Michele Mari
Verderame

The snails mixed with copper sulfate in the large barrels in the cellar dissolve into a glassy paste of a thousand colors. The dead in the home garden, an army of ghosts, Russians and Nazis, the guardian Felice like a faun who speaks a strange language, swears, Michelino who absorbs and catalogs 60s images as if to put order back in the attic of memories, full of precious knick-knacks (for him).

Flame inspired me, I thought back to my university years. When the mustachioed professor emphatically quoted Scerbanenco, the manual of 20th-century literature sealed the brilliance of Fruttero and Lucentini. When you read Elsa Morante and it felt like you had read all of humanity's History. And upon reflection, you realize you haven't changed your mind much. You still see Useppe in his tent of trees.

I reread some passages of Carlo Emilio Gadda a few weeks ago. Stuff where we had to study an entire book of stories, and it was more difficult than a tome of ramblings and oddities. Soféghi! Soféghi! Gadda is one of the most precious memories because in the extreme difficulty of his language, in the obliqueness of the always harsh thoughts of the engineer, capturing a meaning gave a pure breath of humanity. Puberty, death by fire, the pain for a mother in the depths of the basement, in the storm. Scintillations of communicability between humans remain in a tangle of angular, aggressive, surly words.

If you open a book with "Dimidiata" you don't care for your readers, editors say to Mari. True, or maybe it's the opposite? Maybe you care too much, but for the true readers, those who are not afraid of difficult terms, who have a yearning for a different meaning, who do not want to hear repeated what they already know. Certain narrow words open up new ways of thinking, new nuances of existence.

Open the book at random and read a few lines, you will find the same problematic vision of the world, you will immediately taste that pastiche between literature and life that obsessively interpenetrate in Mari's novels. Life as (stubborn) confirmation of literary premonitions, literature as ennoblement of life and its trinkets. Objects, memories, alchemies that transform adolescent episodes into dense historical mysteries, the man who tells the story of his childhood self and fills the interstices of the unknown, of the incomprehensible, with vertigoes of horror and nostalgia.