Man of RomaApotheosis
The third volume of my trilogy The Three Sides of the Coin, entitled Apotheosis, has already been published in Italian. The English translation is complete but has not yet been published.
Here is the introduction.
Author’s Introduction
Bringing this third volume to completion was not easy. The threads that had to be retied—indeed, the many narrative strands left unresolved—did not close up by themselves. Some had hidden so well that I had to chase them for page after page, with the vague sensation of playing hide-and-seek.
I often identified with the exhausted old narrator who writes with his fountain pen. Of course I used my PC, but cafés, endless days and the occasional existential bewilderment were never in short supply.
There are more surprises in these pages than in the previous volumes: plot surprises, genuine narrative twists. At a certain point I even began to surprise myself—was that a sign the characters had taken on a life of their own, or should I worry, at nearly eighty?
People have told me that the novel, and especially its ending, are ambitious. Whether I overstepped is for readers to judge. What I can say is that I had fun writing it. Besides, this is part of what the trilogy—a tale of love and adventure—is about: at my age, an eventful life is scarce; inventing one on the page is a pleasure and, let’s be honest, a pretty decent exercise in survival.
Throughout the trilogy the register shifts deliberately: it moves from a low tone—jokes, dialects, the occasional comic-strip scene—to a higher voice which, in this third volume, becomes more explicit and looks towards Propertius, Milton and Dante. There is melodrama, too, which I enjoy and which warms me, and the ancient philosophical and religious traditions I have tried not to betray, while still offering a personal, novelistic version of them. These are the freedoms and the risks I have allowed myself here, as in the two earlier books. I will add nothing more. What I had to say is in the pages that follow and in the trilogy as a whole.
Giovanni Mario Buffa
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