Niccolò Ammaniti is back and tells the present – Corriere.it

It begins with a cry of pain, ends with a picnic on a grave The intimate life (Einaudi Stile libero) by Niccol Ammaniti, who returned to the novel eight years later Anna, the pandemic dystopia that became a TV series just as Covid-19 made that apocalyptic scenario real. Between the comic-grotesque opening and the melancholic languor of the ending, in the new book the writer explores the truth of a woman who seems to live only on her public image and at the same time exhibits the insipid and kitsch patina that wraps a present erected on the image.

The rule that governs the writing of Ammaniti limpida: the more the cage tightens around the protagonist, the more oxygen comes to the narrative development, the more the writer feels free. In the previous novels it was the cramped places for which Ammaniti has a declared propensity — prisons in the earth (I’m not afraid), catacombs (Let the party begin), cellars (Me and you) – to crush the protagonist pushing him to action, here the non-physical, rather psychological and social constraint. The writer keeps his promises and abandons (perhaps forever) the kids he has been able to narrate with an instinctive and credible force of identification to put his talent in the hands of a character who does not look like him and has only apparently stopped growing. If Anna, the protagonist of the previous novel, represented a double caesura – for the first time the writer placed a girl and not a boy at the center; for the first time the renunciation of confrontation with the world of adults, taken out of the way with the expedient of the pandemic, was total – here the tear is even clearer and the challenge open. Ammaniti rides her with her happy inspiration, giving the reading a tragicomic mood and the enthralling pace of the action novel, even when the action is all internal.

As the title makes clear, the writer intends to tell the intimate life of Maria Cristina Palma, the protagonist, by observing it from the outside. But to do so she must tell the external one: public life, social relations, the oppressive gaze of men and the competitive one of women, from the personal trainer who inadvertently drops a barbell on her toe in the first pages of the novel; to the journalist who claims to extract, live, the truth about her; to her husband, Domenico Mascagni. Who is not simply a lawyer, heir to a rich dynasty of lawyers, but the Italian Prime Minister, a progressive in a crisis of coherence and consensus. Maria Cristina, 42 years old, daughter of a rich and dysfunctional family, a beautiful former model (for some media the most beautiful woman in the world), with a past marred by mourning: the death of her mother when she was still a child and then of her brother during a dive in the sea of ​​Greece; the car accident that leaves part of her body burned and kills her first husband, the writer Andrea Cerri, perhaps the only true love of her life.

At the disposal of her intimate life Maria Cristina has only two authentic relationships: with her teenage daughter Irene and with the friend with whom she grew up, Luciano, the proletarian son of the custodians of her grandparents’ villa, who seems roughed out by an indolent sculptor, round and hirsute like a panda. For some, the first lady is a golem built at the table by a team of experts programmed by the Bruco, the premier’s powerful social media manager, a graduate in theoretical philosophy, famous among gamers from all over the world for defeating Ragnatos, the invulnerable boss of a famous video game. None of Mascagni’s entourage moves without a nod from the Bruco, even though legend has it that he lives like a hermit on the Simbruini mountains, some claim in a cave, others in a deconsecrated church, others in a reconstructed trullo in a wood from which he sends very complicated emails, authentic sociology essays to dictate the rules of communication.

Ammaniti is interested in transformation, change, and Maria Cristina entrusts the task of representing it. She does this by investigating the gap between how she behaves publicly, how she is seen and evaluated and what she actually thinks, feels, feels. And this inner world, initially completely compressed, which is gradually released. But for Maria Cristina to emerge from a destiny that someone seems to have written for her – from a happy child to an orphan, from a teenager in a residential compound to an athlete, a little bitch from Parioli, a model, a wife of, a widow of, a mother of … — it takes an obstacle. Because – explains the narrator in the role of himself – the stories, the important ones, the ones that change destinies, are impetuous rivers, difficult to harness. You put an obstacle on them and they deviate, they find another way to flow. Here the obstacle is a compromising video (revenge porn or a simple attempt to share?) that a twenty year old flirt sends her. The fear of being judged, the shame, the fracture between being and appearing that the protagonist embodies and that the virtual world imposes on everyone, the ground on which Ammaniti works without imparting moralistic lessons, unearthing words such as intimacy and authenticity from the grave of social media and consensus.

The writer alternates moments in which he lets himself be guided by entertainment, taking situations and characters to extremes to the point of making them hilarious prototypes, with emotional, moving surges, translated into rapid descriptive touches, often made effective by the biological metaphor, by the lucid gaze on everything that nature, from the story of human pain through animal pain. Life exists as long as there is and who knows, maybe it doesn’t end, it abandons you and moves to another organism in an endless relay. A man dies and a grasshopper is born, a grasshopper dies and a fawn is born and all, from viruses to the most evolved primates, are mere cases, linings created by DNA for an ontological need to replicate. Ammaniti recounts these years in his own way – politics without ideals and a certain Roman bourgeoisie of great beauty, social media and TV, money and power – with the taste for paradox that characterizes him with a sharp, sometimes indulgent gaze. Wise Indian hairdresser-guy with shops in the suburbs against hair sculptors dressed in caftans, truth-hungry journalists, luxury hospitality entrepreneurs, lobbyists who want to put pressure on the government and maybe even a selfie with the first lady, exit counselors from the America to break the stereotyped mental paths and allow artists to recover their lost creativity: the crib of the writer populated by characters who find their intrinsic truth in deformation.

Melancholy, the happiness of being sad, makes Ammaniti say, quoting Victor Hugo, one of the least empathic characters in the book, a rough and superficial minister from northern Europe. And in qThis bittersweet aftertaste that remains on the palate at the end of the readingThe strength of this novel lies in the happiness of being sad, which says a lot about the present and our frailties.