In the book (Solferino) between literary clues and usual suspects a journey in a whirlwind hunt for the culprit but also an apologue full of love for knowledge. The first presentation on 12 October in Rome
Giovanni Floris’s book The game, Solferino editions, made me think of an image that I have held in my heart for twenty years. I was, with Father Alex Zanotelli, in Korogocho, a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. There were hundreds of children sitting in an open space of red dust dominated by a huge landfill. One of them, like a spokesperson, walked up and down singing a nursery rhyme. Every now and then he would inhale melted rubber from a broken plastic bottle and then pick up a refrain that always ended with the same sentence: “Education is the key.” That child, in one of the places of greatest suffering in the world, said that only through school he and his peers would come out.
Floris’s strange novel perhaps wants to tell us the same thing. I can’t define it as a genre. Of course it should be listed among the “thrillers”, because this is the passage of the story and because the narrative structure is based on two archetypes of the genre: the tension to reveal the reason for the events and the constant succession of twists.
Ma The game it is even more. In conclusion is an essay on the value of training as an instrument of emancipation. It is a desperate defense of the role of school and culture as an essential form of freedom and redemption.
We are in a suburb on the outskirts, with the evocative name of «Torre Bruciata». In a school where they teach professors who live with the prostration of a now devalued social role and the sense of duty that the educational mission brings with it.
A girl disappears one day. One of the many pupils of that school, nothing in particular. But of particular, instead, there is the context within which the protagonists are agitated. In this story the characters are all classifiable by pairs: two teachers, two detectives, two deranged, two students. The two boys, Momo and Francesca, are the worst in the class and they have all the characteristics to be suspected. Firstly because they bullied Rossella, the missing student. They did it as if it were normal, a natural code of relationship founded on the belief that, after all, words do not count for anything: “He professed, that now it’s all bullying … he’d given her a head, I’d understand,” says Francesca.
E Momo who is black, but halfway, as he tends to point out every time, made jokes about his sympathy for Isis. One plus one equals two and the diligent investigators, a woman named Nilde because the family wanted to pay homage to Iotti and a shrewd old right-wing policeman who frequent plots and reports, think they have the culprit one step away. Black, bully, almost illiterate, forced and moreover a supporter of ISIS. Momo is a “done on purpose” to end up in jail.
But it is not he who made Rossella disappear from the school and from the present. Thus begins the real thing Game. With a capital g, mind you. Because it is not a competition between children, nor a pure pastime. It is the game as an intrigue, as a challenge of brainsas a test of the strategic intelligence of individuals.
E Floris’s book, at this point, becomes even more. It takes on the character of a real “treasure hunt”. An occult director sows the search for the treasure which in this case is the life and salvation of a girl from the Roman suburbs. Bread crumbs to find and find again, as in Hansel and Gretel: «Wait, Gretel, for the moon to rise: then we will see the bread crumbs I scattered; they will show us the way home ”. Or as in Tom Thumb: “He was sure of the fact of him: to go after the crumbs of bread sown along the street, and find the direction of the house.”
But the clues, in Floris’ story, are not made of bread crumbs but of literary quotations. Starting from Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe and passing through Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Duchamp, Calvino, Elsa Morante, Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, Gadda, Remarque … Game she enjoys making the protagonists of Rossella’s research move by taking them to places and situations linked to a quotation, often hidden. And in so doing, after all, it exercises an educational function. Even about the two boys, who had always quarreled with books. Floris has one of the characters, Professor Romano, say: «You are training Momo and Francesca, you are making literature live on them. Not only from a chronological perspective, but also from a thematic perspective: research, awareness, knowledge … A real multi-dimensional training path … And The game it is precisely this … ».
In the pages of the volume everything is crowded: the journey to a Rome which is, at the same time, the statue of Giordano Bruno and a den of the Magliana band, the reference to the great creative confusion of 1977, post-pandemic hikikomori, drugs experienced as normality by children, the distance between reality and its perception. In the distance, almost a noise, you can hear the shouting of the media circus, willing to follow, like a crazy tsunami, every gust of wind, even those produced Because and further away from reality.
And then there is the conspiracy, childhood disease of knowledge. That singular propensity to think that nothing is ever as it is, but everything is the result of an occult and wise design of the Illuminati, of Freemasonry, of the financial powers.
Attitudes seem to be ridiculed, but no one has noticed a few lines of Censis report of 2021: «The conspiratorial variant, tending to paranoia, has infected 39.9 percent of Italians … and 10 percent are convinced that man has never reached the moon».
Plots exist, the book proves itbut conspiracy, as an explanatory theory of reality, no.
I read the book by Giovanni Floris, compelling until the last page, like an appeal in defense of the school. Son of a legendary teacher, mentioned in the acknowledgments, and father of students, the author warns us of the risks of “end of school”. Summarized in a page of the book, in the form of a threat: «Yes, professor, the end of school. And the beginning of an empire. The empire of those who sell the school, produce it. Online … Algorithms ».
The game it’s a yellow book. There is a mystery to be discovered. But it is also a fable full of love for knowledge and for its transmission.
The school is old, unable to provide tools to understand the present. But without shared training there is only loneliness social and civil.
By the way, the meaning of Korogochoin the Kikuyu language, is “chaos”.
Without knowing chaos remains.
The game this is what it means to us: “Education is the key».
Meetings with the author
Giovanni Floris will present «The game” on 12 October at 6 pm in Rome at the Feltrinelli of Galleria Esedra with Daria Bignardi and Marino Sinibaldi (moderated by Laura Gobbetti); on the 20th at 6.30 pm at the Auditorium Casa delle Culture in Velletri (Rome); on 28 at 18 at the Palazzo Roberti Library in Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza)
October 7, 2022 (change October 7, 2022 | 21:13)
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