Thursday 3 July the prestigious recognition will be assigned to Rome which, since 1947, designates the best Italian novel and its author. In the race – and it is no coincidence – they are usually the large publishing houses. But, surprisingly, in this edition of the prize, especially as regards the rose of the 12 candidates, small publishers and some author also appeared to his “first work”.
It is now a matter of hours: in the late Thursday evening at the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia (with a live television starting from 11 pm on Rai Tre) the winner will be known among the five finalists, whose works were examined not only by the jury of the prize, but also by various institutions including the reading clubs of the libraries of Rome and- for the “Strega Giovani”- 118 second degree schools throughout Italy.
In detail, here is the finalist “cinquina”, welcomed with criticism and reserves not only by the “popular jurors” scattered throughout Italy, but also by readers who, through social media, have given rise to controversy as it had not happened for years.
The most targeted was Paolo Nori With “I close the door and scream” (Mondadori), indirect dialogue with the poet Raffaello Baldini (1924-2025) conterraneous of the author and reinterpreted by him as a singer of a personal distress that is expressed in a ferocious and autobiographical irony from which none, among the people met by the sixty-year-old Nori, manages to escape.
Each chapter looks like a post on a social media (Facebook, Threads, Instagram and, for the worst, Twitter …) is so short and lapidary.
It is not properly a novel, as well as an inner monologue that divided the readers into two: on the one hand those who recognized themselves in that sarcasm, on the other who admits they have not even managed to end the book. Too bad, because the idea was interesting and the intention of translating Baldini (who wrote in the dialect of Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna) grasping the moments in which “a very simple and wonderful thing happens: you live” is dispersed in that outerpresents, obsessively repeated, “I who …”, at the beginning of each sentence.
A different discomfort has characterized the majority of readers -even the most loyal -of Nadia Terranova With his full-bodied non-Romanzo “What I know of you” (Guanda), who is not a threat pronounced by a spy, but the obsessive thought of the author towards an great-grandmother never known and left in the oblivion of an old asylum. Terranova would like to establish a contact (not as a seer, to be clear) with this sad figure and does it in the most obvious way, comparing her experience as a mother with that of Venra, the great -grandmother, guilty of having given birth (during the show in a circus) a dead girl.
He could have been a book in which the suffering of a hypersensitive woman, in the early twentieth century, entrusting her with the leading role in a historically built context. This is not the case. So much is fond of her being a woman, above all, that Terranova is obsessively dispersed in menstrual cycles, placing, ultrasounds, making the reading of this local version of Isabella Allende intolerable.
Further lack of respect towards the reader is “inventory of what remains after the forest burns” operates before Michele Ruol (Red earth) where the absence of names could cause refusal and close the book on page 3.
Those who manage to continue, however, could become attached to this destroyed family (death in a car accident of both children) where the terrible truth is revealed as in a puzzlereconstructed through short descriptions for each chapter: here too the chapters are one, two pages. What really annoys is the fact that the protagonists are indicated in “father, mother, major and younger” in addition to the trend (but Ruol is not the only one) not to use Italian syntax.
Voltata page, it is found Elisabetta breed With “lost this sea” (Rizzoli) novel in which the themes of the reconstruction of the figure of a poet (see also Nori) and of the being a woman (Terranova) converge, where the artist evoked is the Neapolitan writer Raffaele La Capria (1922-2022) and the comparison, this time, is with the father of the same author: the paternal figure on one side and friendship. They are the pretext to tell the era that goes from the second post -war period to the present day.
A melancholy novel, never superficial, written with a clean style, in which the author does not have the anxiety of telling himself, but to describe, through the lives and figures of the men to whom he had recognized authority, a complex picture of two realities, Naples and Rome of the twentieth century.
An autobiographical novel (all are, in fact) written with a dry, ruthless and therefore effective style, is “the anniversary” of Andrea Bajani (Feltrinelli) Tale of the last time that the author saw his parents, before moving away forever by a disintegrated even if apparently normal family: an authoritarian father and a submissive mother, in the eighties-noun. The author manages to describe the malaise of two unhappy subjects by breaking the parental authority, without discounts for anyone, not even for himself. The book has already won the Strega Giovani Award: a sign that, when they are called to judge, the hundreds of boys between 16 and 18 years old probably include the difference between solipsism and participation in the events narrated.
All that remains is to update the watches in this countdown, to see which, among the five books in Salsa of I Narrante, will win the glory: for the fame, to readers the arduous sentence.
