proclaimed coward who finds himself on a hero's journey, is a man seeking some kind of meaning. He gets a taste of love, hints of happiness, but what he really wants is the sweet release of death. The discovery of a drug that lets him sample the erasure of life's ills and wounds is the beginning of his escape from the mortal coil, his way of preparing for the death he warmly welcomes. Love-Shaped Story doesn't go so far as encourage suicide but it forgives it by reminding us that some people are much too comprised of too-breakable parts to live in a world that will try to reshape them to fit more easily among the neighbors and family with whom they share neither a connection nor commonalities.
Like the grunge it relies on for background color, Pincio's story is one of inherent merit, letting itself rest on the truths it embraces rather than distracting from its incomplete heart with professional polish and appealing to its audience to maximize its appeal. The writing itself is understated, darkly beautiful and compassionate, but the details on which it focuses to drive its points home are raw, dirty, unflinching and brutally honest. It's also sympathetic to the fact that some people have a beauty within them that exists in direct conflict with the world and the zeitgeist shaping it at that time, and that some people simply can't cope with so-called normal life. Homer and Kurt keep intersecting and coinciding, Homer often appearing invisible to others when Kurt's around and then being mistaken for his more famous friend when he's alone, as their inability to function as normal people in normal society for their excess paranoia and extent of their inner damages keeps them from relating to the world they regard as overwhelmingly populated with differents who regard them as indistinguishable from each other.
It is, most of all, a kind of an apology for those who are wired in such a way that they're doomed from childhood to a life of being misunderstood by others and roughed up a little too easily by the sucker-punches life throws. Homer seems like just another drug-addled loser who retreats inward because facing the world is just too much for him, but he makes a valiant effort to cope with a life he doesn't necessarily want, save for the distant hope that there are others like him who've yet to be claimed by the differents. He finds that connection in Kurt, who proves to be the love Homer was looking for: an identical soul trapped in a world he doesn't belong in, waiting to be released to the home beyond this alien one in which they've been deposited by some mistake of fate that they're trying to correct.
A coming-of-age tale, like every other journey at its core, is a journey to death. It might exist outside the story's scope and well beyond the hero's happy ending, but it's still hovering there in the shadows beyond the last page. Tommaso Pincio's Love-Shaped Story makes no attempt to hide that its hero is positioning himself for a headlong descent to the grave, resulting in a moody, charmingly sympathetic book about heroin addiction and the delicate souls who are obviously not long for this world.
As explained in an author's note, Pincio's story initially focused on "a bizarre individual who has convinced himself that he doesn't exist... and falls in love with a stripper whom he mistakes for a beautiful alien from a forbidden planet." Realizing that the plot and its tone were best served by dropping his characters in the dreary Pacific northwest of the '90s, connecting those dots to the grunge movement and one of its most iconic figures, Kurt Cobain (featured here in a respectfully but highly fictionalized manner), was all but inevitable: That bizarre individual became Homer Boddah Alienson, a personification of sorts of Cobain's childhood imaginary friend and the sobering mirror reflection of the heroin abuse that plagued his older years.
Homer, like so many drug addicts before him, had an unhappy childhood punctuated by his parents' casual neglect and his compulsive, joyless need to own duplicate after duplicate of various mass-produced toy spaceships, which he boxed away almost immediately upon acquisition (unbeknownst to his younger self, he'll later sell these piece by piece to the "nostalgia geeks" whose desperate clamor for his now-collectible childhood trinkets he abhors). He grows up lonely but not morose, emotionally stunted and a little naïve from a lack of interest in experiencing life and other people because at the age of nine, Homer becomes deadly certain that he is alone in a world of "differents," people who aren't who they seem, ranging from the garbage man to his mother who, in a very Invasion of the Body Snatchers way, have been slowly replaced by the pod people who will subsume Homer if he betrays his humanity with hot-blooded outbursts or any telltale signs of emotion. So he disengages from the world and stops sleeping for nearly two decades, until one of his beloved nighttime walks introduces him to Kurt, a kindred spirit carrying around the kind of damage instantly recognizable to Homer as his own, and Kurt introduces heroin to Homer's life.
