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Rating: Ah, how wonderful it is to pleasantly fall back into a Piedmontese prose, concise, precise, ironic.
How delightful it is to abandon the classic, repetitive, and now overly rhetorical format of the "minimum 300 pages" for a noir (just as, nowadays, for any other genre...).
Yes, because it seems our society has completely lost the ability to be concise. Almost to the point of no longer remembering that, essentially, none of the works by, say, Calvino, Pavese, or Buzzati was a two-kilo tome to be read without seeing an end.
In short: in an era where even literature is measured by piecework, here comes this Oggero, whom I had the fault not to know, who, with beautiful, old-timey Piedmontese conciseness, serves up a perfect novel, in form and content (as one would once say of a well-written essay).
The characters are very well crafted and excellently developed, despite not many words being spent on each of them. Are you familiar with Paolo Conte? Profound images with very few words...this is how this splendid author challenges prevailing trends by "photographing" each figure in the book perfectly, without falling into rhetoric or the easy (and prevailing) feel-goodism...(we talk about prostitutes, pimps, murder victims, desperate cops, sex shop clerks..., all set in a ruthless yet fascinating society at the same time).
The book is adequately wicked, adequately ironic, adequately just.
We are in Olympic Turin, and the setting is that of Turin, perhaps the only true metropolitan city in Italy. Those who know it know what I'm talking about...the others will struggle to believe it...but truly, Turin is the only city in our splendid and extremely desperate country where I haven't breathed the air, both beautiful and suffocating, of the province.
Obviously, I won't say anything about the plot, except that it is very well constructed, intricately and cleverly intertwined, so much so that this book (once normal, now probably dementedly defined as a "little book," while it is simply a "just" book, in the best and fullest sense of the term) qualifies as a small masterpiece of the genre.
Highly recommended.
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