in the bookstore
twelve o’clock, May 26, 2021 – 09:21
The new book by the Neapolitan writer comes out. Humor applied to serious matters is the recipe for its success
of Stefano Piedimonte
What makes us laugh and what makes us cry? I often find myself laughing at things that a moment ago made me cry (and that maybe they will come back to do it a moment later), or I find myself crying at things that a moment before made me laugh (and that maybe they will come back to do it a moment later). a moment later). Am I schizophrenic? Not yet, maybe tomorrow. For now I’m just a human being, and like all human beings I try to save myself. why I laugh, to save myself and to save, who knows, others too.
From the tribes to the present day
The famous neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran theorizes that laughter arises in the first human groups as an acoustic signal emitted by our speech apparatus intermittently to warn the other members of the tribe of a narrow escape. In the sense: we worry when someone slips on the banana peel but we laugh like crazy when we realize that he has not broken his head. They panicked when they heard an animal approaching, but laughed when they realized it was just a cat. (S: it seems that some form of cat already existed long before man). It is therefore normal that laughter and its opposite, discouragement, walk arm in arm. It is normal to laugh at things that made us cry a moment before, and vice versa. The crucial, but also minimal, gap. Rather, it is dangerous to get stuck in one condition or another, because in that case the danger never escaped and the threat perennial; or, if we just laugh, we are fools.
Humor about the things that made me cry
Why all this preamble? Because I like to write humorous books about the things that make me cry. a way I have to save myself from perennial despair, to find an island – what Michel Houellebecq would define the possibility of an island – in the sea of despair that surrounds me, in this uninterrupted line of daily frustrations that otherwise, without this formidable signal interruption, they would risk overwhelming me. from this that my magnificent idiots saved me, and from this that I would like my friends, my readers, my traveling companions to save too. And then… I wouldn’t want to fall back into the stereotype of the depressed comedian, because I don’t like to call myself a comic writer, but sadly, I am familiar with depression. There are many things that help me get out of periods of more or less severe depression: friends, relationships, doctors, sometimes drugs. To date, however, I must admit that without writing, without my books, without the possibility of this island, I don’t think I would have made it. I need, from time to time, to understand that sadness can be turned upside down, which is like a reversible jacket. It must be overturned. an indispensable movement. Remembering it to myself, I try to remind others as well.
The criticisms of our time
My magnificent idiots represent, in their own way, the criticisms of our time: the team of four “phenomena” who will have to save the world from a hypothetical alien threat are an influencer (appearing at the expense of being), a thug (violence as the only relational mechanics), a thief (cunning at the expense of intelligence), a priest (faith in “god” as the only possible consolation). These four gentlemen, all four Neapolitans, find themselves catapulted into a mission led by the very young head of Copasir Giampiero Fuschini – elected from the ranks of the All at home party! – which is expressed in a slang suited to his intellectual stature and guides them, with latest generation devices, through the countryside of Morimondo, south of Milan. The physical scenario, therefore, that of the Milanese province, of a barely outlined Naples, and of a Rome that is seen little or nothing. The moral scenario is that of a certain politics that we could define as “political fiction”, but also no. What is the origin of the sphere found in the ground around the Leprotta farmhouse? Why did the hares start behaving strangely? Why were the four of them chosen, just them and not others?
Human cases
I enjoyed conducting these four human cases – untold, to put it more correctly with Diego De Silva, who signs the cover phrase – in what seems like a circle of idiots, where everything is more or less stupid, all more or less fatuous, with little sense or nothing, and where instead the sense, the decorum, that shred of dignity that paws, despite everything, even in the depths of the most sinister creatures, is punished without the possibility of appeal. The last pages of the novel are a tribute, for those who want to grasp it, to Dino Buzzati and his melancholy sweetness, to his infinite expectations that do not allude to the end, but to something much more insidious: the reiteration, the photostatic copy of days always equal without glimpsing a refreshing light. Here, if I have to confess my greatest fear, exactly this: that today is the same as yesterday, and that tomorrow is the same as today. Let the journey stop, in short. Happy reading to those who want to follow me.
May 26, 2021 | 09:21
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