U is a pocket Odyssey reduced to an oratorio divided into movements, rhapsodies, ballads and frottole. It is preceded by an invocation, a Prelude divided into cadences that briefly anticipates both the story and the keys to its interpretation. The story of U does not end with his return to his homeland. An epilogue serves to narrate the death of U not as foreseen by the soothsayer Tiresias, but as imagined by Dante, at sea.
Paolini’s narration travels on inventions of immediate, pop, politically incorrect language but which faithfully maintains all the correspondences with the stages, the encounters and the vicissitudes of the Homeric journey. Orality summarizes the songs of the Odyssey through a sort of free verse that at times becomes a sound rhythm, a ballad that travels between commonplaces, the symbolic and fetish objects of our time treated like islands of garbage floating in the sea. There is no compassion in the language when it describes the earth, the sea is the only place where it can still have a meaning. This is a cutting story told from the point of view of those who must lie, disguise themselves, deceive, fight to save themselves. U’s tortuous route crosses other trajectories of shipwrecked people. U’s boat has become a fleet.
To restore dignity to a million odysseys, we need to imagine their courage, beauty and cunning, not just their horror. We need wonder, not just pity, we need irony within the tragedy. Andrea Zanzotto said that poetry is like a letter that must beg to be heard, traveling until it finds a recipient. Even if he does not aspire to the title of poet, the actor knows that he will have to beg for attention in this time to his story. And he also knows that it is up to him to succeed.
