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These days the world of football fans and that of homegrown autobiographies – stories of illustrious people told by themselves – is in turmoil for the release by Un captain, the biography of Francesco Totti. And they have good reason, because the captain of Roma, with the collaboration of Paolo Condò “on keyboards”, has come up with a good book. It could not have been otherwise seen the character and above all the man, so there it is. It is a light but direct book, not hard but fair: a real man who was lucky enough to make the stages of life at the right moment.
Of course, Totti's book is not is Open by Andre Agassi, masterfully written by the Pulitzer Prize winner JR Moehringer (who did not want Agassi to put his name on the cover) and today a point of reference for those who try their hand at writing their own autobiography or for third parties.
Because inside Open there are “real” things that hurt (because literature, be it a novel, essay or poem, must also hurt) but there are also intelligence, structure, style. From the cover: Totti plays on the title with the stadium choir (“A captain, there is only one captain”), Agassi instead on the double meaning of Open: the US Tennis Open and his opening to the world by telling intimate things, private or even prohibited (such as the use of methamphetamines and lying to the tennis federation). All this to say that autobiographies are a true genre with dignity of literature, and not just the botched memoirs of former combatants of the first or second world conflict. There are autobiographies that are pieces of literature.
Little fish
We come to Steve Jobs, indeed to his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs. In the 420 pages of Pesciolino (excellent translation of the English “Small Fry”), just published by Rizzoli for 18.50 euros, Jobs's eldest daughter tries to take control of her father's myth. It is a story with dark tones, after all it is a natural daughter raised in substantial poverty who was recognized only as a teenager by her millionaire father, who, moreover, publicly (and even privately) has always denied or questioned her paternity.
[su_pullquote align=”right” class=”custom-pullquote”] Indigestible Fish Lisa's book infuriates Jobs's wife and sister [/su_pullquote]
The real central theme of this book, rejected and condemned by the two women likes to be close to Jobs in the last days, his sister and his wife, is the power, and the way in which the daughter tries to rewrite the identity of the father through suffering and detachment at times conflicting, reconnected by means of a thin contact but then more solid and therefore of greater continuity in the last times of Jobs's life, including agony.
The intelligence of Brennan- Jobs in building Little Fish is the most interesting thing in the book. The young woman was born on May 17, 1978, so she has just turned 40 years old. When he lived with his mother he attended “poor” schools, then after the recognition of his father and his substantial maintenance allowance, he studied at Harvard and then at King's College in London for a year. She started writing in newspapers as early as university (for the student-run but very serious school newspaper The Harvard Crimson) and, after graduation, moved to the expensive heart of New York, Manhattan, to work as a journalist-writer. He publishes articles and essays for magazines and magazines such as “The Southwest Review”, “The Massachusetts Review”, “The Harvard Advocate”, “Spiked”, “Vogue” and even “O, The Oprah Magazine”.
A remarkable literary sensibility
So let's say that Lisa definitely knows how to hold the pen in her hand and, after forty years of reading and writing, she has no idea how to get out the book that each of us carries within himself, that is, his own story. In her case, a complex and difficult story, which she returns with apparent honesty and a remarkable literary sensitivity: it is the story of a conflict that she tells above all in the perspective of her childhood with her mother in Palo Alto and of the first relationships with her father. , then jumping to the final part of Steve Jobs' life. And this angle of perspective that the author chooses is revealing.
[su_pullquote align=”right” class=”custom-pullquote”] Apple at the time of Steve Jobs The best books that tell the relationship between Apple and Jobs [/su_pullquote]
The book deals with the theme of a relationship built around his father's power and the way in which he exercises it: Jobs calls by his name a computer (the Lisa) which he in turn will symbolically abandon in favor of the Macintosh, while he does not publicly admit that the Lisa is called in this way. honor to his daughter, except in a surreal episode in which he is cornered by Bono, the U2 singer, during a visit to his mega-villa.
Lisa's relationship with Steve Jobs is difficult, hard, and is a consequence of the perspective deliberately limited to the two moments of their history in which there is emotional intensity. For this we can say that the author is in the very first place capable of structuring a book: she voluntarily chooses to keep the parts that would make the story less intense and less harsh.
Lisa in fact largely hides the second twenty years of “normal” relationship with her father separated from her mother, new extended family, partial access to a wealth that Jobs' wife's two children live fully: nothing that any girl daughter of separated parents with a wealthy father and a subsidized mother does not know.
There is no drama and indeed, the perspective would change. The real drama is that of the father who is torn and evidently partially able to keep his demons at bay and find a balance in the relationship with his daughter, with his ex-girlfriend and on the other hand with the energy that he possesses in his anxiety. to conquer the world. A strong but intimately fragile father, capable of absolute hardness, ruthless, but also the bearer of a very rough affection, manifested more with an intermittent physical presence than as something that can be expressed in words or with fully social gestures.
Steve Jobs's affection is not expressed in an alienating way. Instead, it is that of a man who, in the professional world that completely absorbs his life, moves as in a jungle in which he is the most fearsome beast. And the messages he sends to his daughter (and ex-girlfriend) are actually written in the violent language he employs in the business, in which he was a ruthless ruler, surrounded by beasts thirsty for his blood.
Let's put it another way: if one uses the same register in the family and in the affections as when he goes to fight with Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and all the other semi-gods of the world of technology, entrepreneurs who make 'be ruthless their own distinctive cultural figure, things can't go well. And indeed, so it is. Steve Jobs caresses a boxer with boxing gloves who, faced with the paranoid risk of finding a woman (the ex-girlfriend) who can take advantage of him economically, stretches her out and stretches her daughter too.