Prior to this, Homer had become recently preoccupied with the question of love, namely what it is. His journey, at first, seems to be his search for love; in actuality, love is just one last thing he has to do before he goes. Homer is too steeped in paranoia (the caliber of which is on par with what one would expect from a writer whose nom de plume is a nod to Thomas Pynchon) to fully give himself to another; however, opening himself up to the possibility of love's presence in his life is his final atonement before giving himself entirely to the thanatos that has been creeping over him for decades.
What Homer discovers on his quest to find out what love is is Kurt, in whose friendship he finds both a long-awaited connection and the drug that will become his world entire for the remainder of his life. From their fateful meeting springs a habit that Homer lovingly fosters, ceremoniously introducing the substance to his body and giving himself up to it completely, all because Kurt, who also feels like an outsider wherever he goes, said it would help kick Homer's 18 years of self-imposed sleeplessness. With the melodic white noise of movies and the occasional visit from Kurt to slice the days into significant chunks of passing time, Homer carelessly crosses over the threshold into the land of modern-day lotus-eaters.
As Kurt's band--known to the everyone who lived through the '90s as Nirvana but unnamed in these pages--begins its ascension to fame, Homer imagines himself giving a televised interview that goes from bad to worse as he rambles on to the hostess's annoyance before she outs him as a junkie and he spectacularly voids his stomach all over her. Homer can't even see himself as someone worthy of others' attention and regard inside his head, serving as nothing more than a trove of before-he-was-famous Kurt stories and having his mind rub his own nose in the problems he doesn't want to face; the talk show inside Homer's strung-out head serves as the first real indication that his drug problem is getting away from him while quietly signalling that the damage inside us is capable of delivering hurtful blows just as effectively if not more so than any combination of violent external forces.
When Nirvana goes on tour, Homer departs for Rachel, NV, a town that makes its living on the tourists who come for the possibly extraterrestrial light shows, a town whose population is a little extraterrestrial itself. There, having already faced the challenges of a depleted heroin supply and the unwelcome revelation that his drug problem is less about using to get some sleep and more about just being a junkie, Homer the outsider is a welcome novelty: The locals and tourists alike come to greet him in an E.T.-esque manner (as in, "E.T. phone Home-er") and soon he is paid to be a fixture at a local dive bar where he tells his story, from being a mail-order vendor of childhood memories who sells off his own childhood with every immaculately preserved toy spaceship to his friendship with Kurt to his ongoing search for love. In Rachel, the recurring theme of Homer's alienation comes to a head, as he is finally an outsider in a place where it's acceptable to feel out of place, rather than feeling disconnected from his hometown and his own head, both being spaces in which he could only comfortably exist with the help of a drug that lets him turn off and tune out the world so he can cope with living in it. After a life of living among the differents, a town of legitimate strangers is a welcome, almost hopeful, change.
As the lines separating Homer from Kurt blur in inverse proportion to the growing physical distance between them, they ride out their respective rises to reluctant celebrity, with Homer's being the journey laid out here in excruciating detail: He becomes miserable, with his dwindling stash being the only thing that keeps him afloat. When he uses the last of it, knowing no one in the desert from whom he can score, withdrawal hits him hard (as it is wont to do) and in his agonizing transformation from daily user to stone-cold sobriety, a woman comes to him and changes everything. Touted by the dive bar's barkeeper as the love from another world to maintain Homer's mystique and make a few dollars while Homer's sweating and shaking out the worst of his withdrawal symptoms in solitude, the woman, Molly Resident, supplants the now-absent heroin as his heroine. Homer, paranoid and self-defeating as he is, is torn between getting to know Molly and doing something about what he thinks is love for her (she being the only woman he's ever talked to for any length of time, as uncomfortable as their conversations are), and winds up sabotaging his big chance to reveal his jumble of feelings. Fearing that Molly, too, has been claimed by the body snatchers, Homer runs.
