Giuseppe Berto
Il Male Oscuro

I have to say that I became aware of the book in question after a chat with a friend, a great reader, who, with just a few words, managed to arouse in me an intense curiosity, further strengthened by the passion of another friend, an avid reader of Camilleri, for a book I had never heard of, considering that, despite the much-coveted fame, the author, Giuseppe Berto, achieved it, there might be some doubt about the achievement of glory among posterity, at least as far as those born in the eighties are concerned, if we take into account that in the index of authors in various Italian literatures and in my particular case of literature commonly attributed to Baldi, when we reach authors whose surname begins with the syllable Be-, we read Beaumarchais, Beccaria, Beckett, Belmondo, Benassi, Benco, Bene, Benjamin, Benussi, Berardinelli, Bergson, Berio, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Bernari, Bernhardt, Bertini, Bertolucci, Bettocchi, and Bettarini, but no Berto, despite, as said, the fame obtained among his contemporaries, since for Il Male Oscuro he received in 1964 two esteemed awards within a single month, the Viareggio and the Campiello.

In short, I read it and I was blown away.

Even here, the subject is always the same, more or less, life.

But, how can a life be told?

From birth to death, of course.

Or by following the flow of thoughts that are born and take shape, or do not take shape at all and dissolve, and, of course, in the meantime, something happens, and these events encourage further neuronal activity, so that new sprouts of thoughts bloom, or one goes back and encounters obsessions that haunt the subject in an insistent and relentless way. And, if, as in this case, the autobiography is that of a neurotic screenwriter, then the thought will have a more fast-paced, obsessive, and contradictory rhythm, it will tenaciously entangle on itself only to soar to new shores from which it will crash down to earth with a bang, among its own fixations, phobias, and whims.

So, a book of thoughts?

No, it has been said, the thoughts undergo a detonation after an event, the father's death while the protagonist was away from his bedside, followed by the emergence of various symptoms of a dark illness, such as hematuria in the urine, a mobile kidney, kidney stones, renal tuberculosis, duodenal ulcer, nervous exhaustion, a protruding vertebra, and anxiety neurosis. Then years pass, during which increasingly worse neuroses, increasingly peculiar whims, increasingly frequent phobias, and increasingly strong crises alternate, until psychoanalysis brings the narrative of the narrating self back to an earlier phase of its story, what we might consider the second phase of the narrative, which narrates, from a psychoanalytic perspective, childhood at home, adolescence in boarding school and high school, and youth in battle, traveling, and at university, in an attempt to discover how and when the Super-ego became so demanding and pedantic and strict and rigorous with the ego to the point of bringing the protagonist to this paralyzing neurosis. Thus we reach, in the third part, a thinning of crises, a sort of healing we might say, but right at this moment the protagonist has to confront the external world, which finally reveals what it is, beyond the lenses created by neurosis, and brings with it a heavy load of pain finally confrontable through an effort we can call human, and the narrative ceases to tangle upon itself and begins to unfold straightforwardly in a series of events that break the heart and take one's breath away.

And finally, the story dissolves and you, the reader, find yourself reconsidering your life, turned upside down, in a different light.