The portrait of a very difficult man
In fact, in the intelligence (or cunning) of the rhetorical construction of the Brennan-Jobs book, the moments and episodes that show the figure of Steve Jobs as of a heartless man, incapable of deep affections. These are the episodes that make it possible to draw an easily negative portrait of Jobs, and that's what the press is looking for: the brilliant and ruthless tycoon in business, ruthless and nothing else in family life. Hypnotic on stage, detached and deadly in the family. Too simple, above all without contradictory.
Moreover, this is the very easy reading that is given by the other great text on Steve Jobs, namely the monumental biography of Walter Isaacson dedicated to Jobs. However, Isaacsson substantially fails in his goal of telling the exploits of the entrepreneur and man (which are reduced to a succession of events without a basic design and a morality more sophisticated than the banal “Jobs was a great son of good woman “) due to the hasty drafting of the final draft of the biography, which Isaacson briefly declared that he would like to retouch.
[su_pullquote align=”right” class=”custom-pullquote”] Think like Steve Jobs All the books that inspired him [/su_pullquote]
Isaacsson's book is evidently a consequence and “fruit” of Jobs's agony, which prompted the greedy American publisher and its even more avid author to accelerate its publication to exploit the emotional wave of the disappearance of the Apple founder. With six months of extra work, Isaacsson would have been able to find more sophisticated and interesting interpretations than with a simple job of transcribing and collating interviews with Jobs and others.
Instead , Lisa Brennan-Jobs does a finer job as said, builds an angle of view as a child and teenager in search of a relationship with an emotionally and physically detached father, whose public sphere (work, intuitions, success) arrive only indirectly, as traits of the man's hard-fought character and as a consequence of his professional as well as existential trajectory. The child is the collateral damage of an unwanted and long-denied pregnancy, of a profound existential distance, of a way of trying to mend that relationship which, in Steve Jobs's questionable sensitivity, was also in part an intense and pacifying effort. The intelligence of the book, the reason to read it, is all here.
A tailor-made story
Lisa Brennan-Jobs, in fact, is proud of herself and of his life. She may have been a lost girl, but she managed to build a path (even with substantial help from her father) that kept her afloat. And he sells the most precious thing he has achieved, which is the desire to forgive his father. Because he forgives him, perhaps to end up loving him and psychoanalytically destroying him. In any case, it does so by staging many small moments and details that have the taste of invention, of the plausible.
Why argue such a thing here? Because in the pages and pages of dialogue and description that read like a novel – and are the strong point of this autobiography – one thing never comes back. It is a common sense consideration. Let alone those who remember precisely not only dialogues but also clothing, weather, scene details, thirty years and more away. Let alone if, by writing your own memoirs, you can relive so many facts, words, details and details. Perhaps. Perhaps Pico della Mirandola. But we don't believe many others.
Little Fish is not true, it is likely. It is a Gomorrah of autobiographies, that is, a text that aims at the probable rather than the true, inventing in a way that is close to historical reality to give depth and color to the facts, not to reconstruct what really happened with the painstaking precision of the scholar. Like certain journalism, it is “fake” in the sense that it does not put on the page the timely chronicle of what happened, but a synthetic and partly allegorical representation of it. It is dangerous to do so, however, because in this way we read an interpretation of the facts that would instead allow us to form our own opinion. Who tells us that the story is also correct and not, instead, only misleading?
Attention, the thing that Lisa Brennon-Jobs does is still common and also correct. It is in fact the great literary license that who writes a memoir can take: modeling his memories to allow us to travel not only in his history but also in his mind and his feelings (for this reason autobiographies are interesting and “warm”, almost psychoanalytic , while biographies written by third parties are often “cold” and boring detailed bodybuilding exercises). Lisa Brennon-Jobs takes this memoir license. As far as we know, he did not do any interviews to refresh his memory, to know how effective things went well, to help restore the right measure of things.
Brennan-Jobs expertly exploits this space of intimate “creative non-fiction” and works with chisel in the make narrative, like Tom Wolfe and beyond to be understood, what it can tell. The angle of view is always his, the epoch of the narration is the one in which his figure is not public and therefore there is essentially no accessible news that can feed a contradictory. She tells intimate, minimal, personal stories, in which Jobs crosses the domestic space of his life, and Lisa – like an astronaut's new wife – returns his subjective taste and personal vision.
In conclusion
It is a tasty book, beautifully written, the son of a much greater sensitivity than the need for truth, which is read with pleasure. Especially if you are a fan of Steve Jobs. And who else would want to read this book? The problem is, if you are a fan of Steve Jobs, your hero will come out with broken bones. However, at least it will be done by those who have the right to do it: the daughter and not the illustrious hired and glutton biographer, unable to contain the bulimic quest for success.
Lisa Brennan-Jobs instead she's looking for that too, money and success, but at least she's entitled to it. She is not looking for redemption or closure, but evidently wants to liquidate the emotional investment of a life with Steve Jobs and, let's face it, as the natural daughter of a billionaire for whom she has experienced years of emotional abuse and who has nevertheless allowed her to touch a world that has changed it but to which it essentially does not belong, it also has a right. For us who read with pleasure pages written with passion and intelligence, Pesciolino is beyond all a good book that is worth.
Pesciolino is on sale on Amazon, both in paper version and digital version (for iOS and Android tablets via the Amazon Kindle app) its on iBooks Store, as well as obviously in bookstores
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