Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo e Altri libertini: la musica come elemento narrativo identitario

Abstract

This paper explores the entanglement between music and text in Brizzi’s Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo and Tondelli’s Altri Libertini. Altri Libertini is Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s first novel and it has a specific approach to music: Many popular rock and punk rock songs become part of the narration as Tondelli tries to reproduce musicality in the flow of words and to assign a particular symbolic value to the songs he chooses for his short stories. Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo has become a best-seller thanks to Brizzi’s original narration of this coming-of-age story. The writer uses music as an outlet for the characters’ emotions and it is through music that he describes the popular culture of a generation of young adults living in the 1990s. All in all, this essay intends to point out how the relation between the characters and music in coming-of-age novels can represent a way of creating and exploring a collective, a generational, or a single identity.