Giorgio De MariaReseñas
Autor de The Twenty Days of Turin: A Novel
Reseñas
The Twenty Days of Turin: A Novel por Giorgio De Maria
To be fair, it takes a lot for a book to get under my skin—perhaps a lack of imagination on my part, or the distancing effect of reading—and _Twenty Days_ has some interesting ideas and a nice sense of growing (and justified) paranoia. It is, I think, a bit Pynchonesque, but perhaps too short and vague to really build up to the level of creepiness that it could have reached.
No one wants to talk of those days or speak of the library. As the book continues, a sense of menace and foreboding will go through you, and the author escapes at the end.
Or, does he? Does he escape? What is he escaping from? You will never know.
Can we escape from ourselves? We will never know.
The writing is simple. Very simple. This simplicity masks the mastery of the writing.
This book is relevant, scary, dystopian and a classic.
I was shaken when I read the first novella, "The Transgressionists." The story may seem far-fetched, but it is not. A bunch of people with almost telepathic powers seeking to infiltrate and control the world may seem fantastic. However, when you think about this, you will realize that many people seek to control our minds through the sheer force of their personalities. When such people do so almost in silence, it becomes altogether frightening. And it happens in broad daylight.
The second story tells the tale of a psychological experiment by Stalin on a poet.
The third is about a group of artists who use corpses as art objects. The fourth is of a crazy General, and the fifth is a teleplay.
The stories play upon the horrors of the human mind, almost evil experiments, and psychological games. The stories are disturbing because they live within the realm of plausibility.
I read some of the stories two times, and they stay with me. Read the stories. Buy the book.
Leggendo queste parole nel 2020 è impossibile non pensare subito a certi meccanismi perversi dei social network, ma "Le Venti Giornate di Torino" è stato pubblicato nel 1977, quando internet era solo un impalcatura semi vuota confinata in qualche ufficio del Pentagono.
Grazie a queste intuizioni, il libro di Giorgio de Maria si è guadagnato un'aura profetica e, seppur totalmente ignorato in Italia all'epoca della sua prima edizione, è stato riscoperto nei paesi anglosassoni dove è diventato un vera e propria opera di culto.
Ho scoperto questo breve romanzo proprio grazie all'account twitter di un critico letterario britannico ( qui per chi fosse interessato a seguirlo) che lo segnalava come uno dei migliori romanzi horror da lui letti nel 2019. Ovviamente non potevo che comprarlo e leggerlo immediatamente (con buona pace di tutti i libri acquistati e messi a prendere polvere sulla mia libreria).
"Le Venti Giornate di Torino" è un libro Strano e Inquietante (nel senso di Weird e Eerie, nella definizione dei due termini data da Mark Fisher nel suo [b:The Weird and the Eerie. Lo strano e l'inquietante nel mondo contemporaneo|41563228|The Weird and the Eerie. Lo strano e l'inquietante nel mondo contemporaneo|Mark Fisher|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535830247l/41563228._SX50_.jpg|50205156] ) che pur cercandole, non da risposte. L'anonimo protagonista sta conducendo un'indagine privata su alcuni fatti sconvolgenti accaduti 10 anni prima in città: Un'insonnia di massa che spesso sconfinava nel sonnambulismo, strani sogni e e visioni e poi gli omicidi, brutali omicidi come non se ne erano mai visti in città. Sullo sfondo una strana Biblioteca sita nei locali del Cottolengo che non contiene libri, ma solo sfoghi, confessioni intime, pensieri, flussi di coscenza lasciati li da privati cittadini.
L'atmosfera resa da romanzo non ha nulla a che fare con le classiche leggende sulla Torino Magica, ricorda molto di più quella sensazione di orrore metafisico della porta accanto di alcune opere di Tiziano Sclavi o, in alcune parti, degli Horror di Pupi Avati.
Le Venti Giornate di Torino è un libro assolutamente originale e, per alcuni versi disturbante, da leggere anche se non si apprezza il genere. Difficilmente troverete nel panorama letterario italiano un altro libro che gli assomigli
I'll reread the book simply because all that so appeals to me and because I was to my frustration unable to take it in on first reading, having read it in fits & starts. Not because I put the book aside now & then but because the language often halted me and the narrative often had me wondering 'Wait--what did I miss?' and reading a passage once again to find whether a character was actually playing a recorder whilst banging a pan with a ladle, or had leaped forwardd in time rather than turning on his radio and bolting the door whilst strolling through the city, or whether a performer was frightened by someone who inserted himself rinto the performance of Don Giorvanni or whether Don Juan himself was walking home or who knows, but it was confusing and not deliberately so. I can only think that either the author and his editors were half-locked from start to publication or that becaise the translator hadn't to all appearances a perfect grasp of English s/he so concentrated upon the meaning of each sentence that he lost memory of the previous sentences. Of all previous sentences, in fact.
Wait--what did I miss? when did this couple decide to part ways?:
' "Rudholf, if I were you", I told my husband, "I would get out of here now." He said, "Me too, Ruth." ' In other, better words the terriified Ruth said '"Rudolf, we need to leave here now!" Bur her husband's wonderfully random reply is one I'll keep to hand:: There's going to be a hard frost tonight. Me too. No, that's taupe not grey. Me too, Ruth. Date of birth? Me too.
(The fevered book description at head of LT main page would best be ignored.)
“And what happened then?"
