A Fictional Inquiry

“the metaphysical decorum of calculation . . .”

As the book opens, the narrator of A Fictional Inquiry and a “middle-aged military man” are on some railroad tracks. They must walk the last kilometer to Trieste because their train has broken down. “‘See that perspective?” the military man asks, pointing to the horizon line. “We do scores of calculations for perspective, to reproduce a defect of vision.” When the narrator arrives in Trieste, he visits several bookstores, then the city library, then has a meal. He seems to be stalling. He finally takes a cab to a hospital with a long-term care unit and is shown into the room of an elderly woman, who begins to reminisce. She finally mentions a name, Roberto Bazlen. She continues talking for a bit before asking, “What is it that you want to know about him?”

“Why he didn’t write,” is the narrator’s answer.

And so, indirectly, fourteen pages into the novel, an insignificant character finally broaches the subject of the book. Throughout Inquiry there is the sense that whatever is meaningful lies beneath the surface, that the real events are occurring indirectly. The narrator keeps missing the signals and Del Giudice is hiding them from us.

Written in 1983, but not translated into English until last year, this was the first novel by Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice. Impressively, the back cover had a five-paragraph blurb by another Italian writer, the rising star Italo Calvino, which concludes this way: “What does this remarkable book herald? Another debut novel by a young writer? Or a new approach to representation, to narration, consistent with a new system of coordinates? (Mercator’s map is one of the key images.)”

Roberto Bazlen (1902-1965) never published anything in his lifetime, although the posthumously issued Notes Without a Text and Other Writing contains his unfinished novel “The Sea Captain.” Instead, he lived a life steeped in literature. He was a regular at cafés where writers met and talked with each other. He promoted writers’ works to publishers. The consensus is that he decided to live a full life rather than devote himself full-time to writing.

The narrator goes about his search for Bazlen, his friend who died ten or twenty years earlier, with a distinct lack of passion, almost reluctantly. Bazlen was a man who had the promise of becoming one of the great writers of his time but died without having published a single book. The narrator suddenly wants to know “Why didn’t he write?” To try to answer this, he decides to visit aging friends of Bazlen’s in Trieste and London and listen to their fading memories and their conflicting theories, while he mostly stares out their windows or glances around their rooms.

During one such interview in Trieste, a woman takes a scrapbook from a bookcase and opens it to pages of photographs. Some of them must show Bazlen, but the narrator can’t look. “Each time she turns a page I blur the image, crossing my eyes and focusing on the tip of my nose.” As soon as the scrapbook is closed, he excuses himself and hurries back to the train station and onto the next train home. “I look out the window with a general sense that something has changed. I think I came here to understand why a writer didn’t write. Now everything is diverging.”

Instead of parallel lines that mysteriously merge and point to the horizon, those lines now diverge, spreading out from him, but also pointing back to the narrator. In the second half of Inquiry, it becomes more obvious that this search is as much about the narrator as it is about Bazlen. His next stop is London and a Mrs. Blumenthal, who knew Bazlen well and happened to be the person who found him when he died. As she prepares to serve the narrator tea and cake, she wants him to tell her something about himself. “I find I am unable to summarize myself on the spot, or instantly convey an idea of who I am.” While he watches her slowly and surgically cut two pieces of cake with a knife, he rephrases and, crucially, expands the four-word question he has been asking everyone preceding her.

“‘What I am interested in,’ I say, ‘is a point at which knowing how to be and knowing how to write perhaps intersect. Everyone who writes imagines it in a different way. With him, however, there was an omission at that point, a refusal, a silence. I would like to understand why.'” In addition to trying to fathom Bazlen’s refusal, there is a hidden rhetorical question in the narrator’s first sentence. “What I am interested in is knowing how to be.” This is clearly also part of his inquiry.