And he is not heard from again 'til days before Kurt's suicide and the discovery of his body; when Homer reads the letter his friend addressed to Boddah--to him--he puts that very same Remington shotgun in his own mouth and pulls the trigger, Homer and Kurt being connected as they were like the arms of a clock: One moves with the other, occasionally coming together but mostly tending to their own peregrinations, and one stops when the other ceases to move forward.
Homer, a harmless, self-proclaimed coward who finds himself on a hero's journey, is a man seeking some kind of meaning. He gets a taste of love, hints of happiness, but what he really wants is the sweet release of death. The discovery of a drug that lets him sample the erasure of life's ills and wounds is the beginning of his escape from the mortal coil, his way of preparing for the death he warmly welcomes. Love-Shaped Story doesn't go so far as encourage suicide but it forgives it by reminding us that some people are much too comprised of too-breakable parts to live in a world that will try to reshape them to fit more easily among the neighbors and family with whom they share neither a connection nor commonalities.
Like the grunge it relies on for background color, Pincio's story is one of inherent merit, letting itself rest on the truths it embraces rather than distracting from its incomplete heart with professional polish and appealing to its audience to maximize its appeal. The writing itself is understated, darkly beautiful and compassionate, but the details on which it focuses to drive its points home are raw, dirty, unflinching and brutally honest. It's also sympathetic to the fact that some people have a beauty within them that exists in direct conflict with the world and the zeitgeist shaping it at that time, and that some people simply can't cope with so-called normal life. Homer and Kurt keep intersecting and coinciding, Homer often appearing invisible to others when Kurt's around and then being mistaken for his more famous friend when he's alone, as their inability to function as normal people in normal society for their excess paranoia and extent of their inner damages keeps them from relating to the world they regard as overwhelmingly populated with differents who regard them as indistinguishable from each other.
It is, most of all, a kind of an apology for those who are wired in such a way that they're doomed from childhood to a life of being misunderstood by others and roughed up a little too easily by the sucker-punches life throws. Homer seems like just another drug-addled loser who retreats inward because facing the world is just too much for him, but he makes a valiant effort to cope with a life he doesn't necessarily want, save for the distant hope that there are others like him who've yet to be claimed by the differents. He finds that connection in Kurt, who proves to be the love Homer was looking for: an identical soul trapped in a world he doesn't belong in, waiting to be released to the home beyond this alien one in which they've been deposited by some mistake of fate that they're trying to correct.
March 26, 2019
Mio primo Pincio e non mi ha sbalordita.
Indubbiamente una prosa scorrevole con diversi umili spunti di riflessione buttati lì a casaccio, senza riflettori ad illuminarli, cosa apprezzabile rispetto a tanti autori di romanzi che si credono, a torto, filosofi moderni.
L'interscambio tra Kurt e Homer, la mescolanza delle vite di uno e dell'altro (perché indubbiamente si finisce per pensare al Cobain reale, leggendo) che all'inizio mi infastidiva confondendomi, giunge poi a trovarsi in secondo piano nel racconto.
Diviene forse un curioso gioco stilistico atto ad immedesimare il lettore in quella che vuole essere la fumosa lucidità della visione del tossico, se non altro per rendere meno accademica e più 'vera' la scrittura, più mentale che fisica.
E ora la nota dolente: troppa eroina.
Dall'inizio alla fine del libro è lei la vera protagonista del racconto, cosa che può vedersi anche come fedele trasposizione dell'effetto di questa droga sulla vita dei consumatori, ma che in un libro stanca, a meno che non si tratti di Burroughs (e allora uno sa di che morte va a morire), ma non è questo il caso.
