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Point Lenana by Wu Ming 1 and Roberto Santachiara is the last beautiful book I've read (so far) that left quite a few marks on my soul and will be hard to forget in light of many contemporary and current events.
The book seems like a Russian doll game, but it's not, because it manages to contain within itself other books, first and foremost the autobiographical book, in the English edition “No Picnic on Mount Kenya,” written by Felice Benuzzi. Here begin the surprises, as the same book was printed a few years later in Italian with different cuts and variations in the text and with the title “Fuga sul Kenya,” recounting the real escape from an English concentration camp by three Italian prisoners.
This book (and with that, we return to Point Lenana) retraces about a century of History with a capital H, history that Italian military leaders (mostly right-wing) have tried for decades to hide by all means from anyone (journalists or historians) who sought testimonies of it, why?
Because within many documents there is a highlighted side of the Italian people called to sow fear, terror, and death in Africa to the detriment of populations where many children, women, and elderly were decimated and few warriors rebelled against our fascism, a dark side that various revisionists from Indro Montanelli to the basest missini and right-wing idiots still try to deny or downplay, sometimes even declaring that it was done for a good cause.
Aside from the atrocities of our fellow countrymen who went to steal lives, lands, and more, which inevitably requires deep reflection on the fact that now many African populations are seeking pseudo-salvation in the rest of the world, including Italy.
The book contains truly exhaustive pages on the history of the first Italian mountaineers and climbers who ventured onto national and foreign peaks with souls seeking natural and inner purity.
It also describes part of the Italian irredentist history linked to various concessions and possessions with Austria, the former Yugoslavia, and Italian regions like Friuli Venezia Giulia, serving as witnesses to the inequities, especially fascist ones.
To conclude, the nature of this book, released in 2013, has been defined by the authors themselves as an "unidentified narrative object," also known as UNO (Unidentified Narrative Objects) due to its tenor, which is difficult to classify within a predefined literary genre. It narrates between novel, biographies, reportage, and documented historical inquiries, also a story of friendships from other times...
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