There are travel diaries that read like atlases, boring as other movies of other people's holidays. There are novels in stages disguised as intergalactic manuals for hitchhikers, but which are actually autobiographies beautiful, good and useful barely family.
With Africa, however, you can hardly cheat and why write and write about himself wandering through this universe remain credible to themselves and to others is a difficult task.
In Africa you can not look away, but at the same time you can not ignore the beauty that makes you feel a happy selfish, privileged passage.
Who wants to tell Africa can not ignore the lesson of Kapuscinski, but will also need to Hemingway cynicism, the snob sensitivity of Karen Blixen, unawareness of scientific Felice Benuzzi, the mountaineer who escaped from the camp of Italian prisoners during the Second World war II only for the lust to climb Mount Kenya, before returning in the arms of British captors with a memorable notebook that will become "no picnic on Mount Kenya", the object of worship not only for climbers.
Without disturbing icons and raise too much dust from the shelves, at the end of 2016 it happens across "Africa, Maisha Marefu" (Edizioni TGbook, pp. 223, € 15), or travel notes between Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania the Brianza Marco novated.
Documentary filmmaker who loves mountains, explorer, Novati described and filmed the Patagonia, he is drinking more than half South America, and has known the lure of the Orient.
But like many, it remained bewitched equatorial Africa and the "continent where the sunrises and sunsets are colored by emotions and feelings of the soul, where the animals live in the wild in the bush, where the rules of life are still determined by Nature where he was born the man and where man will die. "
Mal d'Africa Novati is the need to immerse themselves in a reality closer to their own feelings, because as writes in the preface to the artist Bice Ferraresi (other ill with Kenya) "for our writer traveling is riattingere to those values ​​from which often we move away because of our hectic everyday life. "
And then in this dip in a saving the world, in this re-emergence from water to air, you read all in one breath humanity among the animals of the Maasai Mara and Serengeti, the exhausting climb on Kilimanjaro summit and that epic Mount Kenya, the timeless abandonment archipelago of Lamu and the sum of all this in the warm, enveloping, naive and paradisiacal entropy of Watamu.
All seasoned with a strong sense of friendship, that does not need too many words and is played masterfully by his friend Pino, an inevitable look at the social (and how could it be otherwise, when you get into a slum in Nairobi or in a recovery community in Gede?) and a bit of nostalgia for a world free of which perhaps only in Africa still feels the echo.
Marco Novati, with passion, makes us go on board of his novel, which is sometimes a matatu full of colored people, sometimes an obedient donkey, then a Land Rover on safari, but often only one pair of boots and a stick.
Pages as kilometers, marked by the same emotions on a rainy day Italian took him to live the adventure that not only had the desire and the courage to live, but was able to describe so well.