Friends and enemies by Massimo Terni

“Friends and Enemies” is the latest novel by Massimo Terni, Gingko Edizioni, released a few days ago. It is a novel that is part of a trilogy that began with “Sad Passions”, continued with “Cathay Hotel”, and which ends with “Friends and Enemies”, as if it were a saga, a saga that has nothing to do with those in vogue today, but which if anything is the particular literary response that the author gives to himself through the very long journey he takes, without forgetting the wide world in which he has always measured himself (Massimo Terni was born in Shanghai and is of Chinese mother), and without making concessions to anything or anyone.
This is the most beautiful of the three books for a simple reason: finally in this book the historian and the man of the world make peace, without one taking away power and substance from the other, and this becomes possible through the feeling of friendship, which those who also live from public exposure, as in the case of the author, necessarily frequent.
Friendship is first and foremost a philosophical feeling, the highest, and has little to do with hypocrisy, laissez faire, of a strictly bourgeois nature, which today have been supplanted by social media “I like myself”, a fact that Massimo Terni ignores why he was liked in his own way and in his own way, but most of all he managed to conquer his place in the world, in a more philosophical and historical way than he did by navigating the storms of a public life, very little private and very crowded .
The value of the three books is that they are not the result of amazing inventions, nor of imagination, but that above all they are the historical map of the time in which Terni had to live, and in which we too had to live, among different friends from his own, but if we want to define them as “equal” in intensity and duration.
His is a Proustian work, for its ability to condense and dilate time, to cross it in search of confirmations and memories, and because, after all, the enemies in his book, if they exist, are surrounded by forgetfulness and detachment , even when they are declared and named.
Its stage, you will find the actors who move on it named at the opening of the book, is a consistent stage, never accidental or worse still bumpy and this makes everything more enjoyable and even more human.
The historian/philosopher who plays dice with memories thus becomes literate, in a natural way because when writing reveals itself, it has the great ability to broaden the gaze, to recompose worlds and to soothe wounds that otherwise could never heal.
For all these reasons “Friends and Enemies” is a book that keeps you company, as it should be with books, and furthermore, as our author knows the world in all its facets, the most disturbing and varied, it suddenly makes all the editorial experiments by which we are constantly targeted. Massimo Terni tells us that it is useless to write as a profession if you don’t have a life to tell, and if in this life you haven’t sunk and risen with equal ferocity, and that also to teach, a job he chose to do so as not to be alone a socialite with pedigree, you need to be passionate and friends with yourself first and foremost, and that it is not enough to practice a profession to truly believe in it, but that you need to give it time to increase it, sometimes without even thinking about it.
For those who also love the narration of the lives of illustrious men in this book, but also in the other three, you will find everything from Salvator Dalì, to Alain Touraine, to Ottiero Ottieri and Silvana Mauri and I could continue, but just read it to know, and without it descending into social media gossip, because none of his friends or even his enemies are crushed or violated by his narrative. The difference between one and the other, friends/enemies (which then refer back to Carl Schmitt and his internal and external forum) is given by the veil that he places between himself and them, thanks to words, and therefore everything becomes also a game of discovery, in particular for the more Manichean reader interested in “rankings”, a game that is also literary and which should be played by Terni.
Fortunately, writing is one of the few fields in which one can improve, if along the way one has learned to dig, without adhering to one pattern rather than another, and above all if one does not chase the market for the needs of subsistence and visibility. .
The Chinese man, the nickname Massimo Terni was given because of his mother, knows it, and with a soft step and a sly look he moves between the pages of his novel, as if it were all a big dream and also a big bluff.
All you have to do is buy and read this book, and when the book has become a piece of furniture, at the end of reading it, you will miss it, as happens when a friend leaves you, for a moment or sometimes forever, without anything of what has existed between you will be dispersed or, worse still, turned into ashes.
Ps: you cannot review books without being familiar with and in tune with an author, because only those who know the lives and works of an author are able to make the text they review into a philological study, what the review should be, and are able to be objective, giving the possibility to those who will then read that text to really understand it, without it being just a superficial understanding, which should never happen with any author, even with the most elementary and basic one, that is, the one to be plot, which invades every latitude and longitude because now life, for most, is all a quiz, paraphrasing the title of Renzo Arbore’s successful program, but this is not the case, Massimo Terni, in fact explains it to us and shows us not only of having lived, but of having also internalized all the authors he has read and known, Albert Camus for example, as happens in this passage in which he talks to us about his life in Algeria, a passage that moves in parallel with everything written by Camus on the subject.
«In Algeria I experienced absolute remoteness. None of the various places I had been had elicited a comparable reaction. A sense of loneliness without remedy. I, who in Italy had believed I was living the role of a foreigner, now I really was one. An earthling catapulted among Martians. The exotic seduced me so violently that it gave me a sort of sickness. I was dazed and drugged by olfactory and sound effects I had never experienced before. Everywhere masses in motion, menacingly enveloping with their disordered screams and carrying behind them a trail of acrid and penetrating odors. There were many and many. I would have liked some empty spaces and a little silence.”