“Act of pain”, a very rare monument overturned to themselves

For those who write about books, more than for those who read them, having to talk about a novel with little plot and a single voice that talks and talks and talks is a relief because you are dealing with only one character; the others are nothing but projections of him, puppets on the stage of a puppeteer who does nothing but provide us and provide himself with nebulous and mirror images of himself (which then how else can one portray himself?). This seems to me to be the case “Act of Pain” by Antonio Gurrado, a rare overturned monument to oneself who in times of rampant narcissism does a sort of oxymoronic act: he spends decades of his (short) life writing a long book full of words that probably no one will read in its entirety. However, precisely for this reason it attracts attention and the book appears, at the height of narcissism and self-reference, as a kenotic act of emptying-lowering, I would even say of annulment in the infinite river of the many written pages. A real confession, from a contemporary kneeler, “a work of roughing out the soul to become what normal Catholics are right away”.