What is the best novel nominated for the 2024 Strega Prize (in my opinion)

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Ultimately, the 2024 Strega Prize should be a two-way affair. On the one hand The fragile age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, for many the ‘announced’ winner of the highest Italian literary award; on the other Who says and who is silent by Chiara Valerio. In the ranking that outlined the final six, the author from Abruzzo is strong in first place with 248 votes, the writer from Scauri – a hamlet in Lazio where her novel is set – came in third, with 213 preferences. In my opinion, however, the one who deserves the final victory is the one who ‘placed’ himself in the middle, with 243 votes: Winter by Dario Voltolini.

The three most voted works on June 5th (when the magnificent 6 were announced at the Roman Theater of Benevento) are more or less short: 192 pages per The fragile age288 per Who says and who is silent (but in Sellerio’s ‘mignon’ format), 144 for Winter (in an equally super compact edition of The Ship of Theseus). Tight novels, with narratives that leave no room for obstacles or downtime. Each of the three works stands out in its own way: Di Pietrantonio managed to put together a frame on which memory, loneliness and pain travel on interconnected tracks; a novel that finds its greatness in the complex investigation of the fragility that is constant in the lives of parents, children, of anyone. Ambiguity, desire, questions that need answers are the cornerstones of Chiara Valerio’s latest work, a sort of detective story of its own kind, from which emerges a female character the likes of which have not been seen in the Italian literary scene for some time. A character that seems to have clear references, that of Vittoria. A character of size, ‘mythological’ in his own way, mysterious and powerful, the fulcrum towards which all the threads of the narrative converge. Both are persuasive works that have something to say. But I repeat, personal opinion, Winter it has an extra gear.

I go too far, and in going too far I take up the words, I don’t want it, by Sandro Veronesi (winner of the Premio Strega 2020 with The Hummingbird) which he proposed as a Friend of Sunday Winter: “There are books so beautiful that they amaze. What do they have more than others? Maybe the author has already written other very beautiful books, he is a well-known, appreciated figure, his strengths are well known and the quality of his writing should not surprise anyone: and yet in those books it does, it surprises, it amazes”. Here, Winter by Voltolini, although small and fast, is a novel that surprises.

Winter is the story of Gino Voltolini, the author’s father. A butcher by profession, he spends his days separating muscles, removing organs and bones. And then he sells them to customers at the Porta Palazzo market in Turin. A job like many others, repetitive and that leaves no room for variations on the theme, but which is “a ferryman between the two shores of the flesh”, the living one and the dead one. By a nasty twist of fate, Gino contracts a bacterium at work. It begins with an infection, continues with exhaustion, a fatal diagnosis, health protocols, trips to clinics abroad. Dario, the son, is only twenty years old, sees his father deteriorating in front of him and understands the proximity of the farewell.

Voltolini’s is a rhythmic, cadenced novel, with a narrative speed that doesn’t bother you, on the contrary. The punctuation and sometimes even its almost total lack, if not at the end of the sentence, increase the drama, make the work a centrifuge of emotions, sharpen the perception, increase the disorientation at the beginning of the narrative. Winter It is a novel of cuts, cracks, flesh, blood and pain. It is a crescendo of emotions that wedge themselves in the same way in which the knife cuts and insinuates itself into the flesh. It descends into the depths of the human soul, it experiences what perhaps it has not experienced before, but it is still possible to grasp its terrible drama. Winter It is a novel without dialogue – it doesn’t need it – but it dialogues with the reader like few others.

For completeness, the other three novels vying for victory are Novel without humans by Paolo di Paolo (Feltrinelli) Fixing the universe by Raffaella Romagnolo (Mondadori) and Autobiogrammatics by Tommaso Giartrosio (minimum fax).