Matteo De Simone
Tasca di Pietra

When a crazy squirrel enters the head of an elephant, not even a monkey can drive it away, and when anything enters a stone pocket, it's best for it to stay there forever because once opened, it cannot be fixed. So the legend goes. Something has entered the mind of Helen Taylor, an Englishwoman, mother of two daughters, wife of a Moroccan man living in Bologna. Let's call it a crazy squirrel that corrodes her brain, and she absolutely doesn't remember since when because she's lived with it forever. On the brink of the abyss, she has spent her almost normal life.

Matteo De Simone (Turin, 1981, singer of the rock band Nadàr Solo) takes us inside Helen's head during a long car journey from Bologna to Morocco, in the first person. During the journey, around Perpignan, a surreal crime decides for Helen what will happen in her life from now on. The squirrel comes out, but it doesn't stay in the pocket, and Helen can no longer pretend. The loose cannon explodes. This is roughly the story.

With an initial print run of one thousand copies, numbered and signed by hand by Matteo De Simone (of which I bought number 50 at the Turin book fair), Tasca di Pietra was distributed with a white cover. The publisher launched a contest for the cover of the next edition. This is an initiative at least as original as the book itself. Firstly because the narrative by a twenty-seven-year-old man inside the head of a forty-year-old woman already presents a dual challenge. Secondly, because the book, which one may or may not like, is well done and it reads in one go, has the structure of a good novel and is written in impeccable Italian that conveys the protagonist's absolute loss of orientation.

In his review, Wu Ming compared Helen to a female version of Meursault, the stranger of Albert Camus, and even if parallels between characters are useless, I believe in this case, it's at least apt. The fact of blood is there, and it precipitates the situation and is told impeccably, almost cinematically. But the book is the situation itself, the unsettling indifference of the world, the deep loneliness of the stranger who feels like a foreigner everywhere and among everyone because she has a head that turns counterclockwise. I was Helen Taylor. I was crazy. So what?

nina snarvic