“Go beyond” characters, stories, genres: the anti-novel by Martino Ciano

by time news

There is an ancient narration in the pages of Martino Ciano, a narration which is Calabrian and which is linked to the great authors of that land. From Striati to Domenico Dara, to be clear. But – more – there is in the form that Ciano chooses the strength of a land that somehow dictated its linguistic rules also to Berto, who decided to live in that difficult and so beautiful land. It is proof of this Overrun (A&B Editore, 104 pages, 2021), a kind of novel that is actually an anti-novel.

There is a Narrator who lets himself go in pursuit of his thought and his imagination, like a musician chasing a note or a music. But so do the other characters on these pages. Emma does it and Alfonso does it too. Martino Ciano – if on the one hand – fragments the identity of the characters, thus going to play on that direct relationship of the writer and his character – on the other – he longs for a plot that can only be casual, but never confused. A text of this kind – absolutely atypical and out of any narrative route – also has the merit of questioning the reader: in the face of such a deliberately ambivalent text, what is the point of a reading that is not the purest one? That is to say the most instinctive, not mediated one.


In this sense Ciano knows that he will be faced with a bet: he is an author who demands attention from reading, he wants the page to end directly to his natural interlocutor who cannot – and would like to say: he must not – be distracted. The language is sought after, sometimes as hard as the land of this novel, which is perhaps the real protagonist of this story: Calabria. With its roughness, its contradictions, its sudden beauties.

June 14, 2021 | 22:33

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