Dario Ferrari

In the final years of his life, Immanuel Kant suffered from dementia: expelled from the university, isolated from society, the great philosopher penned thousands of pages in a delirious attempt to arrive at the truth of reality, rather than stop at its interpretation. With an inspired intuition, the author imagines that “Herr Professor”—as he was called by his children and students—met the same fate as Kant: losing his cognitive faculties and sliding into dementia after years of rigorous, frigid teaching of history and philosophy, strictly within the rigid, rational frameworks of Marxism. To care for his ailing father, the son leaves Rome to return to Viareggio; among his father's papers, he discovers a manuscript recounting, in the form of a novel, the “Three Days of Viareggio,” a violent popular uprising in May 1920 that was bloodily suppressed by the Italian government. These are notes written in a muddled hand, forcing the son into an arduous transcription. What comes as a surprise, given the father's unyielding Marxism, is the exaltation of anarchism and the title of the narrative: “*indifeso fervore*”—a celebrated verse by Sandro Penna, a poet whose transgressive poetry was worlds apart from the moral outlook of “Herr Professor” as his son had known him. Who truly was “Herr Professor”? This father forever poised to disapprove of his son, from the way he played tennis (more concerned with keeping his hair tidy than moving on the court) to his decision to drop out of his Philosophy degree to become a translator—and, to make matters worse, from English, a language his father despised. It could have been the occasion to turn Dementia—the cognitive and physical decline of a man—into an opportunity to rediscover his figure and his life, to know him better, and even to finally decipher oneself within one of the fundamental relationships of our existence. Instead, as the author states in the afterword: “I cannot help putting the bookish before the real. May reality not hold it against me if it always comes in second.” The father’s illness, the return to Viareggio, and the departure from Rome serve merely as pretexts for witty dialogue between characters, for subtle ironies regarding the social and cultural dynamics of our society, and for digressions—at times interesting, but more often useless and redundant. A grating, overly intellectualized framework pervades the entire narrative, stripping it of psychological depth and rendering it prolix and rambling. The novel can serve as a starting point for a broader reflection on Italian literature. We often witness authors who enjoy considerable visibility and garner favorable reviews from critics and avid readers alike. *L'idiota di famiglia*, for instance, was featured on *Petrarca*, a prominent television program dedicated to culture and books in particular. One might think of novels vastly different from one another yet consistently showered with accolades, such as *Alma* by Federica Manzon, *Almarina* by Valeria Parrella, *La Ferocia* by Nicola Lagioia, or *Con le peggiori intenzioni* by Alessandro Piperno (see the reviews of the cited books on this site): all acclaimed, yet fragile in plot and prose, and above all trapped within pre-established literary formulas that neither reflect Italian sociological reality nor genuinely probe the feelings and psychology of their characters. An oscillation between nostalgia and pessimism prevails, the plots are frequently insubstantial, and the characters easily slip into stereotypes. One has to wonder whether, in these assessments, membership in certain publishing circles takes precedence over genuine narrative quality. By dint of such “niche” novels, there is a risk that our literature will drift toward irrelevance, dragging the language down with it. Why avoid it? This novel is irritating.