The parallels with contemporary social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook but also blogging sites and private chat rooms) are compelling. Until now, when a lone investigator (the nameless narrator of the story) decides to unearth the murky details of the past and interrogate any witnesses who dare to talk about it. What transpires is a kind of colossal psychic disturbance that spreads through the city until the Library in question is shut down, never to speak of again. The goal is that other people of a similar temperament will donate their thoughts in turn. In a city which offers its citizens as much antiquity and historic grandeur as it does the loneliness and dislocation of urban life, the people of Turin are encouraged to “publish” their inner ramblings, furious thoughts, repressed desires and anxieties in a church-run sanatorium called “the Library” - with complete anonymity, unless the reader wishes to seek them out.
It’s a foreboding tale which offers “a perfect prediction of the internet era… Chilling and wonderfully weird” ( Vol. On 16th May, we publish Giorgio de Maria’s Italian novel The Twenty Days of Turin, translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov. When Dolores returns the next day, her reappearance triggers the breakdown of the Matriarch’s fragile order, and the control she wields over their sprawling family begins to weaken.”Ĭome on! You know I’d be one of the characters saying, “Restart humanity? Nah, I’m good.” In any case, awesome debuts are always something to celebrate, and this one sounds great.Here at Norton, we’re excited to publish an extraordinary Italian novel from the 1970s which predicted the phenomenon of social media…as well as its dark side.
But one day the Matriarch dreams of another group of survivors and sends away one of her daughters, the legless Dolores, as a marriage offering.
For entertainment, they watch old VHS tapes of a TV show in which a problem-solving medieval saint faces down a sequence of logical and ethical dilemmas. Together the family scavenges supplies and attempts to cultivate the poisoned earth. The Matriarch, ruling with fear and force, dreams of starting humanity over again, though her children are not so certain. “In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, the Matriarch, her brother, and the family descended from their incest cling to existence on the edges of a deserted city. "The Doloriad" by Missouri Williams (MCDxFSG, March 1)
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