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Rating: It's not easy to categorize this book, The Manipulation of Words, by Gianrico Carofiglio. It would seem to be an essay, and certainly it is; it tells stories, reports on characters from different eras from ancient Greece to our days, and accurately lists, thanks to a renowned philologist, a remarkable bibliography: we need an "XL" Big Mac of information.
It tackles a subject, let's be honest, that annoys you a little: it informs you in not so veiled terms that you don't know your language, worse, that you don't know how to use its words correctly and that, like Attila, you have deliberately destroyed and manipulated their meaning; thus, inevitably, the Pavlovian conditioned reflex is triggered: "who, me? nooo".
And yet, according to the author, that's exactly the case; to get out of this enormous problem, we should subject words to precise maintenance, in short, have them serviced like a car, so that their original meaning regains strength and they can once again be "adherent" to the things they describe. I find this thesis fascinating, but who should take care of the maintenance? This is not known, at least for now.
Given that our language has about 160,000 words, our Carofiglio has to choose and he analyzes only five: Shame, Justice, Rebellion, Beauty, Choice. He explains why they are "united" in a conceptual journey and what use, distant from their true meaning, we make of them.
And here emerges, in reflecting on the reckless use of these words, the real interest that our writer has, which is to narrate, with considerable skill, the close relationship between the Italian language and our political situation: they seem to reflect each other, or rather the interweaving of lexicon and politics is so tight that one refers to the other in a continuous see-saw.
Memento: what distinguishes the human Being from other living beings is precisely the word, but this ability is often not exploited to our advantage and paradoxically is at the origin of misunderstandings or deceptions, precisely "manipulations."
The investigation he carries out is quite rigorous from a literary, ethical, and political perspective. We are presented with numerous citations and sometimes "courageous" and "unusual" comparisons: Aristotle, Don Milani, Dante Alighieri, Bob Marley, Primo Levi... he thus accompanies us to the explanation of our Constitution, with great precision and knowledge, after all, he is a man of law.
But, there is always a but: analyzing the "language of power" has often made the topic slip onto a single person: our premier... This is the first note that, for honesty, I would make to Carofiglio: the political jargon, as the talk among men in politics is often defined, did not begin with the arrival of cavalier Berlusconi, forgive the lowercase, but we must go much further back and extend the problem to the entire category. And finally, I would add: it is true that the author often restores words to their meaning, but sometimes he cloaks them with his "personal" political evaluation and here, inevitably, he falls into the same error that led him to write the essay: the manipulation of words.
Ultimately, it can be described as an interesting, well-written essay with an attached curious fact: it was written four years after being "mentioned" by the author in a previous work, "Reasonable Doubts" from 2006: could he have the gift of foreknowledge?
I would say not, but the reading slips by quickly and before you know it you'll already be on the last page.
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