On November 29, “The house without memories” (Longanesi) is released, a psychological thriller in which a twelve-year-old, Nico, is a prisoner of his own mind. Presentations in Florence, Milan and Rome
A face torn to pieces, one of the famous woman faces of the artist and designer Piero Fornasetti reduced to fragments and reassembled by another artist, Carlo Dell’Acqua. It comes from dwelling for a long time on the cover of The house without memories from Donato Carrisi, out on Monday 29 November for Longanesi (preview the second chapter here).
The temptation is twofold: on the one hand, playing to put the pieces back together, knowing full well that that face will never be new and smooth as before; on the other hand see what’s underneath, what secrets that apparent serenity hides. An exercise that is almost a training for Carrisi’s new book (Martina Franca, Taranto, 1973), an unsettling novel playing at composing a story and at the same time looking at what lies beneath it. A formidable psychological thriller that challenges the reader to… not lose the reason. Because the only certainty, it will be said and repeated, is that: “Our mind is much more powerful than our conscience”.
The house without memories it is the intention of the author not a sequel de The house of voices (2019) but a twin book: to bind them, beyond the similarity of the title, the affinity of contents and the continuity of characters. The first chapter investigated the ghosts of childhood while the latter goes hunting for monsters, those generated by immature minds and those, perhaps, true. For both, the author’s choice to do without the easy genre repertoire (blood, violence, macabre findings of corpses and grim crime scenes). In their place a fluid, engaging and adrenaline-pumping narrative that touches the sensitive keys of fear, deception, doubt.
Author of bestselling novels in Italy and abroad (including The prompter, I am the abyss, The girl in the fog e The man of the labyrinth, the latter two also become films) Carrisi, who confirms himself here as a writer of international stature, takes up in the new story the character of the “child sleeper” Pietro Gerber, already known in The house of voices. The appellation, we remember, comes from his profession of child psychologist and hypnotist: he is a specialist who “enters” the minds of others and plumbs the abysses of the human psyche in search of leaks. Traumas that manifested on the surface as disorders of various kinds (food, behavior or mood) and sometimes evolve into something worse.
His father, who has long since disappeared, also did the same job and he too worked with minors. Because? “Nobody is willing to believe children’s stories” she had answered him once. The parent was convinced that children were repositories of absolute truths about life, death, good, evil. For the father, adults by now “have lost their innocence”; the doubt of the son, facing the case for which the magistrate had him called in the middle of the night, is that this time even the children may have lost her.
These are the facts. A woman and her 12-year-old son, Mira and Nico, mysteriously disappear near Florence, in the woods of Mugello, in Valle del Diavolo. The teenager then reappears in an equally mysterious way eight months later: he shows no signs of violence or mistreatment, he is not badly dressed or malnourished. It just appears disoriented, indeed “lost” according to the person who found it. Nico does not speak, closed in an enigmatic silence. Pietro is called for this, to try to unlock it with the instrument of hypnosis: many questions are closed in his silence. Who kidnapped him? How did he escape? What happened to his mother?
The expert will do much more; because he notices that the little boy lives in some sort of trance he continues, a sign of his suspended state is the fact that he does not blink; it is as if it were enchanted. And Peter also understands a terrible aspect of his condition: it does not happen by chance, but it was induced. Someone whom Pietro calls “the storyteller” for the persuasive force of his words – has locked Nico in what hypnotists call the “lost room”. Now he is a prisoner of his mind, locked up in a “remote and unknown” place. There the little one is able to remain quiet for a long time, until someone or something activates him, then doors open in his mind from which come out sentences and messages that the storyteller has left, “engraved in his mind as on a tape magnetic”.
The hypnotist is certain that the boy has given voice to a story that is not his, to a confession who knows how true and how invented, induced. But it is a difficult theory to prove in practice. Pietro will take the risk of diving into Nico’s fragile mind several times, activating the right triggers, to find, unlock and put together the pieces of a story that seems absurd, crazy. But that is also the only way to try to free the psyche of the little boy from the “parasite” that occupied it.
The tightness of the story, the solidity of the plot, the coherence of the characters and the rigor of the writing allow Carrisi to stay in the realm of the possible, to play on the edge of reason, to challenge logic, provoking common sense and winning the challenge. The reader’s doubts and disbelief are silenced by the Author’s Note, a few final lines in which Carrisi warns that “the hypnotic practices present in history are actually used in therapies, the effects produced are exactly those described”. Warnings that seem to emphasize the boundary between literary fiction and reality in favor of the latter. The rest is done by the phrase we know and which, at this point in the novel, we have had direct experience: “Our mind is much more powerful than our conscience.”
The presentations
Online preview Sunday 28 November, 7 pm, LibrerieLive, on the Facebook page of illi February.it. Presentations: on the 29th, 6 pm, in Florence (Il Conventino); 30, 6.30 pm in Milan (Feltrinelli piazza Piemonte); on 1 December, 6 pm, in Rome (New Europe Library).
November 27, 2021 (change November 27, 2021 | 15:29)
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