The review
twelve o’clock, June 21, 2021 – 9:57 pm
A complex and ambitious novel for Enrico Ianniello
of Mirella Armiero
The novel by Enrico Ianniello, Alfredino, over there (Feltrinelli) is a difficult and ambitious test with which the actor and writer from Caserta measured himself with skill and good literary inspiration. After all, Ianniello has already signed a couple of successful novels, including the very remarkable one The prodigious life of Isidoro Sifflotin. From the first page of the new book, the writer shows that he has mastered a rich and connotative language with which he mercilessly photographs an existential situation that has reached a turning point. We are at a party, but the joy is sometimes hidden by a sort of opacity that poisons the air. “The long table marked a white line between the shady olive trees, marked by the livid circles of the wine glasses, darkened by the water poured down from the sweaty jugs”: the apparent convivial serenity reveals imperfections and leaks. From here the story of Andrea and Teresa unfolds, which will have a strong caesura, a before and after, symbolically linked to the drama of Vermicino and to the fall into the well of the child that all of Italy, with desperation, saw slowly die, from alone, in the dark. When Alfredino was in the well Andrea was also a child, but now as an adult he finds himself obsessed with that story and with the little one in the striped tank top. So much so that his family life is also at risk, with his beloved Teresa and his twin children to whom he dedicates a lot of his time. This domestic universe seems to disintegrate little by little, Andrea’s certainties waver and a second part of the book opens, more openly dreamlike and visionary, in which the protagonist sees characters he has known and missed opportunities of his youth pass before his eyes. A kind of circus parade of loves, friends, landscapes. With the opening of the third part of the novel, the plot finds a more traditional form, the points that remain unresolved are clarified and the plot finds circularity. Ianniello does not always manage to hold on to the reins of this incandescent narrative material, at times he tends to take lateral and somewhat dispersive paths, but he certainly shows himself to be a solid writer with uncommon inventiveness.
June 21, 2021 | 21:57
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