One is never too old to run away

After the music of Payne's operetta and Griffith's film of the same name (1914) "Home sweet home", also taken up by the American band Motlely Crue forty years ago, now becomes the title of a book by Andrea Kerbaker in the Italian "Casa, dolce casa". Right from the title there is no doubt, that is where you want to stay, or rather return from the albeit cosy retirement home from which you escape VIA VIA. There is no question mark as in Benjamin's film with Tom Hanks, there is the same desire that animates Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" who, with a click of the heels of her ruby red slippers, wants to return home to Kansas where she lived with her aunt.

In short, there is always an Ithaca for everyone to return to, and Kerbaker reiterates this in his narrative debut of his latest book after having ranged extensively in non-fiction. The story of an umpteenth return to what is an ultralogue, the dolce casa, is narrated in the second person singular, with the tu, and indeed for an avid reader like him it could not be otherwise given the confidence he has with his many readers.

 In spite of his vast knowledge of literature, he admitted that it was a bold choice; indeed, had he remembered that the very unusual 'tu' is used by Italo Calvino in 'If One Winter Night a Traveller', he would have been careful not to use it when deciding on the narrative voice. But before escaping into the final fugue there is a long, mainly inner journey to be made, a reflection on the difficulty of accepting to grow old, perhaps well. These are considerations made with a certain wit, like English humour, to lighten a subject where it is easy to fall into heaviness if not into existential despair as in Kierkegaard. On the contrary, the book is full of hope precisely to make a plan to escape from where one feels cramped if not quite forced; what agitates the protagonist Mr Coleridge is a life force that pushes him to make a couple of attempts before succeeding. But the problem then is what one finds; there are no longer the usual points of reference.

As with Ulysses on his return to Ithaca, George too will have to come to terms with the changes he undergoes, from the inner ones starting with his motor difficulties to the outer ones of a changed environment and social context. Kerbaker certainly has precise literary points of reference, the flight from old age is a literary as well as autobiographical narrative topos, for example Tolstoy who, as an over-eighty year old sick man, runs away from Jasnaja Poljana. Certainly today, with the lengthening of life, the eighty-something years are no longer pillars of Hercules to be crossed. It is the age of the last two American presidents, which is now so easy to reach that the leaders of the superpowers when they met recently in Beijing confidently thought they were aiming for 150. But this goal does not interest the wise Kerbaker, indeed he said that for him eighty is already a lot. Although nowadays people prefer to speak of 'ederly adults', in the end it is still old age and the book certainly does not hide this. Indeed, as Virgil reminds us that 'time takes all things away', and George's vicissitudes do not fail to reiterate this