Today’s column is a bit special. This is not a liberal book that I recommend to readers. But this is a double to avoid. Like every year, I take my role as juror of the Premio Strega quite seriously. Generally I don’t participate in the social events of the renowned liqueur. I would be out of line. And to think that I voted M by Antonio Scurati, like many other books that later became a mantra of the left. I liked them, like a book on Piombino and Avallone steel. When there was absolutely nothing, I avoided voting. Out of respect for Franco Alberti, the unforgettable and highly cultured owner of the Strega liqueur, who hired me, I think the minimum is to read the five finalists, if not the dozen who are still in the running at this stage. And I’m grateful to him. Without him I would never, ever have read the rubbish I have read. Due to laziness and getting older you decide to always do what you expect to like. This is why, unlike Strega, I always start from what I consider furthest from my sensitivity.
This year I decided to start with Chiara Valerio with Who says and who is silent (Sellerio) e Valentina Mira with On the Same Side you will find me (Shem). They are embarrassing, the first more than the second. That’s why maybe he’s favored. It is the story of two homosexual ladies who live in a small village an hour from Rome. Vittoria much older than Mara, but also more mysterious. With a rich and sophisticated past, she leaves everything to get engaged and run away with Mara, a prostitute raped by Vittoria’s husband at a Roman party. The plot doesn’t exist, the characters wouldn’t interest even a baboon, no dialogue, and then there are the general considerations. “I suppose that those who have loved themselves absolutely can ignore themselves absolutely.” I swear Valerio wrote it. And again: «I judged myself for my vices, I judged myself badly, and in fact I smoked locked in the bathroom» and finally «Termini (intended as station, ndt) and I fell in love, I think we reciprocated because nothing has ever happened to me, and love has never ended.”
Mira writes much better and not even as a joke would she have ever thought of a reciprocated love with Termini Station. Her story is the story of Mario Scrocca’s suicide in prison. He was accused, without much evidence, in fact almost none, of having been one of the murderers of the two young militants of Acca Larenzia in Rome. It’s a terrible book. Yes tremendous. Especially for those who have never been an extremist. The book tells the drama of this suicide, through the eyes of his young widow, describing his brutality step by step. But it is as if, in a sort of literary and historical apartheid, the suffering of those killed (the MSI militants) did not count. As anger mounts for Mario’s unjust suicide death, the reader’s anger mounts for the inability to understand the death of his presumed adversary. It is a book in which compassion, reasonableness and indignation are one-sided.
The two books will sell many copies, by Italian standards that is.
You can do without it.
