Massimo Fini
Il Dio Thoth

The idea of a story set in a pessimistic and realistic future is not new, see Orwell, Huxley, and others. However, Fini presents us with an updated version of this projection and shows us where our ethical values, socio-political structures, but above all modern technology will lead us: a world in which it is precisely the latter that takes over and systematically controls the population. People are anesthetized by an incessant flow of cultural, journalistic, and ideological information, which makes thought uniform and annihilates free will. Man is drugged by a perfect world where no one is poor or sick and leads a quiet existence in the service of that technology which, paradoxically, was supposed to be at the service of man.

Those who, like the protagonist Matteo, take off their headphones and leave the town, realize how reality is made of violence, pollution, and mystification, all hushed up by the unified information organ and seat of power, according to which "The news is the fact/The fact is the news", according to which what is not mentioned by the media is not real. The protagonist's attempt at revolt is futile, and the symbol of Matteo's rebellion is the impossibility of finding the original work of Hamlet, buried under centuries of words, comments, reductions, summaries, and even reviews.

The unavoidable and necessary implosion of the new world will erase modernity but not the word (the god Thoth), from which new barbarians will restart to fuel progress, in a cycle that the author implies is infinite.

Those who have read other works by Fini will see in this book the transposition into a novel of his coherent and autonomous thought, but will also notice a certain approximation in the narrative, in the depiction of characters, and in the action scenes, a sign that Fini, while an excellent essayist, is not an excellent novelist.