Interessante la svolta finale con la mescolanza di dipendenze amorose tra droga e donna, ma decisamente non originale, almeno non dopo certi lavori degli anni '90; ma in qualche modo doveva pure trarsi d' impiccio anche per non appesantire un libro e protrarlo oltre un finale che si era già stabilito da sé.
Lo scenario western degli ultimi atti poteva forse riaparmiarcelo, ma questo è un mio gusto personale, quindi vale meno di nulla nel complesso.
Leggerò altro di questo autore perché, nel complesso, è stata una lettura piacevole e il suo modo di scrivere non stanca, ma appassiona.
Indubbiamente una prosa scorrevole con diversi umili spunti di riflessione buttati lì a casaccio, senza riflettori ad illuminarli, cosa apprezzabile rispetto a tanti autori di romanzi che si credono, a torto, filosofi moderni.
L'interscambio tra Kurt e Homer, la mescolanza delle vite di uno e dell'altro (perché indubbiamente si finisce per pensare al Cobain reale, leggendo) che all'inizio mi infastidiva confondendomi, giunge poi a trovarsi in secondo piano nel racconto.
Diviene forse un curioso gioco stilistico atto ad immedesimare il lettore in quella che vuole essere la fumosa lucidità della visione del tossico, se non altro per rendere meno accademica e più 'vera' la scrittura, più mentale che fisica.
E ora la nota dolente: troppa eroina.
Dall'inizio alla fine del libro è lei la vera protagonista del racconto, cosa che può vedersi anche come fedele trasposizione dell'effetto di questa droga sulla vita dei consumatori, ma che in un libro stanca, a meno che non si tratti di Burroughs (e allora uno sa di che morte va a morire), ma non è questo il caso.
Interessante la svolta finale con la mescolanza di dipendenze amorose tra droga e donna, ma decisamente non originale, almeno non dopo certi lavori degli anni '90; ma in qualche modo doveva pure trarsi d' impiccio anche per non appesantire un libro e protrarlo oltre un finale che si era già stabilito da sé.
Lo scenario western degli ultimi atti poteva forse riaparmiarcelo, ma questo è un mio gusto personale, quindi vale meno di nulla nel complesso.
Leggerò altro di questo autore perché, nel complesso, è stata una lettura piacevole e il suo modo di scrivere non stanca, ma appassiona.
October 16, 2019
Παιδιά, σας πάω :p
https://pepperlines.blogspot.com/2019...
Υ.Γ. 4,5*
https://pepperlines.blogspot.com/2019...
Υ.Γ. 4,5*
June 29, 2008
Ich habe deses Buch gelesen und ich war nicht Homer B. Alienson, ich war Kurt. Ich kenne die Geschichte um Kurt Cobain, aber ich habe mich nie großartig mit diesem Menschen beschäftigt. Seit ich die ersten Seiten dieses Buches gelesen habe, weiß ich, er war ein Mensch, der niemals hätte erwachsen werden dürfen....
August 31, 2017
Dei Nirvana conoscevo giusto quelle due o tre canzoni che conoscono tutti e non avevo altre informazioni sulla figura di Kurt Cobain che non fossero l’anno e la modalità della sua prematura scomparsa. Per il resto, buio notale.
