From an idea by Luca Crovi and Claudio Gallo: Cuore di Tigre

Ed. Piemme, Milan 2013
pagg.334

Salgari after Salgari: this could be subtitled this collection of stories, where 14 writers pay tribute to the one who accompanied them by the hand during adolescence, to the discovery of unknown worlds, described in detail, but never reached by the author if not with imagination.

Back in the limelight in the years 70, thanks to the television drama "Sandokan", played by Kabir Bedi, with Philie Leroy in the role of Yanez, Adolfo Celi in that of James Brooke, the music of the brothers De Angelis and the direction of Sergio Sollima, Emilio Salgari, despite the copious literary production, has had, undeservedly, a scarce notoriety. And perhaps, therefore, for a debt of gratitude, which appears a book like this, where the writers pay homage to one of their dead comrades a hundred years earlier, whose goal was "to take a kid ... and take him around the world, from Malaysia to the Antilles, making him wear the clothes of the pirate or even of the Polish political exile in Siberia. "Each of them tells us, before the story written in the manner of Salgari, how he came across this narrator, profound connoisseur of the habits of pirates and islands inhabited by them. So we see again, in the story of Piero Colaprico, Tremal-Naik, in old age, reached in his refuge by an English colonel, in charge of a Special Operations department, arrived up there, first of all, to ask him how much he resisted in him hunter who won the thugs. "The soul does not change with the seasons in the same way as the body."

The pen of Carlo Lucarelli describes the meeting, with a final that is tinged with yellow, between James Brooke, the Rajah of the island of Sarawak, and an Italian journalist, Giovanni Salgari, who arrived on the island to interview him. Also reappear the Black Corsair, a favorite character of Alfredo Colitto. In command of his ship, the thunderbolt, saves three young men destined to be sacrificed by a so-called King of the Maya, adored by the Indians as a god. The Black Corsair, however, is protected by his younger brothers, the Red Corsair and the Green Corsair, captured and hanged by Duke Wan Guld. He "had managed to recover the bodies and had given them burial at sea, vowing to avenge them. And he was convinced that with the phosphorescence the spirit of the brothers would rise from the bottom of the oceans to remind him of his oath. "In this episcopal compendium, they could not miss them: Sandokan and Yanez. Tullio Avoledo describes them in a chronicle story, where the two protagonists of many common battles are grappling with a time machine that makes them travel to the 2001, imagining a different ending for that dramatic 11 September.

And not even a tribute to Kabir Bedi, he, who in the 1976 became a star thanks to his interpretation of Sandokan could not miss. It is Simone Sarasso that in the original "The wonders of 2011", tells us an impossible meeting between Emilio Salgari and, indeed, the same Kabir Bedi. Meeting, this, due to an experiment described by Salgari himself in his book "The wonders of 2000". There is the amazement of a trip by plane. "In my books I have described itineraries in balloons or aircraft always based on the words of others: travel diaries, novelist lies, triumphant poems. But no word is worth the charm of making us birds ourselves, comfortably seated in an armchair aboard a prodigy. "There is the amazement of seeing a cell phone; or rather, "a miniature orchestra". There is the amazement to see all his books in a bookstore in Verona. "In front of that window of the 21st century, after a thousand and thousand miles journey through time, for the first time since I had returned to the world, I burst into tears."

A revenge, then, for him who three days before taking his own life, wrote this letter:

"To my publishers,

To you who have enriched yourselves with my skin, keeping me and my family in a continuous semi-misery or even more, I ask only that in compensation for the gains I gave you, think of my funeral.

I greet you by breaking the pen."

 

Gianlorenzo Capano