Looking for Pan

On the bridge of the port of Brindisi, a super-luxury cruise ship is weighing anchor for Greece. This voyage to the East has a strange narrator, a poet-exile, whose tale has a beguiling, hypnotic tone, almost a bewitching siren song enveloping crew and travellers. Could it be the same voice that, on another crossing, announced the death of the god Pan? On a journey in reverse, the passengers voyage to the origins of the myths, towards the mystery behind the disappearance of the god. Is he truly dead, or alive and hidden somewhere else? They look for the traces, sometimes sailing, sometimes with a motor, even rowing. The vessel stops at Delphi, Mykonos and Sparta, going beyond Ancient Greece. Indeed, the journey will end well beyond the Peloponnese and the Greek coasts. They land at Constanța, the city of exile of Ovid, a constant covert main character in the strange company of travellers. In an attempt to take the alternation of prose and poetry – his personal stylistic hallmark – to an extreme peak of experimentation, Filippo Tuena creates a work in which the narrator and veiled figures of the main characters contribute to the composition of a dreamy atmosphere reminiscent of the Odyssean lotus-eaters. Indeed, the people on the cruise themselves mirror divinities, demigods or nymphs of the past. In a journey through space, but still more through ages and culture, Tuena’s ship overlays, crosses and weaves together waves belonging to past and present, accompanied by the constant song of a modern Ovid. A song that seems to call to readers’ minds a world of which the memory is preserved, but fleetingly, elusively and dimly. In In cerca di Pan (Looking for Pan), the fluid, multi-genre style of Filippo Tuena finds expression in an “exploded” form of the novel, broken down into poetry and put back together as prose. It becomes stratified in telling stories, memories, philosophical investigation and iconological influences before returning – in reality – to a state of, ancestral, suspension.  

In cerca di Pan
di Filippo Tuena
Nottetempo, 2023