Italian literature exports, through Marco Missiroli o Susanna Tamaro among others, to those rare birds of the literature that every narrative quarry in every country protects like treasures. Something like a meticulous but also creative Jesus Carrasco in Spain.
What do I mean? Well, it is about writers who write in another league, if I may use football slang. Writers who do not submit or indulge in plot trends or popular tastes and delve into the exquisiteness of the noble art of writing and the committed craft of telling what is seen.
And of course, that being the case, only when you know that something as serious as writing is done well will you end up conceiving your new book. And thus emerge those pearls lost in the ocean of a literature dominated by the great best-selling predators. Authors for whom from time to time, if not continually, it is worth getting lost to taste again those literary fruits of such careful cultivators of words.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Marco Missiroli
Fidelity
Love and its various concepts, monogamy, passion. Fidelity is what flies over every relationship to end up composing what is called commitment. Then there are those who are capable of communing with free love, polyamory or whatever else ...
The point is that fidelity is a very literary element that in the hands of Missiroli goes through all those edges made temptations of Christ on Golgotha, the salvation of love without remorse or failure (infidelity) with all those complements of matured love.
Carlo and Margherita are a young couple who could be considered happy. A couple like many. Even "the misunderstanding." This is how they begin to call a hint of doubt that is slowly eroding their marriage.
Someone saw, someone warned, colleagues spoke, and the alleged betrayal ends up becoming a powerful alibi that opens the door to fantasies. Are we capable of not falling into the temptation of being unfaithful to our own feelings?
Marco Missiroli tells it with a poignant and enveloping style, addressing the hearts of his characters: he, she, the other, the other. Ourselves. Get ready to read your own story.
Obscene acts in a private place
Love is also reached from the fascinating and tortuous path that passions travel. It is almost always a parallel walk, an anarchic passing whipped by impulses, first impressions, irrepressible needs and the search for touches as a sublimation of the meaning that most covers all that we are through the skin.
A story about the sentimental upbringing of Libero Marsell, the protagonist, from the day when, at the age of twelve, he surprises his mother with the best friend of the family, until after half his life, when he finally finds lasting love.
Against the tide of detachment and indifference claimed by contemporary literature, Marco Missiroli -laurated with countless awards in Italy, including the 2006 Campiello Opera Prima and the 2015 Mondello with this work- has poured all his privacy into this immodest and detailed book.
After the birth of his son, Libero begins to write his memoirs. From that indelible moment of his childhood in which he discovered quite crudely that passion knows no ties and conventions, history runs through the last decades of the last century between Paris and Milan.
Thus, looking back, Libero recalls the many sexual experiences and reviews the sinuous process of maturity that leads him, finally, to realize the generous and welcoming world of women. First Marie, the librarian, dispenser of wisdom, in love with books and her loneliness; later Lunette, who teaches him the devastating power of jealousy and from which he flees, leaving behind his bohemian existence in Paris.
And finally, the frenzy in Milan, where, among his childhood companions, Buzzati's texts and Giorgio's tavern, he embarks on endless love adventures until the chance encounter with a person leads him to reach the unsuspected fullness.
The fate of the elephant
The largest of the elephants fears the smallest mouse. Or at least they disturb him in his dimension so distant with the proportions of his world. For the elephant in this novel, his mouse is the smallest memory of a remote time, so far removed from the current proportions of his world, as disturbing when he is seen coming ...
Devotion to all children, beyond ties of blood: that is the fate of the elephant, the code inscribed in the animal-amulet of a story that begins in a luxurious apartment building in Milan.
Pietro is the new doorman, a XNUMX-year-old ex-priest who has just arrived from his native Rimini with an old bicycle and a battered suitcase full of souvenirs.
The doorman is very kind to all the neighbors, but maintains an enigmatic relationship with one of them, Dr. Martini, a young doctor dedicated to avoiding suffering for the sick who, on the verge of death, cannot receive other consolation.
Why does Pietro enter the Martini house when no one is there? Why do you follow him until you share an unspeakable truth with him? The secret that unites them investigates the meaning of affective relationships, protagonists of a plot that is unfolding, to reach the origin of everything: a young woman that Pietro met when he was a priest without God, in a Rimini that at times seems to be portrayed by Federico Fellini.
