A review by sophee_568
The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria

challenging dark slow-paced

4.0

 The Twenty Days of Turin, written by an Italian writer, pianist, and composer Giorgio De Maria, was published in 1977. I stumbled upon this book while looking for an Italian novel to fill my prompt for the Storygraph's around the world challenge. I skimmed the synopsis, decided it was worth my time, and added it to my TBR. Now that I've finished it, I am beyond happy to have deemed this book interesting at first glance. 

The novel starts with the protagonist introducing Giovanni Bergesio, the first victim of Twenty Days of Turin, and describing his interview with Bergesio's sister. Throughout the first half of the novel, our nameless protagonist informs us he is writing a book about Twenty Days of Turin, and he has to interview some people who witnessed the event to better understand what happened. The protagonist is a stand-in for the writer De Maria himself, which gives this book a self-awareness rooting it into reality. He has a boring desk office job and finds his peace and recluse in playing his recorder. As a mellow and unobtrusive person, once he reaches a point in his research that requires him to take action, he cannot do it. Just like the rest of the people he meets, he turns his head the other way, his tail between his legs, and attempts to flee. But nobody escapes terror.

Twenty Days of Turin happened 10 years before the protagonist started his novel. It is an unexpected and disturbing event, never forgotten but never talked about. It represents a collective trauma, permanently scarring the collective memory of Turin's inhabitants. It started innocent enough – a group of fine, good-looking young men founded an institution called The Library in a wing of the city's Sanatorium, run by the Church. The Library did not have ordinary books; they only accepted documents from the average Turinese - „true, authentic documents reflecting the real spirit of the people“. Their goal was to bring people together, and tear down the walls of loneliness and dread in the „stifling atmosphere that held sway over Turin at the time“. What seemed like a noble cause at the time proved to be a breeding ground for the weird and the deranged to let loose, and leave their darkest thoughts on paper for anyone to read. One of the most often quoted sentences perfectly describes the types of documents submitted to the Library: „The range was infinite: it had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.“ 

At the time when The Library was open, people started having episodes of insomnia. As we see at the very beginning of the novel, not everyone was affected by insomnia. Bergesio's sister was spared from it, while Bergesio was not that lucky. The insomnia attacks started in early May and lasted until June, culminating in a massacre committed by peculiar perpetrators who were never identified. All massacres happened in the early morning hours, in public places, such as Corso Stati Uniti and Piazza Carlo Felice. The only people targeted by the perpetrators were insomniacs, who gathered in those places during their usual nightly walks. The witnesses to those events are people who were not insomniacs but were awoken by the motions or the screams outside. But people were not the ones who were screaming... it was something else.

The protagonist finds an unlikely acquaintance with an attorney Andrea Segre. Segre gives the protagonist a book to read, hoping he would catch the subtle clue connected to the tragic events 10 years ago. Segre remains one of the few people who encourage the protagonist to continue digging up history. The second person is Paolo Giuffrida, an art critic. The attorney recommends the protagonist should visit Giuffrida, as he could aid him in understanding the events. When the protagonist goes to visit Giuffrida in his house, the art critic plays him a series of recordings of weird sounds, and voices, picked up by a radio transceiver. The descriptions of the sounds still haunt me. Those passages are one of the best depictions of auditory elements I have ever read. Example: „After a long minute of scratchy silence, I became aware of a faint chiseling sound, a deep, rhythmic pitter-patter, close to the sound a workman might produce trying to engrave something onto a rock. It was joined by other chiseling noises, until everything formed a remote but hectic soundscape, like an underground mining operation, accompanied by wheezing and something that resembled a heart pulsating under a stethoscope.“

A few days before our protagonist meets Giuffrida, he is intercepted by a nun, who tells him he ought to be more discreet and respectful towards those who died 10 years ago. He should not be worrying himself about „the unfortunates who have passed on“. She tells him: „if the waters of baptism didn't rinse your forehead in vain, why do you insist on searching where human reason could never find anything but shadows?“ At first, the protagonist takes her advice lightly, but one night there is a loud pounding on his front door, and it does not sound like a human hand. He hides under the covers and does not check who is at the door. Sometime later, that courier of warning comes back smashing his front door and starts to bang on the door to his room. This frightens him so much that he decides to leave Turin for good.

Soon after that, the novel ends, but the ending strays into surreal territory leaving the reader more baffled than ever. This novel ends so abruptly, at the most inconvenient time, that I was left with my mouth hanging open. The second half of the novel teeters on surrealism and absurdism, but in the end, it plunges in completely. We are not sure if the protagonist is dreaming or did he transcend reality. What is the meaning of all that happens?

Ramon Glazov translated Twenty Days of Turin from Italian to English, and in the introduction, he tells us a little bit about the writer as a person and what inspired The Twenty Days of Turin. Since the novel was published in the late 70s of the last century, Italy's sociopolitical state of the period heavily influenced the story. The Years of Lead (Anni di Piombo) span about 15 years (1969. - 1982.)y. Many different alt-left and alt-right groups were wreaking havoc in the country. One of the more famous alt-left groups was Red Brigades, responsible for the murders of 86 people and Italy's prime minister Aldo Moro. According to the article by Middlebury Institue of International Studies at Monterey: „However, the most notable aspect of the Italian terror wave relative to other global phenomena, given the relatively widespread nature of communist violence, was its neofascist component, which was the most well-developed, active, and malignant manifestation of the radical right among the western democracies of its time. Italian neofascism evolved substantially through the latter half of the 20th century, developing new unifying myths, ideologies, and political goals, and culminating in the terrorist explosion of the Years of Lead.“ The alt-right terrorist groups organized mass bombings, the deadliest being the attack at the Piazza Fontana in December 1969. 

Needless to say, this was a terrifying time for Italy and its citizens. De Maria did not have to look far to find inspiration for his horror novel. The dread and the fear caused by real-life terrorist attacks seep into his novel in a transformed version. The perpetrators of the massacres in the novel are never truly revealed. They remain faceless, unidentified; only their war-like cries stay forever trapped in the minds of the witnesses. Reading some parts of the novel, I gathered that the statues might be responsible for the crimes. Glazov describes Turin: „In a far-flung corner of northwestern Italy, girdled by industrial haze, flanked by a crescent of jagged Alps, stands Turin, grandiose necropolis of a town. Baroque palaces, shaded neoclassical arcades, interwar military monuments and diverse hordes of bronze statues recall history as the first capital of modern Italy...“. The statues are corporeal, permanent historical reminders. Twenty Days of Turin is anachronistic, and so are the statues. They would be perfect vessels for something demonic or simply deities looking to exercise their will on people. Those possessed statues represent the higher power, in this case, the terrorists who think they are above the law, whether that be legislatively or divinely. 

Read this if you like: weird books that don't make sense, brainstorming ideas about what happened in the book, slow pacing, eerie atmosphere, a strong sense of place (Turin, Italy),  the protagonist wandering around the city, one-dimensional characters, anachronism, beautiful writing, dream-like quality of the plot, Carlos Ruis Zafon's work, Steppenwolf by Hesse