The Phosphorous and Matchstick Handbook
Italian, Quodlibet, 2024
“After lying idle for years in the darkness of a box, the match—or the ‘lightning’, as you will still hear it called in Piedmont—must now release all its energy. This is its moment. As fleeting as the flame may be—and fleeting it really is—something will have been accomplished.”
“It’s odd how the handbooks human beings create for themselves are so different, the authors seeing themselves by turns as watchmakers, mountain climbers, school teachers, chess players, collectors of tiny precious objects… The ‘Human’s Handbook’ certainly considers the fact men and women write handbooks on any and every subject, not just to pass on to heirs and contemporaries knowledge of the world and the most effective methods for shaping its web of cause and effect […], but perhaps also in an attempt to free themselves from that very guide to their species.”
In a masterful assembly of essays, fables, encyclopaedia entries and autobiographical stories, Matteo Terzaghi has produced a book that contemplates life and our attempts to give meaning to our time on Earth.
At first glance, you might think that Terzaghi’s The Phosphorous and Matchstick Handbook is a collection of eclectic writings: quickly flick through its pages and you will encounter more than one funeral, various printing firms, lots of dogs and countless matches, the writer Borges and the painter Degas, reflections on handbooks, on the postal service and globalisation, and stories about moles, pharmacists, ventriloquists and encyclopaedia compilers. The form of this prose varies too: the first part of the book is mainly essays, the second a collection of short stories, the third autobiographical writings. But to those who open this ‘handbook’ and are guided by the narrator’s clear, candid and wry voice, it’s immediately clear that despite their apparent diversity, all the events and characters described are part of the same story: we are not told an action-packed tale; rather, we accompany the narrator, text by text, on a journey of discovery culminating in a minor epiphany that enlightens us, too.
‘I want to talk about a book,’ says the narrator at the beginning ‘that helped me answer a question that had lingered at the back of my mind for years.’ The question, we learn, relates to a 1909 handbook for the match industry: while reading it, the narrator is reminded of a mystery from his childhood and, thanks to the handbook, he is able to shed light on this mystery. In the book, this pattern is repeated: we meet various characters who, coming across an object or place from their past, feel compelled to look back and see how the memory of that object, that place, has shaped their entire lives. One story shows us an elderly Borges who on returning to Lugano where he lived as a boy is bombarded with questions from local journalists, keen to learn how the little town had shaped him; another tells the tale of a couple who every 10 years go back to see the waterfall they visited on their honeymoon, comparing the changes in the waterfall—and in themselves—from one visit to the next. In this looking back lies the book’s big question: what remains in us of the life we have lived? And how should we live so we can look back without a sense of nostalgia or regret, but rather as the first story puts it, a ‘particularly pure sort of joy’?
In the last part of the book, ‘Another childhood’, the author tries to find an answer in the sincerest testimony that a person can offer: their own experience. Venturing into the realm of autobiography for the first time, Terzaghi writes a series of texts that are pure recollection. The last closes, once again, with a match being lit. As it lights up, it in turn lights other matches: it is perhaps a sketch of an answer and one last image, a glimmer, barely visible, of life.
Text by Sara Groisman
- Title
- Il manuale del fosforo e dei fiammiferi
- Publisher
- Quodlibet
- Translation rights
- Valentina Parlato, valentinaparlato@quodlibet.it
- Publication date
- 2024
- Pages
- 144
- ISBN
- 978-88-229-2236-6
- Awards
- Special mention from the Martin Bodmer Foundation at the Gottfried Keller Prize 2024
Author
Matteo Terzaghi
Matteo Terzaghi was born in Bellinzona, canton Ticino, in 1970. His two previous works of prose, Light Show Office and The Earth and its Satellite, both blend fiction and non-fiction. Published by Quodlibet in their original Italian, they have been translated into several languages. Terzaghi has also published a series of collaborations with artists and photographers, including Gotthard Super Express (Humboldt Books, 2015) and Thoughts and Fantasies About a Markus Raetz Landscape (Edizioni Periferia, 2021). For The Phosphorous and Matchstick Handbook (Quodlibet, 2024), he received a special mention from the Martin Bodmer Foundation at the Gottfried Keller Prize 2024.