Milan, 24 May 2024 – Thinking about the country, the province as a room is the simplest way to explain it to those who don’t know. Few people (still too many) grouped in a well-defined boundary, closed in a hermetic silence that becomes a deafening noise. Everyone knows, no one talks. It is inevitable to feel the need to escape. And the country “becomes a cage”.
The third novel by Mattia Grigolo, ‘Good people’ (published by Fandango Libri, 2024), is set in the rural province of the Po Valley. Three childhood friends meet again after years of silence: Brando, Larcher and Sara have grown up, yet the ghosts of their shared past have not yet abandoned them. It’s Christmas and the glossy goodness that characterizes the days that precede the holidays doesn’t concern them, a promise brings the three friends back on the same path.
Similarly, before them, the fathers of the three friends also grew up together in “those countryside, inherited from their fathers and from the war […]. They are men of the country, masters and slaves of the land and of the ridiculous economy of that place.”
Something, however, marks the quiet routine of that microcosm. Time stops on Christmas night 1995, after the tragic death of Mighé, the thirteen-year-old son of immigrants who had left Southern Italy in search of a better future, and after the strange disappearance of Gianin, the village madman. A dark event – or rather, two – which concerns “the people who speak, the people who can never hide, the people who die and those who are born, the people who remain, the people who escape. Good people.” Everyone and no one.
‘Good people’ is a novel with dark tones in which the narrative always returns to that night in ’95, among the flashbacks of the boys, their fathers, the parish priest Don Maurizio, Anna always ready to pour a glass of wine , between long dialogues and tormented silences, to shed light on the guilt that everyone pays with their own ego. They are all protagonists and antagonists in this novel, but the line between guilty and innocent becomes increasingly thin. The three friends, now adults, grew up following the local culture, condemned to memory. Because no matter how far you can escape, you are always destined to return to where it all began. And a football pitch or a slingshot is not enough to get rid of anger.
Mattia Grigolo, a Berliner by adoption, has already dealt with memory and secrets in his debut ‘The Ray’ (published by Pidgin, 2022), a long story composed of two notebooks to be read backwards to discover the great cruel mystery of the protagonist. And the idea that you can’t escape certain specters was an echo in the collection of short stories ‘I was afraid you would say love’ (Terrarossa Edizioni, 2023). Grigolo’s third novel is the story of a town’s secret, an invitation to question whether the people who live in the province are really… good people. A book recommended for those who have been trying to escape from their home country room, perhaps for years, in vain.
