Roberto Alajmo
I didn’t want to come
Sellerio, 320 pages, 15 euros
In the midst of a lot of “yellow” ballast, including a seller, here is an original and ferocious novel, by one of the two most interesting Sicilian (male) writers of today (the other is Giosuè Calaciura, see the recent I am Jesus but most of all Borgo Vecchio), Palermitans interested in the tangle of a society that has grown culturally and economically but nevertheless dissatisfied and overbearing. And Palermo, it should be remembered, is the most self-referential city known today. A girl disappears in the outskirts-village of Partanna-Mondello and the local boss asks the fearful security guard Giovà (whose name perhaps refers to the stolid hero of the Arab-Sicilian fairy tales Giufà) to investigate, for his own reasons. A tattered but slowly revealing investigation starts, chaotically conducted by Giovà, accompanied by the chorus of the women of the house, and in which the boss’s son and daughter have their role.
Alajmo tells very well (but a tighter editing would have been useful) a small cynical world with a lively language steeped in dialect (but not Camilleri-like) that he comments himself (“the following dialogue must therefore be interpreted very loudly, to be heard at a distance “, and so on). The investigation is useful, as in the big one noir, to discover and reveal a world where social status and the most obvious passions, the social and community intertwining, the daily life of a part of Italy and its inhabitants count.
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