Episode 3: Letters That Arrived Late

For the third conversation, Kasper Nyholm travelled to Trieste to record the essayist Ettore Castagnola in the back room of a second-hand bookshop that used to be his. They talk about the notebook of marginalia he has kept for twenty years, about the letters he left in a kitchen drawer for the next tenant of his old flat, and about the particular melancholy of forwarded post.

In this episode

• Four volumes of other people's notes in the margins
• The note that started it all, and the question it never answered
• Why he never tried to find the people who wrote them
• Letters to a future tenant, and whether anyone has written back
• A reading from the notebook, in Italian and English

From the conversation

Kasper Nyholm: You describe the notebook as an anthology with no editor.

Ettore Castagnola: That is what it is. The entries arrive in the order the books arrived. I do not choose them. I do not arrange them. A furious note about an emperor sits next to a shopping list. If I edited it, it would become my book. As it is, it is everybody's.

Kasper Nyholm: And the letters you left in the flat. Has anyone replied?

Ettore Castagnola: I do not know. I gave no address. That was the point. I imagine them in the drawer, with perhaps a second letter next to them by now. I prefer not to find out. Forwarded post always arrives a little late, and I think these letters should arrive very late, or never, to someone I will not meet.

The full conversation runs to thirty-five minutes and was recorded among several thousand books, which you can hear absorbing the sound.