“Witch Hunt”: A good literature for TV adaptations.

“Never before in the last century – wrote Pietro Citati in 1959 – have writers complained of the fate they were forced into by the times: isolated and abandoned, unable to establish relationships with an indifferent or hostile society”. the nineteenth century, although the century of the novel, it was an inclement period for those who practiced literature. Nevertheless, how many in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century took charge of such an importunate legacy – to name a few, Flaiano, Gadda, Landolfi, Manganelli, Ortese, Piovene – could not boast a greater contiguity with worldly life. On the other hand, according to Giorgio Manganelli, whatever the era, literature must always ensure reasonable solitude: a debt of social life to protect the intangible boundaries of freedom of writing and a clairvoyance that is never too diluted in the spirit of the times. Certain, there were also writerslike Moravia and Pasolini, who in very different ways consummated an ambiguous wedding with the general public, but literature remained a place where the words of everyday language regenerated and then returned to the people full of new colors. On the other hand, that literature did little to reassure the reader about the solidity of his cognitive and moral skills: the book, with exceptions that were not rare but not too widespread, remained a complicated machine, a device ready to explode to generate universes or at least produce disorientation. Writers and writers remained in forced semi-clandestinity, not so much for natural elusiveness, but because their work was not made to tell the umpteenth story that everyone already knows. Literature, the good one, had more to do with the sacred and the mysterious than with the happenings of the sweet life.