Every month, our literary critic puts a work through a kaleidoscope, collecting the images it projects and reconstructing their diffractions. Even if the flashes of genius turn out to be shards of glass.
Spring brings flowers, and Marco Martella's are no exception. Just as moiré as the man he is: writer, gardener, member of the scientific council of the European Institute of Gardens and Landscapes, founder of the magazine Gardens and, above all, hidden behind several heteronyms that punctuate his literary output.
Flowers is an extension of the conversations and reflections he conducted as part of his magazine, exploring the poetic, philosophical and existential dimensions linking man to nature and landscape. In his book, we meet writers Enrique Vila-Matas and Pia Petersen, landscape architect Gilles Clément and artist and philosopher William Morris, before setting off in search of Emily Dickinson's walled garden at Harvard's Houghton Library. Never bombastic, always intimate, this diary of encounters blurs the boundaries between libraries and gardens, reality and fiction. With nostalgia and solitude in the foreground.
Organized into eight stories, each adorned with the name of a flower (narcissus, eglantine, pansy, hogweed, bellflower...), the book opens a discussion on beauty, but also memory, time, the fascination of death, love and freedom - ultimately, the eternal themes of literature. Marco Martella picks these encounters before they fade into memory, and gives voice to flowers, not as decorative or scientific objects, but as bearers of history, memory and spirituality. Each flower becomes a companion in solitude, a gateway to the invisible, a silent manifestation of beauty and the passing of time.
To Quentin Perissinotto's previous column
Under Marco Martella's hand, the texts are like so many shady alleys in an English garden, which the reader strolls like a serene, well-dressed stroller, but with his mind stimulated on all sides. The words are dewy corollas, offered without ostentation. Martella's words don't explain, they reveal. Flowers is not a treatise on flowers, but a herbarium of souls, a bouquet of presences, sometimes gone, sometimes barely glimpsed. Each text is a clearing, a hushed shelter where thoughts light up as one lights an oil lamp, discreetly, so as not to frighten the evening.
We close Flowers like leaving a garden at twilight: gently, slowly, with a few petals of silence in your pocket.
«Be that as it may, my friend had finally found what he'd been searching for in vain all his life: a world, who knows? where words and flowers are one and the same, and which goes on unruffled and unobtrusive as a long autumn afternoon; a space in which both death and life are merely accidents without too much importance or, at best, interesting subjects of conversation or literature.»
Quentin Perissinotto is a literary critic for Regard Libre. Write to the author: quentin.perissinotto@leregardlibre.com
You have just read a review that appeared in our print edition (Le Regard Libre N°117).
Marco Martella
Flowers
Babel
April 2025
192 pages
French 
German 
English