“Poet Raúl Quinto has brought Nannetti back into orbit with La canción de NOF4, a book halfway between biography and essay. He is considered a weirdo, but if a writer is not a weirdo, what is he/she then?“ Enrique Vila-Matas, Babelia (El País)
An outstanding literary exercise on writing, art, solitude, and madness.
Fernando Oreste Nannetti (1927-1994) spent nearly half of his life confined to the psychiatric ward of the Volterra Asylum, where, in a state of schizophrenia, he inscribed a book—an extraordinary text stretching over seventy meters—onto the asylum walls with the metal tip of his uniform buckle.
Nof4’s Song immerses us into the labyrinth of Nannetti’s existence and the visceral power of his writing, which is at once a haunting testimony of madness and an unlikely form of desperate yet artistic expression, that has posthumously been hailed as ‘Art Brut’.
With a writing style that dances between poetry, narrative and essay, Raúl Quinto’s novel elevates the story of a forgotten madman into an exploration of some of the most profound questions of human existence: the origin and meaning of writing, the boundaries of madness, and the paradox of isolation and artistic creation.
Each copy contains a colour fold-out with photographs and plans of Nannetti’s wall.
Writing is an effort to break the chain. Writing is to count the heads of cattle and the number of the stars. It is a sophisticated way of surviving for a frightened animal. Before beginning, we must make all this clear. There is a man capturing words through invisible towers of electricity. An ancient animal scratching a wall with the buckle of his vest. He’s writing. He can’t stop. The door is wide open. And this is his song.