“The city of the living”, by Nicola Lagioia: the fine line between victim and executioner
Review by Patrick Bateman
Among the most interesting works of 2020 that has just ended is undoubtedly "The city of the living" , by Nicola Lagioia ( Einaudi ), who returns to the bookstore with a novel six years later from "La ferocia" , a title that it earned unanimous appreciation from critics and audiences, as well as the victory at the LXIX edition of the Premio Strega .
Here, however, we move on a different path, as the author, originally from Bari but transplanted to Rome, decides to start from the harsh daily reality to bring out a work that recalls without fear of denials "In cold blood" by Truman Capote. The American writer in 1966 invented the non-fiction novel almost from nothing, telling of the fourfold murder of the Clutter family at the hands of two stragglers through an aseptic style halfway between fiction and journalism, using meetings with the protagonists to make the practically every passage in the book was real and, needless to say, it was a success.
Lagioia seems to start from there, putting in place the urgency in telling the thin line between victim and executioner, fluctuating above all on chance, and the personal need to tell how close he too was to overcome it. The crime story that is analyzed here (but it would be more appropriate to say, dissected, fragmented, broken down and reassembled) is the Varani murder, which in March 2016 distracted Roman citizens for a while from the now customary city decadence, and which saw Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato as defendants, respectively a boy who is all in all willing but with little working continuity and a brilliant event organizer, particularly active in the gay Roman nightlife but not only.
According to the trial reconstructions, the two would have invited Luca Varani, a young man of humble origins, with a job in the body shop, a long engagement and some dark side to clarify, for a sort of alcoholic-chemical-sexual party in an apartment in the neighborhood Collatino, where the irreparable would have happened, in an orgy of unprecedented violence made up of torture and stabs.
The kaleidoscope staged by Lagioia arises from the crude chronicle, only to then unravel in a polyphony of voices of parents, friends, acquaintances and professionals who tell the events, the facets of the personalities involved and the cultural / political / sociological climate of this story that he still cannot find a reason if not in a poor cocktail of frustration and narcissism, the son of an exasperated solipsism and an impossibility of identification with the other from himself.
The background to the unmotivated madness of the gesture is a beautiful and decadent city, a little Monster and a little Narcissus, able to take your soul and lead you by the hand towards the unexpected shores of a suburb where you can find yourself unbeknownst to one side or the other of the barricade that separates the victims from the executioners, the good from the bad, as if Manichaeism could still serve to tell the chiaroscuro of a cryptic and ungovernable time.
The post “The city of the living”, by Nicola Lagioia: the thin line between victim and executioner appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/recensioni/la-citta-dei-vivi-di-nicola-lagioia-la-sottile-linea-tra-vittima-e-carnefice/ on Sat, 16 Jan 2021 04:50:00 +0000.