“Loro” is released for Neri Pozza, a story set in a villa on the outskirts of Rome, a novel that evokes Stevenson, Henry James, ETA Hoffmann, René Girard, Euripides
They, the title of the latest novel by Roberto Cotroneo (published by Neri Pozza), is a key word of our time. They are the others. Banks, multinationals, politicians. The aristocrats, such as the Ordelaffi family, where the protagonist Margherita B. takes service as a babysitter for the highly educated twins Lucrezia and Lavinia. And the spirits that stir the “glass house”, the splendid villa on the outskirts of Rome where the novel is set. A book to be appreciated by going beyond the inevitable genre reading. Also because it is not a genre book at all. Even if it seems so.
Nothing personal, Cotroneo’s last work, was a kind of intellectual autobiography. They if anything, it is related to another of his books, although very different: This love. Where the references to verses and poets are many, to the point that the German edition contains a final note in which all the poetic quotations are indicated.
They follows two tracks. The gothic font and type of narration required a linearity, and a writing that conceded nothing to quirks and digressions. But the taste of novels built in layers, such as those architectures that in the lower part show bricks of the imperial Roman age, in the middle part medieval bricks, and perhaps the Baroque in the upper parts, not to mention the foundations that perhaps date back to dawn of Rome, has never abandoned the author. Many readers will search these pages for the ghost story and the final twist. Others an unpublished writing, dry but maniacally treated. Still others will want to read in filigree a series of elements and references, which constitute what we call the literary tradition.
Everything starts from the “glass house”: it is attributed to the Oma studio and to Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect who revolutionized architecture in recent years. To tell the truth, there is no villa designed and built by Koolhaas in the Roman countryside. But that type of building, with some unavoidable differences, does exist. It is the single-family house in Floirac, address 56 place Gambetta, 33000 Bordeaux, built between 1994 and 1998. In 2002 the House it has been included in the list of the heritage of historical monuments of France. In 2008 the documentary film was shot Koolhaas Houselife by Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine, first in the series Living Architectures. The goal was to understand how to live inside a work of art.
The house in Floirac is the starting point to tell and describe the place where the Ordelaffi family lives. Combining the contemporary with the archaic is the first of the bets. Thus the windows of the supermodern villa are combined with the Renaissance temple and above all with the sculpture of the goddess Hecate.
Hecate’s iconography is vague. A statue of him is remembered work of Mirone, but it is lost. Just as the sculpture in which Alkamenes first represented it in the characteristic trimorphic aspect is lost. His image appears in the Gigantomachy of the Altar of Pergamum. The cult of Hecate also came from Asia Minor, and in Roman times it was revered above all in the Germanic provinces. It remains mysterious, little represented, and rare even in ancient literary presences. It is found only inHomeric hymn to Demeter, in Callimaco and is mentioned in the Magical Papyri. Cotroneo considers her the most disturbing Greek deity.
Then there is a character, Gaetano, who refers to John Silver, the one-legged sailor, one of the most fascinating enigma in the history of literature. A man who represents evil, and who deceives Jim Hawkins. Silver is a demon that at the end of Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island not only does he manage to save himself from hanging by running away at the right moment, but he also takes away what little treasure he will need for his last years. He will flee the man of the island, Ben Gunn, who knew him well and knew how dangerous it was to sail with a prisoner like him.
The twins in the novel have Roman names from the noble tradition. But the horse bears the name of Miles, and the Haitian cook (Haiti is the most necromantic island there is, moreover also dark) is called Flora, like the two children in the novel by Henry James The turn of the screw. The surname Gibbons, given to the pianist and his son, is a tribute to a book published by Adelphi: The twins who did not speak, by Marjorie Wallace (1989, with a preface by Oliver Sacks). June and Jennifer Gibbons are incarcerated in a criminal asylum, they are monozygotic twins, originally from Wales. The father is called Aubrey. And the book tells the perverse and mysterious relationship that can exist between twins, and lead to criminal behavior.
Other books are cited in the text. A second homage to Stevenson with The Lord of Ballantrae, but above all i Nocturnal tales by Hoffmann, where there is also The Sandman (The man of the sand, 1815), the tale about automatons that inspired Sigmund Freud for the essay On the uncanny. The “immense darkness” evoked is Conradian. And the “things hidden since the foundation of the world”, of which Hecate is the key figure, represent a tribute to another author who influenced Cotroneo: René Girard.
The voices that the protagonist Margherita hears in the woods, in the most dramatic moment, they are none other than the chorus of Baccanti by Euripides, perhaps the most enigmatic and impressive work of antiquity. Lastly, Nietzsche, quoted at the end: “When you peer into an abyss for a long time, the abyss will also peer into you.”
This book closes a circle that begins from a very distant place, linked to the almost filial relationship that Umberto Eco had with the author. His idea of a text that is a fabric of other texts, a “book made of books”, has always been a model for Cotroneo. If in his other novels he has done so by showing the essayistic and intellectual side more openly, here he has constructed a mise-en-scène, which hides the tools of the stage, and shows only the illusion, the visible effect of what is being told. But what is behind the scenes also matters. And it is behind the scenes that literature, novels reveal what they really mean. Because – Eco was convinced of this – «what cannot be theorized must be narrated».
August 5, 2021 (change August 5, 2021 | 22:02)
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