It dawns. The waves of the sea bring two breasts complete with nipples to a yawning and astonished fisherman on the shore. Unpaired from the rest of the body to which they belonged. It is the beginning of an initially macabre, then above all increasingly delirious series of discoveries, which will continue with two buttocks – no one knows why, in this case mobile, dynamic and bouncy, difficult to catch, it must be said – and then, among others, with a navel, which as a mere absence is actually impossible to see properly. Next to the parts of the gradually dismembered body (and which the maniac is supposed to be keeping alive by gradually cauterizing the wounds), notes are found with enigmatic messages challenging the authorities. An unnamed Commissioner is assigned to follow the case, the narrator of the story, who from the beginning does not seem so interested in the developments of the investigation, but rather concentrated on making his mind wander along daring existentialist paths, mainly based on acid nihilism. The only being with whom, initially, he relates, beyond the brief and abrupt contacts with colleagues and superiors, is a sister confined to a wheelchair: she calls him quite often, she seems to have something serious to communicate to him , but the conversations are always stopped in the bud, between telephone network problems and the Commissioner’s lack of desire to listen to her, much less visit her. Meanwhile, public opinion rises up, the Commissioner doesn’t know which way to turn and finds himself caught between personal reflections, attacks from his superiors and his sister’s tenacious insistence on meeting him…
This is a genre novel, of course, but a genre in its own right, which we could define as the “Rezza genre”. The semblance of a plot is valid only as a side dish, occasion and pretext for an infinite series of witty mottos, literary quotations, puns which, present en masse in almost every sentence, deconstruct the usual canons of narrative language, after having dismantled those of the detective story, which soon evolves into the grotesque. All this requires the reader – who is also expressly mocked several times for this by the Commissioner, in a sudden and self-aware identification with the narrator – considerable patience to bring the periods, paragraphs and chapters of the book back to unity as much as possible. But there is no unity, except in the intent, precisely, of escaping any convention: from detective stories we move on to the grotesque and then to existentialism; from the commonly understood narrative language we move on to an experimentalism made up of charades, daring alliterations, jokes from the courtly to the vulgar until, for a few pages, we limit ourselves to mathematical equations! The dismemberment of the body of the woman victim of the faceless maniac is the same dismemberment first of the genre and then of the language that we witness as we proceed with the reading. While it leaves something inside the reader, especially in the meditations that take place here on the role of family and society – mostly considered deleterious – in the life of man and artist, the work is sufficiently accessible only to those who already know what to expect from such an atypical author, although seriously noteworthy especially in the theatrical field. The work is so unconventional – and so much intended for strong stomachs, especially in the last fifty pages! – that it is very surprising that Aurelio Picca recommended it for the Strega Prize, underlining “the truth expressed by these pages, capable of describing nobles and poor with the same realism”. In an interview Rezza stated that he believes having to follow a plot or any obligatory succession of events in writing is too stringent and enslaving, because this conventional modus operandi distances the author from the possibility of being able to express the unknown. One wonders, however, whether the fifteen/sixteen years which, in the same interview, the artist declares were the overall period of gestation of the work did not make it a little too disharmonious, between a first part which, despite its strangeness, it also manages to entertain and a second in which self-satisfaction takes over in the jokes on the reader, in the destruction of the prose and in the ideas that are sometimes a little too vulgar.
