New Year's Eve, the hourglass of the Apocalypse - La Stampa

New Year's Eve, the hourglass of the Apocalypse - La Stampa


It happens that an hourglass can represent a threat and should be afraid of it, after all it is the traditional emblem of the time. It happens that a group of friends get together for New Year's Eve, each bringing with them their ghosts, addictions, wishes and maybe even regrets. A lot happens in Simone Innocenti's new novel, which is at the same time very hard and ruthless, but with abandonment of tenderness; and stages a literary topos that for us at least has a not short history of its own, linked above all to youth literature, indeed precisely to the rebellion of the writer as a young man. New Year's Eve is, as you will remember, the frame of perhaps the most famous story written by James Joyce ("The dead", in "People of Dublin") and who knows that Simone Innocenti did not think about it when writing his "The inverted year" ( Atlantis). It is also the perimeter of "The last New Year of humanity" by Niccolò Ammaniti, an apocalyptic story in the collection "Fango" (hence a fairly famous film at the time) when in '96 a new generation of authors appeared on the scene . Other examples could be added.

Years have passed, in the case of the Irish even more than a century, but the New Year is always there, promise and threat. It seems an empty opportunity (after all, why never feel compelled to be excited for a completely conventional date), but it remains precisely for this reason, because it must be "filled" with contents, a rite of passage. The Romans interpreted it in honor of Janus, the god from whom the month of January also takes its name, and it was Giulio Cesar who set the date (it goes without saying that with the changes to the calendar it is no longer exactly the same). It is an apparently always festive appointment, but literature seems to constantly want to overthrow it. “The inverted year” is dominated by this very theme: a sort of Big Chill is celebrated in a villa on the Tyrrhenian Sea, but not to remember, or not only. There are friends of a lifetime, including a notary, a tennis teacher, a policeman, the model Caterina who "no longer hears her heart", and among others the owner of the bathhouse where everyone met (not he will in any case make allusions to Salvini and the feared liberalization of licenses by him: perhaps because “no words can tell the sound of the sea” and therefore we must be careful not to waste them).

They are at least largely successful, yet tormented people. Over the years many stories and infinite intersections have been born between them, which now in some way are renewed and measured, and which the author tells with the air of a chronicler - after all, it is his job - thus offering us, a chapter per character, a fresco of our years caught between conflicting feelings, between hope and egotism. Ammaniti saw the New Year in an apocalyptic key, the young Joyce as a function of a melancholy impossibility, and in any case the dead man always escaped, or rather more than one. Could this be the fate of modern New Years? And why are they so afraid of us? Asking the narrators - in the specific case of Innocenti's book - can be a good solution.



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