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On October 28, about fifteen reading group members gathered in Book Beat and online to discuss Giorgio De Maria\u2019s The Twenty Days of Turin<\/em><\/a>. Words like uncanny, weird, horror-packed, social-media, and conspiratorial came up repeatedly. We found the novel to be filled with lies, strange coincidences, absurdly surreal and inexplicable events. It invites us to look for patterns, even as it makes us doubt whether those patterns mean anything at all.<\/p>\n First published in Italy in 1977, the novel remained obscure for decades, passed hand-to-hand by devotees before Ramon Glazov\u2019s English translation appeared from Liveright in 2017. Its renewed readership has found a book that seems to speak directly to contemporary anxieties about surveillance, political manipulation, and the instability of public life.<\/p>\n Giorgio De Maria was born in Turin in 1924. A gifted classical pianist, he also wrote songs, plays, and television scripts. He was a founding member of Cantacronache, an activist collective in the late 1950s that used song to challenge the conventions of popular music and confront the political legacy of fascism in postwar Italy. Members included Italo Calvino and Umburto Eco also from Turin. After a mysterious cramp affected his hand, he turned increasingly to writing.<\/p>\n Readers identified echoes of Kafka, Robert Musil, and Cervantes. Several also thought of Thomas Pynchon\u2019s The Crying of Lot 49<\/em>, another novel in which the search for hidden connections becomes almost impossible to distinguish from paranoia. Pynchon makes conspiracy intellectually seductive and often comic; De Maria\u2019s world feels more claustrophobic, and physical, as if an entire city has been caught inside the same nightmare.<\/p>\n At the center of De Maria\u2019s novel is the Library, an institution that collects the private writings of Turin\u2019s lonely insomniacs and makes them available to others. What begins as a seemingly benevolent attempt to connect isolated people becomes a system of exposure, voyeurism, and control. The private self becomes public property, and the promise of connection produces a new kind of loneliness.<\/p>\n We discussed how much this resembles social media. I brought up the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which personal data harvested from Facebook was used to build voter profiles and target political messaging during the 2016 U.S. election. One member recalled receiving a phone call from Cambridge Analytica on his unlisted number; the caller wanted to meet with him. Another member described her own work for a company involved in data and surveillance. She recalled a spokesman from Oracle stating that internet servers have an average of 320,000 datapoint records and profiles for each person online or not. <\/p>\n Suddenly, the Library seemed less like speculative fiction and more like contemporary life. One last comment made as the meeting broke up compared the novel to Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonely Hearts<\/em>. <\/p>\n The character of Sister Clotilde adds another layer of unease. Initially associated with charity and concern, she gradually seems to belong to the network of paranoid watchers and threats. When she smiles and waves as the narrator leaves Turin, the gesture feels like a sign the dark system was winning. Knowledge is kept within. An escape from the city is only possible when privacy is conquered by death.<\/p>\n Antonio Gramsci came up in our discussion of the novel\u2019s treatment of institutions and social hypocrisy. One member brought his copy of Gramsci\u2019s Prison Notebooks<\/em> and read a passage recalling a childhood visit to a woman whose son was kept chained up in a pigsty:<\/p>\n \u201cShe opened the door and I could hear an animal-like howling. Inside was her son, a robust boy of 18, who couldn’t stand up and hence scraped along on his seat to the door, as far as he was permitted to move by a chain linked to his waist and attached to the ring in the wall. He was covered with filth, and his eyes shone red, like those of a nocturnal animal.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The passage offered a grim counterpoint to De Maria\u2019s grotesque world. Cruelty can persist behind the respectable appearance of social order, hidden from public view until someone opens the door. The Library\u2019s collection of private writings, and the city\u2019s appetite for exposure and spectacle, take on a different weight when set beside Gramsci\u2019s account of a life reduced to confinement and neglect.<\/p>\n Another reader interpreted the novel as a metaphor for Italy\u2019s Years of Lead<\/strong><\/a>, the period of political violence and instability that marked the late 1960s and 1970s. The discussion touched on his current reading of Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia<\/em><\/a> and allegations concerning efforts to undermine the Italian Communist Party. These historical associations are not a simple key to the novel, but they help explain why its atmosphere of conspiracy and institutional mistrust feels rooted in its time.<\/p>\n One of the book\u2019s most memorable scenes is a puppet show play also named The Twenty Days of Turin<\/em> in which children watch Turin\u2019s historic horrors retold as comedy. They laugh, and the city\u2019s past becomes entertainment. It brought to mind Karl Marx\u2019s observation that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. The short story-within-a-story asks what happens when a society turns its own disasters into spectacle and, in doing so, loses the ability to recognize them. At this moment in the book, the sense that the horror was returning began to form.<\/p>\n The Monument to Vincenzo Vela, Turin, by Annibale Galateri (1911). The sculpture depicts Vela at work on his celebrated Dying Napoleon. In The Twenty Days of Turin, the monument becomes part of the city\u2019s increasingly uncanny landscape.<\/p><\/div>\n Turin\u2019s statues are among the novel\u2019s most unsettling presences. Civic monuments that should embody permanence and collective memory become grotesque, threatening, and seemingly mobile. Their appearances and movements unsettle the distinction between the city\u2019s familiar landmarks and its emerging nightmare. <\/p>\n Readers brought in other literary examples of monuments coming to life. Andrei Bely\u2019s Petersburg<\/em> and Alfred D\u00f6blin\u2019s November 1918: A German Revolution<\/em> both use animated monuments to unsettle official history and political authority. In these works, heroic statues no longer stand quietly above the crowd; they become participants in the disorder below.