Eighty novels to be read by March 30, or rather at least by the 29th: sleepless nights, lots of coffee – Balzac, after all, warmly recommended it – and in general extraordinary hours of extraordinary (one imagines) application await the Strega’s Steering Committee. It is that never like this year, favored by the nomination system which allows each juror (400, from more to less) to present a title (until a few years ago there had to be two) the aspirants to the coveted prize have become legion. Among them, undoubtedly, are the authors of some of the most interesting works of the past season, but also many writers who have never been talked about except in very restricted circles.
On social media, news and related comments – at least in the “bubbles” of readers and writers – have gone viral, under the banner of a certain mocking disbelief. It is taken for granted that the super-readers of the Strega, i.e. those of the Committee chaired by Melania Mazzucco, having to choose the twelve semi-finalists, will perhaps not read all that library with due attention (five hours at least for each book would make four hundred hours, and it is that they also have nothing else to do in the meantime); or perhaps, this is what the most critical say, they won’t read it at all.
Giorgio Montefoschi, in the “Corriere”, amused himself the other day by asking the same rhetorical question (will they read them?) to answer quietly that no, they won’t even think about it. Everyone will deal with a certain number of titles that he already has, he added, perhaps thinking of the reference publishing houses. It is not certain, of course, but the assurance from the prize that professional readers already know at the moment does not seem convincing: with about 50,000 titles a year of fiction alone, being read or not, and judged by insiders, it’s a matter of public relations, transversal advice, personal stories and of course chance.
Let’s face it right away: all of this is normal, in a highly complex society and with one of the leading publishing houses in Europe in terms of titles and turnover. The problem, if anything, is another: it is not that by dint of “democratizing” the mechanisms of a historic prize, once firmly in the hands of a small elite (and of the publishers), there is now the risk of a somewhat demagogic form of literary populism, where all are equal but some, as Orwell taught us, are always and fatally more equal than others?