Mario Paluan | 1976 | Towards Kabul
In the opening pages of “On the Road”, Jack Kerouac states that “somewhere along the way I would be given the pearl.” “Towards Kabul” is a tiny pearl found along the way, a booklet of yellowed pages that has lied hidden in a trunk for almost fifty years.
The novel dates back to the seventies, when a flood of young people left for elsewhere from all over Europe, obeying an existential call, the intolerance that youth dictates, the rebellion against the system or simply to follow the moment. Mario is one of them…
We ended up getting in touch due to complicity of a Dutch researcher in a curious Turin – Amsterdam – London triangulation and since then I’ve been knocking on the doors of publishing houses to try to publish the manuscript, which, to this day, remains unpublished except for previous self-publishing experiences.
An excerpt is available here, a collage of the most suggestive sentences that you can read as a whole to capture the spirit of the novel.
An album of photographs of the journey emerged from the same trunk, with a warning from the author: “Time has swallowed up those places, clouding them. Try to put the captions yourself, it is not difficult: in the images you will recognize your own adventure, your illusions, your most secret desires. You’ve been to Kabul in one way or another, don’t you remember?”
Hippie Trail 