Così, leggendo il retro di copertina, scopro che Kurt aveva un amico immaginario e che Tommaso Pincio ha avuto la brillante idea di dare una vita tutta sua all’inesistente Boda e di farne il protagonista del romanzo. Un amore dell’altro mondo, contrariamente a quanto mi ero aspettato in un primo momento, non è quindi un romanzo biografico su Kurt Cobain, e non è nemmeno un romanzo che parla strettamente di lui. Pincio ha, sì, raccontato molti aspetti della vita del cantante dei Nirvana e dato voce alle domande e alle angosce di Kurt e dell’intera generazione di cui era diventato portavoce, ma tenendolo sempre a margine delle vicende che vedono invece protagonista il suo immaginario amico. Così, Boda si eleva a Homer Boda Alienson, e ha come tutti una famiglia, una personalità, dei problemi e una missione, quella di trovare una risposta alla domanda che lo coglie all’improvviso: “E l’amore?”. Se proprio questa ricerca dell’amore, che lo porterà in un paesino sperduto in mezzo al deserto, nei pressi dell’area 51, è il tema centrale degli ultimi capitoli, nei primi vediamo invece un paranoico Homer preda delle difficoltà che la vita e la sua immaginazione lo costringono, volente o nolente, ad affrontare. Boda ha avuto un’infanzia turbolenta che lo ha portato a coltivare una passione maniacale per i giocattoli di fantascienza, e a non dormire per diciotto anni per paura, influenzato dalla visione de L’Invasione degli Ultracorpi, di svegliarsi e scoprire che le persone a lui vicine sono state sostituite con delle copie. La cura di tutti i problemi gliela fornisce Kurt la sera del loro primo incontro in mezzo al bosco, sul ponte sotto il quale il biondo cantante si era ritrovato a dormire dopo la prima fuga da casa. La cura è l’eroina, che loro chiamano “il sistema”, ed è il primo tassello della profonda amicizia che legherà i due fino alla fine.
Ho amato questo romanzo. Pincio è uno scrittore di notevole bravura, è il suo primo romanzo che leggo e sicuramente non sarà l'ultimo. E' delicato e crudo all'occorrenza, non c'è mai una descrizione, una situazione o una singola parola fuori posto. L'artificio letterario, quello di dare vita a Boda, è geniale: è stato il perfetto mezzo per parlare di Kurt senza scriverne una biografia, per lasciarsi andare a una storia surreale con le radici ben piantate nei problemi della realtà. Ed è proprio questo personaggio il punto di forza del romanzo: turbolento, fragile, paranoico, insicuro, dolce, Boda è l'adolescente insicuro e spaesato che continua a vivere in ognuno di noi anche ora che siamo cresciuti, come se fosse il collage di tutti i pezzi che ci siamo persi per strada ogni volta che ci infrangevamo con il duro e inscalfibile muro della realtà.
Così, leggendo il retro di copertina, scopro che Kurt aveva un amico immaginario e che Tommaso Pincio ha avuto la brillante idea di dare una vita tutta sua all’inesistente Boda e di farne il protagonista del romanzo. Un amore dell’altro mondo, contrariamente a quanto mi ero aspettato in un primo momento, non è quindi un romanzo biografico su Kurt Cobain, e non è nemmeno un romanzo che parla strettamente di lui. Pincio ha, sì, raccontato molti aspetti della vita del cantante dei Nirvana e dato voce alle domande e alle angosce di Kurt e dell’intera generazione di cui era diventato portavoce, ma tenendolo sempre a margine delle vicende che vedono invece protagonista il suo immaginario amico. Così, Boda si eleva a Homer Boda Alienson, e ha come tutti una famiglia, una personalità, dei problemi e una missione, quella di trovare una risposta alla domanda che lo coglie all’improvviso: “E l’amore?”. Se proprio questa ricerca dell’amore, che lo porterà in un paesino sperduto in mezzo al deserto, nei pressi dell’area 51, è il tema centrale degli ultimi capitoli, nei primi vediamo invece un paranoico Homer preda delle difficoltà che la vita e la sua immaginazione lo costringono, volente o nolente, ad affrontare. Boda ha avuto un’infanzia turbolenta che lo ha portato a coltivare una passione maniacale per i giocattoli di fantascienza, e a non dormire per diciotto anni per paura, influenzato dalla visione de L’Invasione degli Ultracorpi, di svegliarsi e scoprire che le persone a lui vicine sono state sostituite con delle copie. La cura di tutti i problemi gliela fornisce Kurt la sera del loro primo incontro in mezzo al bosco, sul ponte sotto il quale il biondo cantante si era ritrovato a dormire dopo la prima fuga da casa. La cura è l’eroina, che loro chiamano “il sistema”, ed è il primo tassello della profonda amicizia che legherà i due fino alla fine.
