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Rating: "Mia Sorella è una foca monaca" is now a bit of a literary case, published by Fazi (not a bad publisher), it came out in the early months of the year.
It is a half ream of printed and bound sheets that others call a "book," but it would be more appropriate to call it a "composition," a neutral term usable for both a masterpiece and a school essay.
Christian Frascella lives in Turin (so far so good, like in that famous joke about the suicide from the thirtieth floor).
He is about thirty-five years old, that is, the age in this unfortunate country that allows his interlocutors to call him "young" without the "young" in question responding with a spontaneous and sacred punch on the nose.
He has done crappy jobs like everyone else, but he talks about them too much, evidently, he wasn't that badly off (and what's there to show off then, is unclear).
He has low schooling, but he hasn't even realized that this could have been an improper weapon against the community of storytellers and intellectuals (yes, right) to which he now belongs.
He has written a work whose extraordinary novelty consists in describing the deeds of a geeky teenager (notoriously very rare), in Turin in 1989 (notoriously considered a new renaissance), who lives in a broken family, separated parents, dumb sister, etc. (notoriously a fertile and still unexplored situation).
As for the book, I find it useless to describe the boredom of stereotypical situations that can intrigue only the dry and sexless secretaries who populated Turin even in 1989. It seems unproductive to emphasize the plastic tenderness that the geeky sixteen-year-old should elicit through his gray vicissitudes.
And I find it banal to emphasize the non-explicit but bulky presence of the author, which takes shape through an unnatural and vaguely backward disenchantment that cannot be the protagonist's.
Finally, I overlook the logical absurdities that this paper is stuffed with (Have you ever seen a teenage delinquent drooling over the movie "Casablanca" and knowing Renzo De Felice but practically ignorant of where Berlin is? - but the list could be long).
Authoritative critics have filled their mouths with resounding names: Salinger, Fante, and Bukowsky. May god (lowercase) forgive them, and not so much for the blasphemous comparison, heck no!
The reason is another.
Frascella's book falls into a genre that draws inspiration on the one hand from contemporary American authors and on the other from the entire pop imagination of the second half of the '900; a genre now fully codified into a "literary genre." And in this, nothing to object to, indeed, excellent quality works have also been produced. However, when creativity (or rather, personality) is lacking, one falls into the repetition of the genre, that is, a sterile re-proposal in other forms of formulas and contents already seen.
But that would still be little. Beneath the repetition is the citation of the "genre"; in this case, the author merely stuffs his writing with a few well-recognizable elements, merely quoting the genre's style for an audience with simple tastes, without, however, any narrative or content depth.
Our Frascella is exactly this. We do not expect the brilliant immaturity of Arturo Bandini, nor even the profound and in its own way warm deviance of uncle Hank, sure, but at least to outline the characters not just as caricatures, at least a little historical and costume research, for heaven's sake!
It's your first novel, young Frascella, present yourself well.
To delve into the character, I find it useful to listen to a couple of interviews:
Our author participated a few weeks ago in a Radio Tre show called "Fahrenheit," where the excellent Marino Sinibaldi asked him a series of questions.
The host's embarrassment is clearly noticeable as he sometimes has to cope with meaningless responses or rather has to extract concepts from Frascella, evidently lacking logic, except when besides the usual already known names, he shamelessly mentions Raymond Carver.
Or the interview with Simona Dandini (along the lines of the one on Radio Tre), worth watching just for this exchange:
Dandini: "Salinger, Fante, these are big names (referring to the comparisons made by the critics)"
Frascella: "Yes, maybe too big... even less... I don't know, Bukowsky is fine"
(followed by Dandini's bewildered reaction).
Otherwise, if you really want to hurt yourself, you can also look for the gems of the most boorish platitudes found on Christian Frascella's personal blog.
In conclusion, however, I note that this book has received enthusiastic reviews in almost all newspapers; they talk about making it into a film, and it has even been voted "book of the month" by the listeners of the aforesaid Radio Tre. But that's not all: critics say this narrative is "real life," that each of us has been like this, and that this character is not a stereotype...
I don't know.
A bold hypothesis for the relative success of this "composition" might be the correlation that exists between the intellectual, moral, and social vitality of a people or a period, and the authors that country or historical period produces (both close to zero), but more likely I haven't understood anything at all.
It ends up that sooner or later I really have to read it.
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