The release of a book is always an important event, but this book written by Luigi Manconi is special. He tells his last 15 years in an acute way, describing all the phases that led him to accept a new situation: complete blindness which has changed him irreversibly. Don’t miss this almost “autobiography” of rare subtlety, because it talks about problems of every age: identity, limits imposed by destiny, relationships with others. The intelligent and poetic style shares a vibration like a musical theme resonating for a long time. If he had not already written dozens of books, one could say a great writer was born at 76. Published last September by Garzanti, “The Disappearance of Colors” is a real novel, not an essay on blindness.
Going blind is a dramatic experience. It means wearing out relationships with the world, with its sizes and colors, with its promises and surprises. And it means tiring out relationships with others and with things: caresses don’t hit the mark and glasses fall, the impossibility of writing a dedication or recognizing a face. Over more than fifteen years, Luigi Manconi – sociologist and political activist – has been going from severe myopia to low vision, to partial blindness and finally to total blindness. Therefore, this is the story of a loss and a slow descent into a darkness that is not, however, “an inkwell of compact gloom”, because “blindness is not black. It is milky and sometimes hazy”. This book is the testimony of a journey of consciousness and knowledge and it’s the story of a new world full of echoes: the sounds of a basketball game, the notes of a song, the voice dictating a text or giving a command to a voice assistant or that one of an actor reading an audiobook. And the tactile sensations: the heat of the sun on the skin, hands that brush the walls orienting themselves, uncertain grips on objects, shins hitting the edges. And above all memories, because the loss of sight is accompanied by the vicissitudes of memory: the premonitions of adolescence and the faces that remain the same as thirty years ago.
And again: what can see who isn’t able to see? In Manconi’s narration, there is both the flattery of desperation (“should I throw myself out the window or not?”) and a constant vein of humor, irony and self-irony. There is acceptance of the limits imposed by fate and praise of the struggle: the antidote to blindness, “which is first of all immobility”. The struggle is “the movement that gathers and mobilizes energy, that produces knowledge, that pursues goals, that exercises intelligence”. Today, no one, not knowing, notices Manconi can’t see. He does not wear glasses, or a stick and does not keep his eyelids closed.
Certainly, he is mostly accompanied, but it seems that it is leading the other lightly touching his elbow. Is he still himself, the same as before? Is he still the intellectual, writer, journalist, defender of rights memorable the battles for jailbirds’ ones with Pannella)? Certainly yes! Even physicality, for a good part yes! Still very handsome, elegant and sober, nice (when he decides to be) and above all self-deprecating. He is more than a jab for the so-called able-bodied, including that set of behaviors that are triggered towards every disabled person: pity, embarrassment, ignorance, excessive care. Since the limit of asking “who brings Luigi here? Where do we put him?”. Finally, Manconi gives us a political lesson against that legal paternalism that continues to preclude, in our country, legislative choices that respect the self determination of the patient, whose autonomy is denied «obviously, “for his own good”».