Ho amato questo romanzo. Pincio è uno scrittore di notevole bravura, è il suo primo romanzo che leggo e sicuramente non sarà l'ultimo. E' delicato e crudo all'occorrenza, non c'è mai una descrizione, una situazione o una singola parola fuori posto. L'artificio letterario, quello di dare vita a Boda, è geniale: è stato il perfetto mezzo per parlare di Kurt senza scriverne una biografia, per lasciarsi andare a una storia surreale con le radici ben piantate nei problemi della realtà. Ed è proprio questo personaggio il punto di forza del romanzo: turbolento, fragile, paranoico, insicuro, dolce, Boda è l'adolescente insicuro e spaesato che continua a vivere in ognuno di noi anche ora che siamo cresciuti, come se fosse il collage di tutti i pezzi che ci siamo persi per strada ogni volta che ci infrangevamo con il duro e inscalfibile muro della realtà.
August 13, 2020
Il retro di copertina sembra spoilerare il romanzo dicendo che Homer B. Alienson sia l'amico immaginario di Kurt Cobain, ma quando si inizia a leggere la figura di Homer B. (dove B sta per Boda, l'amico immaginario a cui Kurt bambino parlava e a cui Kurt adulto scriveva lettere) viene tratteggiata come se fosse quella di un "normalissimo" ragazzino con la passione delle astronavi giocattolo, di Twin Peaks e, più tardi nella narrazione, dell'eroina. Dove sta quindi la verità? Homer esiste? O è solo e semplicemente Boda? Ho trovato molto interessante rendere le figure di lui e Kurt così sovrapponibili da mettere in bocca a Homer parole dette da Kurt stesso nei suoi diari e interviste, ma questo libro non mi ha comunque convinto. Il fatto che droga e fascinazione per spazio e alieni siano poi i suoi nuclei non l'ha reso accattivante per la sottoscritta, ma de gustibus. Ho apprezzato però molto il finale laconico e poetico allo stesso tempo.
March 7, 2018
❤️❤️❤️
February 28, 2024
Un libro originale, da leggere nelle giornate di pioggia per immedesimarsi con tutto il corpo e l'anima nel grunge più grunge degli anni 90. Questo libro mi ha trasmesso molto disagio e mi ha aiutato a capire Kurt Kobain e tutto il dramma che c'è dietro alla sua storia. Uno dei libri migliori letto recentemente.
October 17, 2008
Kurt and Boda together like best friends till the end...
September 6, 2011
un bell'omaggio a kurt cobain, molto personale. non un capolavoro, ma decisamente apprezzabile
July 27, 2012
I absolutely loved this book. If I had not have borrowed it, I would have read it again and again... will have to buy it, won't I!
November 28, 2012
for anyone into kurt cobain and the grunge era a must to read
October 7, 2015
Kişiliği falan tanıtım da olduğu gibi beni çok etkilemedi aşk kısımları da şöyle böyle. Daha iyi bir biyografi beklerdim.
September 4, 2017
Pincio coglie perfettamente il genius loci da cui sono nati il grunge e Cobain - il triste nordest americano degli anni '80 - e ci costruisce sopra una storia incisiva e memorabile di alienazione e di dipendenza. Homer B. Alienson è un personaggio forte e autonomo, reso incidentalmente più "appetibile" dall'amicizia immaginata con Cobain. Il maggior pregio del libro - oltre alla scrittura nitida di Pincio - è quello di non calcare mai troppo la mano nelle parti dedicate a Cobain (a parte forse quella sulla presenza in sala di incisione di Homer, francamente un po' forzata), che svolgono bene la funzione di specchio e contraltare degli stati emotivi del protagonista.
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