What happened, indeed. I think not knowing exactly, not having a concrete answer, is kind of the point. I’m finding a lot of Italian fiction from this era bears this stamp of uncanny dedication to dark ambiguity (e.g. Gadda’s 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘈𝘸𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘔𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘝𝘪𝘢 𝘔𝘦𝘳𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘢, Sciascia’s 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘢𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘸𝘭, Calvino’s 𝘐𝘧 𝘰𝘯 𝘢 𝘞𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳’𝘴 𝘕𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘢 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘳). Even the films of Pasolini and Antonioni seem closer to works like these than other literary analogs. Sure, as the dust jacket cites, there are hints of Poe and Lovecraft. Both of those authors, however, were more taken by evil caught in glimpses and at how ineffable the conveyance of that full horror was. These Italian authors, by contrast, seem more obsessed with the very fact of not knowing—as if that lack of knowledge were the most horrible conception possible. Fear of the unknown unknown?
Honestly, Bolaño’s 2666 is the only novel outside the Italian canon I can readily conjure that has any real affinity. “The Part About the Crimes” in that great work, with its pervasive descriptions of the aftermath of torture and murder, is very reminiscent of the murder sequences around the monuments in Turin. There are hints of a killing giant, too, just as in De Maria’s novel. Those episodes in both books are populated with characters who try and fail at finding the source to all this mayhem. And those characters are forever haunted by that unknown of unknown horrors. Simply not knowing, not having the answers . . . goddamnit, that’s brilliant.
There are hints of De Sade, too—both in the title as well as in the perverse fascinations of an elite; whether the players choose to secrete themselves in a castle in the mountains or a sanatorium converted into a library. However, just as twenty days is far less time than four months, and Turin nowhere near as debauched as that damned city Sodom, so is De Maria’s work far less concerned with perversity than with keeping the characters, the reader, the old stone buildings themselves, fully wrapped in the dampest fog.
And I’m totally taking that moving statue idea he’d floated in the barber scene. An homage, I suppose, to that great unknown unknown refusing to step out from the fogged shadows and measure itself against a far too brightly lit reality.
This is just a short note to register I've read this. It isn't the kind of book I usually read: even though it was written in the 1970s, it is in the line of H.P. Lovecraft: it conjures its terrors with set-pieces (a strange old woman's narration, a zealously guarded vault full of moldy papers, streets with inexplicable happenings, special radio recordings of incomprehensible voices, solitary witnesses to horrific events, and so forth). Readers are supposed to be drawn in by those prefaces and invitations. I find myself thinking about the author, who experiences fright as something that happens only when it appears, supposedly unexpectedly, after a series of curtain-raisings and changes of scene. de Maria works hard to prepare us for moments of horror that are, in the end, often pre-ordained by the scenes he's staged for us. There are only a few real surprises, and they have to do with rude or obscene episodes that seem out of place in the machinery of fin-de-siecle storytelling: a woman who is constipated and wants a massage; an old man who advertises for young girls. The rest is familiar from early 20th century fantasy and genre fiction, comics, and movies. It's entirely appropriate that de Maria chose a picture by Felicien Rops for his cover (here reproduced in negative, I suppose to make it look more frightening).
However, there is a good reason to read this book: it's a wonderful snapshot of Turin, and specifically a certain moment in the 1970s, when there were threats of terrorism. The book is "out of time," but the idea of threat is everywhere. Turin is conjured through its public sculpture; the statues are named and brought into the story. You could use the book as a Baedecker: you'd go from one piazza to the next, looking at the statues everyone overlooks, pondering their pervasive effect on people's thoughts. de Maria was serious about the city and its statues; he even has a character in the novel read Musil's piece on the invisibility of monuments from "Posthumous Papers of a Living Author."
(And yet -- for a much better novel of a haunted city, try Alfred Kubin's "The Other Side." Kubin's visual art was of a piece with de Maria's imagination -- and his choice of Rops -- but Kubin's book is full of the sort of the less predictable, endless strangeness we now associate with Kafka.)
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JimElkins | 12 reseñas más. | Jan 8, 2018 |
JimElkins | 12 reseñas más. | Jan 8, 2018 | De Maria evokes a “library” where people can deposit their personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls. Not unlike the social media platforms of today, this proves to be problematic. Although the idea sounds appealing, the library also contained much vile and hateful rhetoric. De Maria emphasizes his point by housing his library in a charity hospital for the insane and having it endorsed by the Church.
Turin experiences 20 days of extreme and random violence following the death of Giovanni Bergesio, a bank employee. Insomnia was highly prevalent during this time and violent mobs roam the streets at night. De Maria never points to the library as the source of all the unrest, but its patrons seemed to be common among the insomniacs and the victims of violence while the perpetrators may have been right-wing neofascists.
The narrator is an unnamed amateur sleuth who seeks to find the truth behind the strange happenings that occurred in Turin a decade previously. His investigation consist mainly of interviews with people who lived through the 20 days of “collective psychosis." These people attest to much weirdness, including moving statues, terrifying screams, and strange foul odors. Throughout, the narrator has feelings of being watched. This may be more than just paranoia since he seems to believe that neofascists may have been responsible for both the library and the brutal murders of the insomniacs. In the final analysis, his of unrest drive him to abandon his investigation and leave Turin.
Despite its status as a cult classic, this novel has many flaws. De Maria clearly sees fascism as a threat and much of his symbolism in that regard lacks subtlety. None of the characters, including the narrator, are well fleshed out. The story is so bizarre that it cries out for more explanation than De Maria provides. And his intentions seem obscure: Should people be more careful about sharing their most personal information with strangers? Does this lead to violence and hate? On the other hand, De Maria masterfully evokes Turin and its inhabitants adding to the spooky feeling that pervades the novel. The place is isolated from much of the rest of the country and has a history of occultism. Turinese are well-mannered but private. Many of the interviewees seemed circumspect and even evasive. The attorney describes the setting best: “Perhaps because we’re an isolated city, out of the international time stream, where certain experiments can be carried out without drawing too much attention.”
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