Journey to Rome trapped in a bubble, where one communicates only between similar ones
(by Franco Giordano)
“If it burned the city” (Giulio Perrone Editore) is the latest work by Massimiliano Smeriglio. For those who know the author, his novels can appear to be a pleasant and very successful break from his feverish political activity. And in this, however, there is no trace of explicit political references, much less institutional. Yet the descriptive and emotional passion of the characters of a Roman village that animate complex and unpredictable life stories brings us back to the almost original meaning of politics, namely the concrete interest in the pains, anxieties, suffering hopes of women and men for how they really are and not for how often we would like to represent them.
The “naked life” of Roberto, Marco, Meri, Valerio, Hamid, Corvina … is hard, desperate, for long stretches, repulsive. It is hard not to use the same adjectives for them as for the degradation of the village suspended between a consular and the void of a Roman countryside that still maintains a certain “charm. That nucleus of illegal houses built only on one side of the road and therefore marked by a procession of odd numbers is the only identity glue that binds the protagonists of these stories. The territory, although degraded and abandoned to its fate, holds together the most disparate bonds.
Hamid, the young son of a couple of former Eritrean fighters, is respected as one of them on a par with the highly successful female subjects, even in a cultural context marked by racist and macho impulses. The township covers and protects the authors of crime stories, preserves their memory and even builds an epic. Roberto, who ended up in prison for twenty years after a robbery, when he returns he becomes a real “wise” protagonist worthy of great respect who channels, together with the “brilliant” Meri, the boiling spirits of disbanded young people in a more rational and meditated economic recovery that tries to ferry a permanent illegality to a semblance of legality. The township defends you and traps you. After all, it is the history of Rome in recent years. There is no possibility of social mobility. Meri tries. It has all the qualities for the big leap. He studies and is very intelligent. But it is rejected.
Rome has long ceased to be a unitary social organization. There are many different realities that do not communicate with each other. It is not recognized. And when they do they conflict. Your chances of life from the place where you are born. Every form of social relationship has been shattered. The relationships are instantaneous and marked by individualistic logics. Every memory of collective social histories has been erased, every ambition for the future has been made impossible. The sense of justice was overwhelmed by that of envy. In the air you can breathe an aggression and a barely repressed anger.
Of course the politics we read in the newspapers, which we see on TV in talk shows, does not exist in this novel. Emery couldn’t invent it. His magnifying glass paused to look at the invisible trajectories of a pained and wounded humanity, a frayed and torn web of relationships that has transformed society into individuals crushed by problems much greater than themselves. There is no politics here. She portrayed herself in a “bubble” that communicates only between similar ones. Yet in this story that describes the decay of the urban landscape and the material condition with an almost surgical precision, a sense of humanity is perceived at every moment in all the main protagonists, a desperate need for solidarity and social relations. It is the blade of grass that grows in a stony and arid ground. It is the metaphor of a sort of “irreducibility of the human” which, after having reached the lowest point, tries to invent, as it can and as it knows, to reconstruct new social ties. Politics should do this: water that blade of grass, invest in the human factor, reinvent society to reach the slope of injustices and disparities. This book helps us because it comes out of the “bubble” and looks at real lives, it does not hide the roughness, the contradictions, the unfriendly versatility of the subjects on which it looks. To give us back hope.
This article originally appeared on The HuffPost and has been updated.