Acceso usuarios
Ewa Nicewicz
The town space is one of the most important ones created by our civilizations. Labyrinth town is also the icon of the postmodern one, which is characterized at his time by the time-space disorientation. The Alessandro Baricco work, a representative of the young Italian narrative style, is a perfect example of it. In his novels, strongly affected by the other genres, we will find time as a prevalent element, as in: Seta (1996), or the prevalence of space, in: Oceano mare (1993) and City (1999). This essay aims to present through the above mentioned work, one of the fundamental aspects of the postmodern sensibility: the abolition of the harmonious relation between time and space. The Baricco town, extended and decentralized, which could allude to an American city and which looks alike a big labyrinth or as a net, lives outside the real time. The space assumes an absolute value and it determines the structure of the novel. The streets, the various levels of the narration, mingle and cross each other freely, without any logic of time. From this picture finally emerges the vision of the contemporary man, Theseus of our times, who is looking for the answers to fundamental questions and who must find the way out of the labyrinth.
