“No one sees love” is the fourth novel by the communications advisor to the President of the Republic: an existential mystery that slips towards a thriller but only to serve a metaphysical dimension
After three successful novels with a historical background, the first on the forbidden bond between a German Jew and an Aryan sylph, the second on the impossible feat of the Greek scholar and aviator Lauro De Bosis, who challenges fate to throw anti-fascist regime leaflets over Rome and ends to sink into the Tyrrhenian Sea, and finally the third on the mysterious disappearance of a soldier in the Great War, this time the communication advisor to the President of the Republic, Giovanni Grasso, gives free rein to his imagination with an existential mystery, (Nobody Sees Love, Rizzoli, 240 pp., 19 euros), but in terms of “morality legendary”.
The story is simple and always shrouded in mystery. A young woman dies in a car accident. She drove as fast and recklessly as she lived. But little is known about her. Even the family is forced to make inferences, before the sister sets out like a bloodhound on the fleeting trail of a mysterious man, to try to get to the truth of that young girl, refractory to the province, who worked in an auction house in Milan, living beyond his possibilities. There’s the old widowed father, there’s the sister, married without poetry to a dull guy, and there’s the charming fifty-year-old who appears contrite at the funeral and leaves a bouquet of peonies, the dead young woman’s favorite flowers, on the grave . From one clue to another, driven by pain, curiosity and the desire to deal with that disturbing presence that has marked her life, the sister gradually manages to find the key to the problem, presenting herself in the presence of the guy mysterious to discover the truth of his connection with the dead woman.
The “pactum sceleris” between them respects the order of necessity and the limits of confidentiality. The man agrees to tell her her story, but on the condition that he keep her identity a secret. He’s a prominent guy, he drives around in a blue car, maybe he’s a politician who keeps everything under control. So no prying questions, no personal details. In exchange, a painful confession that unfolds over the course of weekly one-hour meetings, in a suburban bar, which keep the reader riveted to the re-enactment of an irresistible passion, undermined by violence, perversion and a sublime impotence.
The sentimental novel thus takes on the colors of the existential mystery, sliding towards the thriller but only to serve a metaphysical dimension. What is trust? Where is the truth? And what is the truth to believe? The one that the mysterious guy tells, or the one that the dead young woman’s sister wants to believe? By skillfully moving the levers of the story, between self-awareness, twists and theatrical twists, Grasso sets in motion a powerful device, where introspection generates drama, recognition produces a sense of atonement and catharsis triumphs. The driving force of the story, in fact, is not the trivial story in itself of a petty passion, where the uncontrollable force of emotions throws the characters at the mercy of an unpredictable destiny from the beginning, and where tenderness is intertwined with lust in a perverse game of suspicion, oppression and humiliation. In reality, the core of the novel lies in the reflection that supports the re-enactment of the facts, to draw on the light of truth and free the conscience of those who experienced and triggered that drama.
This is how Grasso renounces the unintentional heroism of the protagonists of his previous novels but always cultivates a sort of legendary morality. It uses an existential mystery to set up the psychological drama of the dissolution of the times, and if on the one hand it celebrates the aspiration to absolute love, on the other it contemplates the melancholy of lust as an end in itself, brought about by the end of religion, of death of the soul, of the silence of grace. Ultimately, the convinced Catholic, aware of sin and in the grip of its torments, who gives voice to the protagonist of the novel, torn apart by an unlivable love, is his own demiurge, omnipotent inventor of imaginary figures to whom to entrust the fictional truth of the era in which he lives.
