I DREAMT WIMBLEDON SO MUCH I EVEN WON IT (!)
The story, in an ironic-oneiric key (symptomatically subtitled: “Theoretical and practical manual to realize a Dream, conceived by the one who did it and recommended for those who want to try”) describes an inspiration and at the same time, a “very remote aspiration” of the author, for whom the experience of tennis has obviously “left its mark”, despite the relative career was prematurely “kut short” at a young age!
The passion for tennis, sport “so strange as intriguing”, led the author to “play again”, by narrating the dynamics, the technique, the psychological aspects but also his History, through descriptive portraits of excellent actors, authentic national “TOTEMS” (see Chapter “The Four Musketeers”) and global (see the passages dedicated to Federer and Nadal and references to McEnroe and Borg).
In this “path of play”, the natural setting for a “fanatic/fan” can’t but be Wimbledon, the Holy Place, the Temple, the Olympus of Tennis, the fascinating context in which any player, but perhaps a mere layman, would like to place their extremely personal Victory.
And so it was [!] … for Maurizio Castelli on the occasion of the 2006 edition of the “TOURNAMENT” (!), having met among others the KING: Roger Federer!
To tell the truth, for the writer, Wimbledon is a different entity than the quiusque plerumque dicit; it is something hidden, even intimate, a sort of “part of one’s mind” which involves the thought and the psyke, until arriving, at traits, to the negation of thought itself (see chapters “THE INTERVIEW and. .. something after ” and “IGNORANT STRATEGY”).
This state of affairs has, so to speak, “led” the author to convey the story in first person, by adopting as a narrative profile a version that can be defined: “live”.
“The Final” or better “The end” is a singular shock the author “launches to himself”, as if he was incredulous to succeed in running such an “EPIC ENTERPRISE”
Maurizio Castelli
See recommended text:
“WELKOME BACK” NEL CIELO DI WIMBLEDON.
The novel, composed of 54 pages whose 20 pages with illustrations selected and/or edited and/or created by the author himself (which have a “carrying” function as an evocative tow for the “con-text”), consists of an introduction and eight chapters, and was realized in the period August 2006-December 2006 (finished on 22nd December, 2006).
Typewritten pages are realized with Word and, intentionally, using heterogeneous types in different colours.
HAVING WIMBLEDON IN MY MIND
(Claudio Girardelli’s review from “UBITENNIS” UBALDO SCANAGATTA’S TENNIS WORLD of 21st January 2011. www.ubitennis.com)
Triumphing at Wimbledon is everyone’s dream, professionals and not. Winning on the English lawns is, yet, an achievement of few champions, and never Italian. Since now. Since Maurizio Castelli, who lined up, among others, Nadal, and, at the final, his idol, King Roger Federer, has succeeded in it. Fantatennis? No, it is the story the writer of Caravaggio sent to our editorial office.
Claudio Gilardelli
Who knows why I’ve always imagined to win Wimbledon.
Who knows why if u ask me what I would like, if I could get everything I want, I say instinctively: “ TO RAISE THE CUP ON CENTRE COURT OF WIMBLEDON”.
It may be I haven’t done anything else in my life or at least I’ve never thought of nothing else…it might be, but whocares…
Who knows why I thought so at the age of thirteen and I think so still now that I’m forty-three; perhaps because I’m still a child, perhaps because I’ve never wanted 2 “grow”…but whatever the reason, one thing is certain: I happen to think even “worse”, that is 2 say, one day I could still do it!
If you are wondering, after reading these lines, if the automatic corrector of the video writing of my computer doesn’t work, the answer is no. It is simply the way “I dreamt Wimbledon so much I even won it” starts. The author is Maurizio Castelli, from Bergamo, a reader of Ubitennis, a lawyer and a teacher of Law and Economics with aspirations of being a writer (and not only this, considering the title of his first work). The story is simple: it is a “very lucid dream” placed in the temple of tennis, Wimbledon. We are in 2006 and Roger Federer is pursuing his fourth wins in row at Championships: in reality he will succeed in getting the title at Rafael Nadal’s expense, at his first final, but in fiction things go very differently. The King has to reckon with the unimaginable: an Italian player (!) “a player…as there are many, scattered in tennis clubs throughout the world” but with a dream that “fits me almost like my life itself; as the red-black football shirt is stuck to MALDINI, with 3 on the back that doesn’t come off, even if u put it 2 soak in bleach for a week”. He comes at Wimbledon as an unknown person, gets a wild card in an astonishing way and…
To recense a book is difficult in itself, above all for me, that don’t do it by profession. It is much more difficult if the work is so “peculiar”, as that one of Castelli. The question, in my opinion, is always the same: how can you distinguish originality from the presumption of being so? Castelli’s work, composed of 54 pages written between August and December 2006 ( equivalent of “12.508 typewritten words”, as the author really wants to specify) has surely this quality. Maybe not in its subject, but certainly in its narrative structure, register and linguistic style used.
“The natural setting for a fanatic/fan of tennis like me” Castelli says “can’t be but Wimbledon, the Holy Place, the Olympus of Tennis. Actually, it is a sort of part of my mind involving thought and psyche. This state of things leaded me, as to say, to be in the story in first person adopting a version you could define “live” as narrative profile. Passion for tennis, then, often forced me to stop and reflect on its dynamics, technique and psychological implications during the narration, but also on its story, through descriptive portraits, a sort of story in the story, of excellent actors of this sport, authentic totems both national (a whole chapter is dedicated to Panatta, Bertolucci, Pietrangeli and Zugarelli, “the Four Musketeers”) and global (Federer, Nadal, McEnroe and Borg).
The eight chapters composing the work are, moreover, interpolated with twenty illustrations selected or created by Castelli himself, having a “carrying function as an evocative tow for the “con-text”, as the author explains. Indeed: the peculiarity of this handwritten is without a shadow of doubt the use of heterogeneous types which represents a real expressive choice. The use of different “fonts” in the same paragraph and the singular use of punctuation, different colours of words and letters, the alternation of italics and bold, the body of the text becoming big and extremely small from a chapter to another, are all tricks giving the “ironic-oneiric” aspect of the story.
“I wanted to offer, in the very phase of writing, a sort of tonality or visual expressiveness to what it is exposed. So it’s a way of animating, even optically, the story; a need to make what I write “pulsing”, an attempt almost “Dadaist” to live my written. So, the use of those types acts of support to my way of expressing, to my way of being: you could say that, in those situations, I “play to write” and there I enjoy! My way of writing has some assonances to my way of playing and interpreting tennis (service and volée, aggressive play and continuous variations in rhythm). In short, I probably write like I play and the form I used is nothing but the expression of what I am playing. It is like when I play tennis, I refuse to follow a scheme, following my instinct, releasing the idea”.
And more, about using the typical language of sms’:
“Obviously that’s been done on purpose but it’s also a consequence of contaminations of modern living, (alas) rapid-accelerated, even “without sense” sometimes, and it’s in contrast with some considerations in the text, apparently of a nostalgic nature and tasting of “old tennis passion” but, actually, want to be cues to think about the necessity of running so much, of “bombing here and there”, of “rowing from the bottom line like madmen”, with all the negative appurtenances that follow, to the prejudice of the quality of…healthy living!”
Claudio Gilardelli
