Those “Stupid intent” to the test of America

Bernardo Zannnoni, a young writer not yet thirty, lands in America after winning the Campiello last year, and having aroused quite a few controversies because in his novel “My stupid intentions” (Sellerio) there is not only a usurer fox – who also educates the young marten, protagonist and narrator of the story – but also a ferocious dog, a real thug: and the two are called respectively Salomon and Gioele, ie they are explicitly marked as Jewish characters. The magazine “Shalom” had noticed this, and raised the case after the award. The newspaper of the Jewish Community of Rome obviously compared this stereotype to that of the Merchant of Venice, where in fact medieval brand anti-Semitism culminates with Shakespeare, at least in literature; and somehow the modern one begins.

Zannoni was, he said, a little surprised, evidently he hadn’t thought of it. His tale of talking animals had, he explained to Ansa, no bad intentions: on the contrary, Judaism had always exerted a great fascination on him, with “its stories full of meanings” and the “most beautiful names that exist in this world ». And then, isn’t Salomon really the one who initiates the weasel Archy into writing and reading, which will make him almost human? He had apologized, yes, but keeping to the point – even if, looking closely at the dynamics of the text, little or nothing would have changed if the fox and his assassin had been called in another way. Is the writer’s choice based on a slip of the tongue (in this case turning to Freud), or a trivial yielding to a cliché felt to be very literary?

But now “My stupid intentions” have become “My stupid Intentions” for the editions of the New York Review of Books, and will arrive in bookstores on June 15th. From the point of view of political correctness, the writer would seem to have slipped not into the lair of the usury fox, but precisely into that of the wolf, considering the American climate, still incomparable with ours: here the problems – and in some cases the hysteria – of canceling cultures or cultural appropriation are still a good import genre at best to settle a few scores – or try to get noticed, or at least try to. They are a real battleground there.

For the moment, however, all is calm, it seems: indeed, the NYRB publishes a preview of some pages, precisely those where Archy chats with the snarling Gioele on the problem of the divine existence. Joel (Joel in the translation) has remained as it is, and in the same way a reference to the fox who has something very mysterious in her room (obviously a book), something that has allowed her to form an opinion about God, tells us that Salomon was and Solomon has become. In just two

pages, there is already everything that was the object of the (brief) dispute with us. But in America they don’t joke. Is it a trial balloon?