Abel - A Western Metaphysical Tale

Abel - A Metaphysical Western by Alessandro Baricco, as the title suggests is a Western book.

And as the name suggests, this is not just a Western story.

In Search of the Primordial

Abel Crow, the protagonist of this novel, achieved the status of being the best marksman in the Wild West at the age of 27.

Jimi Hendrix died of suffocation at the age of 27, Kurt Cobain chose to commit suicide with a gun, and Amy Winehouse left this life at the tragic age of twenty-seven.

The list is so long that people have given it a name: "The 27 Club".

At the age of 27, Abel, gun in hand, sought answers to metaphysical questions in a time when "there still existed spaces that had never been visible before, lands that had never been conscious.

On the other side of the barbed wire fence, looking up from your work, you can see it. It is Primordial. Located in the apparent absence of human life…”.

The Primordial has been waiting for man for thousands of years, the Primordial has given birth to everything. Life. Death. The Abel Crows. The Hallelujah Woods. Men like they came out of the Bible, in the prehistoric times on earth.

In the Bible, Cain and Abel were the first two sons of Adam and Eve - the first humans. Abel's death was the first death of mankind.

Baricco makes no secret of the religious inspiration that pervades this work. But he also borrows from the Wild West, a mythical world that seems to lie on the edge of geographical borders and the line between life and death. Of justice and revenge. Of heroes and anti-heroes. Of good and evil.

The name Wild West itself is enough without saying much. Alessandro Baricco borrows the Wild West to tell his biblical story. Similarly, he borrows Japan in the novel Silk to talk about white music , borrows the ocean in Novecento to talk about existence.

The characters in his three novels Silk, Novecento, Abel all have one thing in common: they are young. These three novels also have one thing in common: they are short. A novel that can be read on stage as a kind of performance art.

The main character moves back and forth between spaces, which Abel calls "Those silent spaces". Or like Novecento takes the floating feeling of a moving ship in sync with the rhythm of his life.

In Abel, the act of shooting contains both an existential meaning: "I shoot when my heart trembles" and "A slight shiver of the world, that's all. Shorter than a moment".

Past feelings

Abel is the latest novel by Alessandro Baricco. The original was published in Italy in 2023, the Vietnamese version was translated by Tran Doan Trang and Vu Ngoc Thang, released in 2025.

Readers will not find it strange that an Italian writer chose the Western associated with American cowboy movies. If you know, there was a genre of Italian Western movies (Spaghetti Western) that flourished around the 1960s and 1970s.

During the heyday of these "Italian cowboy" films, there were two prominent "Sergios": Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci.

Director Leone is famous for the film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) starring Clint Eastwood. Director Corbucci also released the film Django in 1966, which later became the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino to make the film Django Unchained.

This movie Django Unchained helped Tarantino win an Oscar for excellent screenplay and actor Christoph Waltz won an Oscar for excellent supporting actor.

In 2021, a documentary called Django & Django was released, in which Quentin Tarantino made a cameo appearance, commenting on the influence of the Italian Western genre on the history of cinema.

So, it can be said that with the novel Abel - A Western metaphysical story, Alessandro Baricco has made a double shot. He has told a metaphysical story taking place in the Wild West. At the same time, in the middle of the 21st century, it evokes nostalgia for a trendy film genre of the past.

The world that Alessandro Baricco creates is a crossroads between reality and fantasy, between guns and witchcraft. When it seems that the world is constantly being destroyed with each shot only to be reborn, in the uncertain and impossible search for the primordial.

He had a "preface" to the readers before entering the book, that "The Wild West is a place that belongs largely to imagination. The Wild West in this book is even more so".

He expressed regret "if I have offended the sensibilities of a reader or an entire community", but added that "absolute freedom is the privilege, the condition and the destiny of any literary work".

HUYNH TRONG KHANG

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/abel-mot-truyen-sieu-hinh-hoc-cao-boi-vien-tay-20250623094343257.htm