“Harry Potter, the paper wizard”. The literary journey into the world of Hogwarts

And if the millions of readers who have sworn loyalty to the saga of Harry Potter weren’t they wrong? Is it possible, however, that the ones who fell into error were the supercilious and snobbish critics, ready to immediately get rid of the bespectacled wizard by declaring an irreducible aversion?

Often, the writer has heard a catchphrase such as “I dislike Harry Potter”, obviously pronounced by adults who are too “Muggle”, one would say “Muggle” to the core. The fact is that one day two years ago the bizarre idea arose of trying in some way to disprove the skeptics, at least by demonstrating that Rowlingbefore becoming a writer with half a billion copies sold (a record, like it or not, which she shares with a few, very small sacred monsters of the literary world), she was a very curious and euphorically dromopathic reader.

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An idea fully shared with Alessandro Cutrona, a young scholar who grew up with Potter (also for generational reasons) and co-author of the book which slowly took shape, like a mapping, the drawing of a surprising constellation (with a real map of London, attached to the end of the volume , in which the locations of the novels are indicated for the first time, together with the most emblematic film sets). We started for fun, challenging ourselves to track down a source, to intercept a model: we got carried away to the point of inconveniencing the Palindrome editors, who were immediately curious and, above all, reactive. In a nutshell, this is the genesis of Harry Potter, the paper wizard (the Palindrome, 208 pages, 18 euros), whose subtitle reads: “Literary itineraries in the world of Hogwarts”, illustrated by Cinzia Cacioppo. Which to iconically prop up our pages has copulated with the cinematic universe of the saga, creating highly effective visual short circuits.

As is easily predictable, there were many sacrifices to be made: after all, it was not our intention to give shape to a Potterian encyclopedia, a project that was too vast and perhaps even useless. We started scraping and smoothing to dedicate ourselves to some key issues, first of all the mysteriously fascinating presence of death. In fact, the entire saga oscillates between thanatophobia and thanatophilia: death is the absolute master of the stories told, even of the apparently more lateral events. And right in Rowling’s masterpiece novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows precisely, the declination of what we can consider the theme of literary themes puts the reader on the trail of the great Geoffrey Chaucer.

From this point of view, the novels in question have acted as a sounding board, becoming fascinating litmus tests. As he once wrote Giorgio Manganelli, books pass through and you can fall into them. And by dint of ending up in Potter’s stories we were able to see that the roots of the gigantic tree of literature are always the same, and it is rewriting that determines its growth. So much so as to convince us that Rowling conceived and, above all, wrote the seven chapters of the saga together with the great authors that she has read and digested over time, in the same circular room.

Authors like Dante, Ariosto, Dickens, Carroll, Thomas Hughesand obviously Tolkien e Lewis, madly coaxed by her. In the center of this circular room, from time to time, we tried to identify that point that the narrator had to face in solitude, in the decisive moment of her writing. The chapters of the book (dedicated, among others, to Dumbledore, a charismatic and Caravaggio-esque master for the sum of lights and shadows that substantiate him; to justice reversed; to school and college novels; to fantastic creatures; to Potter’s multiverse) are altered in-depth boxes, in which the spotlight is placed on particularly representative creatures or characters, analyzed with the help of great writers. As in the case, for example, of gigantic spiders, for which we have called for help, for example Primo Levi. Or the hippogriff and the centaur, about which His Majesty was consulted Jorge Luis Borges.