Novecento de Alessandro Baricco

A trumpeter, Tim Tooney, tells us how he came to meet an outstanding jazz pianist aboard the liner Virginian, a true city of glass and steel launched haphazardly onto the Ocean. We imagine the 1920s-30s, an imaginary Ellis Island: abandoned at birth on this liner where he was born, adopted by the crew, he never set foot on land. The legend that it is, this Danny Boodman T.D. Lemon Novecento... But something goes off the rails, we don't quite know how, it's as if this Tim Tooney saw himself there, relived everything of a buried past, before us, distant, perhaps tinged with melancholy, who knows... Yet this story with the air of fantastic tales is steeped in celebration and breath. Novecento... his music of enchantment, the greatest pianist who ever played on the Ocean, inner voices, a storm of brass and accordion... But still, we wonder what we are watching. A narrator who pushes us to witness his own metamorphosis?