<\/p>\n One reader even wondered whether an alien presence or some higher consciousness might be animating Turin\u2019s monsters. De Maria never offers a comfortable explanation. The statues remain disturbing precisely because they occupy the uncertain space between the supernatural and the political, between a city\u2019s collective imagination and the possibility that something has genuinely gone wrong.<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s recurring smell of vinegar was another small but memorable mystery. The odor is never fully explained. During our discussion, I offered my own crackpot theory: perhaps since the statues also farted, maybe the odor came from the monsters pissing on the city. Someone online promptly objected: \u201cNo. That would be more like ammonia.\u201d So much for solving De Maria\u2019s mysteries. The exchange was a reminder that the novel\u2019s horror repeatedly tips into black comedy, and that its unexplained details can send readers in wonderfully absurd directions.<\/p>\n We also discussed the drought that hangs over De Maria\u2019s Turin. Read today, the city\u2019s parched landscape suggests another kind of foreboding. Climate change has made drought, heat, and water scarcity urgent concerns, particularly in southern Europe. De Maria was writing in the 1970s, and set the story ten or more years into the future, but his dry, unsettled Turin feels familiar to readers living with these growing anxieties. The drought is part of the novel\u2019s wider atmosphere of disorder in which the natural world, civic institutions, and ordinary life all seem to be coming unmoored.<\/p>\n The city is not simply haunted; it appears to be losing the conditions that make life there possible.<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s apocalyptic ending also seemed right for the decade in which it was written. We talked about the political exhaustion surrounding Nixon\u2019s downfall in the \u201870s and a broader sense that institutions meant to sustain public life had become unreliable. Across the arts, artists were increasingly drawn to breakdown, grotesque humor, noise, and cultural wreckage. Rather than imagining a better future, some began working as though the existing order was already coming apart.<\/p>\n This sensibility would feed into punk and other forms of underground culture, when music and imagery treated collapse as subject matter and method. De Maria\u2019s ending, with the narrator fleeing Turin only to arrive in an even more inexplicable landscape, belongs to that atmosphere. Turin is an industrial city, home of Fiat, similar to Detroit but a city without trust where paranoia is its trade. The system of Turin was a closed loop. The nightmare is never resolved.<\/p>\n The ending remains deliberately uncertain. Is the narrator\u2019s flight literal, a dream, or a collapse of reality? The desert and its uncanny figures offer no clear answer. Perhaps the plague has been displaced rather than defeated. The narrator\u2019s recorder, which he has broken and thrown away before buying another, suggests an attempt at renewal, but offers no guarantee of escape.<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s final movement recalls the era\u2019s emerging aesthetics of noise, conceptual art, protest riots and urban ruins. There is a suffocating bleakness to the novel and it seemed to have worn down the author. After the book was published, De Maria was plagued with visual hallucinations, seeing demons and angels, and gave up on writing, and as another reader mentioned, like J.K. Huysmans, he returned to the Catholic church.<\/p>\n The two appendices gave us further ways to think about the novel\u2019s preoccupations. In \u201cThe Death at Missolonghi,\u201d De Maria turns to Lord Byron, the poet who joined the Greek struggle for independence and died in Missolonghi in 1824. One reader who had studied Byron closely remarked that the details of his time in Greece rang true. Her observation suggested that the appendix\u2019s strange fictional framework rests on historical fact.<\/p>\n De Maria uses that historical setting to explore the policing of private morality, religious authority, and the circulation of personal information. The story echoes the novel\u2019s larger concern with the way private lives become public property. The second appendix, \u201cPhenomenology of the Screamer,\u201d considers the Italian popular singers known as urlatori<\/em>, or \u201cscreamers.\u201d Their exaggerated vocal performances suggest an explosive release of repression and desire, but the apparent release may also reproduce the alienation from which it emerges, a return of the repressed<\/em>.<\/p>\n Together, the appendices extend the novel\u2019s interest in the relationship between public performance and private life. Whether through the exposure of intimate writings, the scrutiny of Byron\u2019s reputation, or the scream of a popular singer, the individual struggles to express something authentic within systems that turn expression into spectacle. The barriers between the private and public are exhausted.<\/p>\n Our discussion ranged from Gramsci and the Years of Lead to Facebook, climate change, animated monuments, and the rise of punk. The connections were not all predictions or direct influences. Some were historical parallels; others were speculative readings prompted by De Maria\u2019s sly humor and refusal to explain everything.<\/p>\n That may be the novel\u2019s lasting power. It makes conspiracy feel both absurd and plausible, turning the familiar city into an unstable landscape, and leaves us wondering whether the disaster is supernatural, political, or something already present in the here and now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A reading group discussion for Giorgio De Maria’s Twenty Days of Turin. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":75310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1006,762,18,65],"tags":[759,430,1064,1094],"class_list":["post-75309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-beat-journal","category-literature-reviews","category-monsters","category-world-lit","tag-book-beat-reading-group","tag-book-review","tag-giorgio-de-maria","tag-twenty-days-of-turin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A Writer with Many Lives<\/h3>\n
The Library and the Machinery of Surveillance<\/h3>\n
History Repeats Itself\u2014Sometimes as Farce<\/h3>\n
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When the Monuments Come Alive<\/h3>\n
Drought and the Prophetic City<\/h3>\n
The End Times of the 1970s<\/h3>\n
Byron, Private Lives, and the Appendices<\/h3>\n
Can Anyone Escape Turin?<\/h3>\n