Tristano

What happens when a love story has an infinite number of possible endings? What if a computer re-sorts a novel so that no copy is the same? A radical assault upon the novel from one of Italy’s most radical artists.

The story involves two lovers, there is disruption on the streets of Milan, protesters by Porta Ticinese. Can they escape and be together? How will events change their destiny? In Tristano, Nanni Balestrini brilliantly experiments with form and storytelling to create a new type of novel in which technology, author and the reader themselves collaborate to create the narrative. Constructed of ten chapters, each consisting of twenty texts taken from guidebooks, atlases, newspapers and fiction, each printed edition of the novel is ordered uniquely.

Nanni Balestrini is a poet and novelist, cultural and political activist. He began publishing his poetry in the early 1950s and wrote his first computer-aided poem Tape Mark I in 1961. In 1973, he joined the movement Autonomia Operaia and on April 7, 1979 was accused of subversive association and involvement in 19 murders, including Aldo Moro. He took refuge in Paris until the charges were dropped. His novel, The Unseen, is also available from Verso.