By Tony Jones
“Did an obscure Italian writer really predict social media in 1977?”
Our friends at This is Horror introduced me to Giorgio De Maria’s Twenty Days in Turin and invited me to buy it. Then I discovered an absolutely fantastic interview with translator Ramon Glazov on Weird Fiction Review and I was hooked.
I’ve been into weird fiction for years, but I never remember hearing about Twenty Days in Turin, a book that was just published in English and published in the US for the first time in May 2017. That’s just forty years after it was first published in Italy! Yes, you read that correctly, forty years. That’s an especially long time for a book that critics are now comparing to Poe, Kafka, and Lovecraft…
There really isn’t a lot of information on the Internet about this very strange novel, which apparently has some kind of cult reputation in Italy. However, I asked a few Italian literature experts I know, and no one has ever heard of it or knows much about it. The translator, Glazov, is something of an expert on Giorgio de Maria, and his “Translator’s Introduction” is particularly illuminating and perfectly compliments the novel. The author himself is a real mystery, and his life is as full of twists and turns as the novel itself. You’ll quickly find the man on Wikipedia.
De Maria wrote only four novels between 1968 and 1977, with Twenty Days being his last. A few years later, he became a devout Catholic and never wrote again, dying in 2009 at the age of 85. During this time, he was a concert pianist, theater critic, journalist, and a noted enthusiast of left-wing culture.
So what’s up with this truly bizarre novel? An amateur researcher investigates the bizarre events that ten years later became known as the “Twenty Days of Turin”. He hopes to write a book about this near-hypnotic psychosis that caused many of Turin’s residents to suffer from insomnia and wander the streets late at night. In this amnesiac stupor, some people were attacked and killed by something huge, something that grabbed them by the ankles and smashed them to death against statues and walls. No one really knows what caused these deaths, but people suspect something supernatural or a monster. Ten years later, no one wants to talk about these twenty days, and the bumbling researcher stumbles deeper into something he doesn’t understand and interviews the few suspicious survivors who are willing to talk to him.
This 150-page short novel has a second storyline that I think has been overhyped and read too deeply into. But it’s a great way to market this obscure novel! Whatever your opinion, it’s very fascinating… Translator Glazov believes that the novel seems to predict the birth of Facebook, blogs, and other social media fields by forty years in advance. How is this possible? The second storyline tells of a “library” where citizens can pay to store (or donate) their personal writings or musings. These thoughts must be personal and describe themselves. At the same time, they can also read biographies and thoughts left by others. If they want to get in touch and communicate further, for a nominal fee, they can get the contact information of any author. Sound familiar? Even William Gibson and other early steampunk pioneers almost succeeded in social media like this idea.
Blogs…think Facebook posts…think online stalking…think buying someone’s information online…think trolls…think posting something and then never being able to delete it…all of these ideas appear in some form in “Twenty Days.” Users of the “library” can only display unpublished work, and must pay to find personal information about others they are interested in (buy personal information?), and eventually the equivalent of the dark web takes over, with people just posting nasty trolls and the like, and of course there may be demonic forces at work.
Although I enjoyed this book, I think it has been overhyped by reviews and hype, and some readers may be a little disappointed. A lot of the book is obscure, and you feel like you are wandering through a maze, wondering what is going on. However, as the anonymous researcher digs deeper into the mystery, there are some incredibly disturbing scenes in the book. Aside from the quaint old recording equipment, this novel has been very timeless, but I wonder if this generation that likes to crash, explode, and adapt quickly will have the patience to read it through? Personally, I enjoyed its intellectual challenge, but it will not be for everyone’s taste.
Is this a horror novel? Definitely a very literary work that also collides with magical realism. It’s claustrophobic, nightmarish, has a very dark interpretation of religion, and the plot is disturbing. It’s full of paranoia, full of symbolism, and the nameless narrator slowly begins to wonder if he’s being played… It messes with his mind, and this challenging weird novel may mess with yours too.
Order yours here.
score:4/5
