William Gay
Crepuscolo

THE REVIEW

There is something McCarthy-esque in Gay, something that touches on "Suttree" and goes beyond, touching the necrophilic territories of "Man of God," penetrating the philosophical harshness of the "Border Trilogy," as well as the renowned on-the-road "No Country for Old Men." Yet, the most McCarthy-esque aspect remains the interest found in our "Beautiful Country," where the novel of the writer so praised by Stephen King is published by a small Roman publishing house, Gea Schirò - from which, presumably, it won’t be released before a possible cinematization: unfortunately.

The patience with which the writer describes the landscape.

The naturalness of certain settings.

The plastic three-dimensionality of the hitman hired by the funeral director to take out the boy who discovered his misdeeds with the dead (castration, looting, positioning hardly definable as 'sexual').

And again: a refined writing that evokes the prose of Mann in "Death in Venice" or Faulkner in "Sanctuary," the taste of the horrid dissipated by the aesthetic beauty of a maiden or a plant; the struggle between good and evil is analyzed as nucleated in the heart of humanity and the individual, and this might be the raison d'être, the Manzonian meaning of the discourse, that is, WG looks at neurotic violence with the same eyes with which he observes "a girl with hair the color and sheen of a raven's wing" topped by "an indifferent sky": the bodies are now beyond all commiseration; it is difficult to imagine what sin was so enormous as to have led them to such a painful end.

It frightens and fascinates, blending one emotion with another so subtly as to almost confuse the reader's heart.