Salvatore Mannuzzu
Il catalogo

To distinguish the dispensable from the indispensable is for the shallow-minded, for the overly-structured: memory, like dreaming, does not distinguish between useful and useless, significant and insignificant.
In the past, whether near or far, everything matters and nothing matters anymore.

The presumed past of an unreliable self, intoxicated with regrets and glasses of cheap grappa, is a city of trivial or fundamental details: Farci - barber and derelict soldier, among the greatest painters of the twentieth century, by the end of the twentieth century, a suicidal priest and many other things - does not know how relevant a notch among a thousand more is on Alberto's catalog: each notch, the conquest of a night; each conquest of a night, the life of a woman torn apart by loneliness or loss. Or women finally, torn in the most physical sense of the term: a red notch for each.
Is it perhaps the individuality of each conquest that makes the enterprise great? Or does the enterprise, in all its grandiose entirety, legitimize the sacrifice of individualities?

Farci gets lost in the hypothetical memories of Alberto, the cataloger, the unscrupulous Don Giovanni who is the meaning of his entire existence. Alberto's irony captures the spirit of the province, his kingdom: the kingdom of shortages with great pretensions.
The concupiscence that in Alberto is a vital impulse, perhaps conceals the unconfessable suffering of an orphan - "a saint," they will say of Alberto - or perhaps is nothing more than the expression of the cynicism of a cultured and perverse petty bourgeois: the classic womanizer who finds easy relief for his insatiable desires in the discomfort of the slums.
They live in ambiguity, Alberto and Farci, in the ambiguous provincial nineties of this novel: the past blends with the present, in objects and environments, and the objective greatness that reaches the outskirts from the world like a distant echo, blends with the entirely subjective greatness of local phenomena, which are, instead, powerful protagonists of the small peripheral worlds from which they are generated.

Sassari is the capital of that world, the city of memories, in a suggestion of details that precisely because of their particularity seem to emerge spontaneously and (at least) plausibly from the pages of Farci's memory, the inept and Zeno-like narrator.
Sassari as a decadent theater - perhaps even literary decadence - of the tragedies of women with exotic nicknames and of defeated men at the mercy of folkloristic palliatives that Mannuzzu arranges, along with many other characteristic traits that compose the Sassarese tableau, with such mastery as to transcend the provinciality to which a novel so characterized by its milieu - moreover insular and traditionally isolated - would seem fatally destined. Or Il catalogo is to be counted among the quintessential Italian provincial novels, without a negative connotation.

A coffee poured into half a glass of sparkling water and stirred, like so many details - those apparently insignificant - has in this novel the simultaneously annoying nature of a domineering particular that prevails over general senses, vain grails of the exercise of memory, and sacred of celebration, even in its insignificance, of all that around it is irretrievably lost. As happens to the elderly when they remember.

Just as a rat stomped in disgust can be an omen of the greatest misfortunes, or a copper bracelet, perhaps, the key to a door that will remain closed: Il catalogo is a question without an answer, a stratification of ambiguities that will remain unsolvable; and perhaps precisely in the lack of meanings lies the irresistible charm of Alberto, and of a special novel for those who have in that small world their world.