“Stories of novels and poets”. An essay collects some writings by Enzo Siciliano

Tales of novels and poets (Pellegrini, 2024) edited by Flavio Santi, with a preface by Raffaele Manica, collects critical writings, short essays and journalistic interventions by Enzo Siciliano. The texts, which cover a period of more than twenty years (the oldest date back to 1978, the most recent to 2005), were revised for the occasion by Enzo Siciliano himself a year before his tragic death and provided with a new title.

What a different country ours would be if certain politicians took the trouble to read the novels of young writers to understand what drives the new generations to disobedience. I’m not just talking about the one who calls for peace by lighting bonfires on the state railway tracks. I am talking about other disobedience, the one that pushes many to choose a life as social death, to close themselves in like a hedgehog inside a freedom which is then silence, pain, the complete opposite of what youth deserves.

Those politicians, if they did it, if they went to rummage on the booksellers’ counters, instead of using, as for example Bossi, the minister in charge for constitutional reforms, did years ago, the adjective “communist” as a generic and repeated insult against half Italy, thus offending not that half of Italy but the same institutional figure that he holds, would understand, damn it, much more about the world they should administer. And this would happen because a novel implies forms of knowledge, feelings, emotions, living realities transformed into style, into words, whose quality of expression is much more, in gold currency, than just any dull chatter show.

photo ">

I read with growing interest from page to page the debut novel of a young writer, Mario Ten, titled Not even when it’s night. At the opening of this book, I was struck by the first lines: «One day they could rob us of our brains, of our thoughts. they will be able to make Pasolini, Moravia, Parise, Fortini, Penna, Tondelli and Bellezza disappear from literature books with some bullshit excuse: like that they were communists or fags. It could happen that someone says that the world with all its puppets made of water, mud and salt is made for winners: those who are in “Forbes”, those who have the cover of “Cosmopolitan” and six television channels. Or they could tell you that there is a price for your Saturdays at the disco, your damned frozen foods and your jogging shoes, but above all there is a price for your freedom of thought and this price is that no one listens to you.”

I also copied these lines to make it clear how much, in their tone and harshness, they provoked sympathy in me – first of all, human sympathy. He is a boy who wrote them. I only know about him what is said on the cover of his book: that he was born in the Itria Valley in 1977, that he wrote some poems published by Mario Santagostini in an anthology entitled Poets of twenty years, and that he also works in a law firm in Valle d’Itria. From the novel we can deduce that he has been to Rome – he knows it well – and has told of his suburban life, of sad survival. Its protagonist comes to Rome with a backpack full of books, a bottle of Aglianico del Vulture and the idea of staying there “without vanity”, “as advised by the most frightening book there is”, Ecclesiastes. He says: «I settled like a dog under the first stone bedside. It was a house decorated for social death, a hovel on the ground floor on the ring road: between the desolate Tiburtino and the American Parioli.”

I don’t have to tell you the plot of Not Even When It’s Night. I say: read it. I hope you find in it what I found in it. A strong vitality, and the need for a dream: a dream of freedom and truth and of a world in which work, for example, is not bent only to the use of consumption, but is an instrument of nourishment for everything that is useful and proper to the ‘man for man. Perhaps, alas, for some this alone may already have the smell of “communism”. Communism is dead and buried, in the meaning that, at worst, the last century gave it.

But what was Karl Marx’s obsessive idea, outside of any messianic metaphysics, that is, that it is up to man, despite everything, to keep his own destiny in his own hands is a matter that belongs not to this or that ideology: it imbues the existence of all. Politicians should be aware and concerned about this universality of things. Worry, I say, about people, especially young ones, who choose to live, as is true, outside of certain utilities that are now in need, refrigerator, TV, teleshopping, etc., because they disobey by rejecting the cynicism which is the small change of the affluent society: they don’t want to forget the dismay of the world he writes aboutEcclesiastesand ask with silent deviation for the moral order of freedom, justice, peace, even at the price of their own survival.