The narrator never tells us anything about himself. Not one biographical detail slips out. But twice he engages in extended reveries that reveal his desire for a life that might be more orderly, perhaps with all “defects of vision” corrected. In the first such episode, he is killing time once again, sitting on a bench in the port of Trieste facing a docked French naval ship. A young couple declares they are French to an ensign on the ship and he offers them a tour—which the narrator proceeds to conduct in his imagination, stop by stop. He tours the couple through the chartroom, the engine room, the pilothouse (“a disappointment”), the orlop deck, and other key rooms on the ship without leaving his bench.

“The compass binnacle, floor timber, the alidade on the plane table: These terms the ensign would not likely to pass up for any reason. Some words cause one to behave in a certain way. Then too he likes these words because they have no synonyms, and they are able to combine technical precision with a certain amount of suggestion, eliminating everything in between.”

After the young couple depart the French ship, the narrator remains on his bench and think of all the ways in which he envies the life of the ensign, “his way of seeing things: very often he glances sidelong, he’s used to seeing by collimation.” Collimation is the process of aligning optical elements or light/radiation beams to ensure they are parallel.

The second imaginary reverie occurs on the plane from Rome to London. The narrator momentarily becomes the flight’s “second-in-command, [who] will take radial 292, a standard route over the sea from Rome Fiumicino” (Rome’s airport). The narrator proceeds to explain in precise aeronautical terms how the plane will make its way across the Alps, across Europe, to London’s Heathrow Airport. The co-pilot, he tells us, is using a map based on the older Mercator map,

“the map on which the world is cut out with scissors, rolled up and unrolled, then laid out flat. The meridians remain equidistant; the parallels curve convexly toward the poles, ever more smiling mouths in the north and progressively sadder in the south. But the Mercator map is not a geometric projection; it is devised with precise calculation, and with near-perfect mathematics. Its other name is Representation.”

The Italian flight crew will pronounce their plane’s ID through a protocol—India Delta Oscar Foxtrot November—so that it won’t be “incomprehensible” to others. The narrator mentions how the anemometer, the artificial horizon, and the altimeter operate, before mentioning that these can occasionally fail. At which point he imagines the plane suddenly bursting through the clouds, headed straight toward Mont Blanc at 800 kilometers per hour. The eyes of the flight crew “might sense a brown-and-white mass beyond the windshield and fast-moving wipers, and that image, hypertense with adrenaline, would remain in their eyes, if it’s true that the retina retains the last thing one sees.”

Death is already part of the narrator’s calculation. One morning he tells us that he has woken up “with my arms crossed over my chest, in a position my body assumes on its own now, but that sooner or later someone else will have to arrange it in.”

Del Giudice’s original title for his novel was Wimbledon Stadium, which, I realize, is not as marketable as A Fictional Inquiry. (Just think how many books these days, fiction and non-fiction, are based on searches for people, lost, forgotten, or disappeared.) But there was a reason Del Giudice titled the book after the famous tennis grounds. On the way to his second and final visit with Mrs. Blumenthal, the narrator emerges from Wimbledon Station and once again stalls for time. He wanders into the Wimbledon Stadium Museum, “where all the objects are devoid of emotions, indeterminate, like photos.” He goes out onto the famous center court, silent and empty under the retractable roof, and imagines “where a ball must have traced a horizontal eight between one player and the next, like the infinity sign.” He realizes that his upcoming meeting might be his last chance to ask questions about Bazlen, but he can’t think of anything new to ask. Instead, “any words, whatever they may be, run counter to the setting. I would just like to gaze, and feel; and for the first time I’m sorry, right now, not to be able to photograph.” It’s in the great Stadium where victories and defeats are earned that comes to understand that his search is invalid.

“I have never been so close to the answer, and so indifferent to the question.”

From the beginning, the narrator had been reluctant to seek out Bazlen’s old friends, and now he realizes that their representations of Bazlen’s life and why he chose not to write have been useless to him. At the very end, he settles for an object, one of Bazlen’s old sweaters, which Mrs. Blumenthal has given him during their final meeting. As his train departs Wimbledon Station, he holds the pullover “as gently as one would cradle a baby.”

Daniele Del Giudice. A Fiction Inquiry. New Vessel Press, 2025. Translated from the 1983 Italian original by Anne Milano Appel.