Nicola Lagioia

The book won the 2015 Strega Prize and was framed by many reviews as a sort of Italian-style *Buddenbrooks*: one would expect a fine novel with a pronounced social dimension. Nothing of the sort. It is a dreadful novel, poorly written, intimist-existential, reflecting a perception of reality typical of the 1990s. Bored by the plot, disgusted by the narrative style, I stopped reading at page 237 and can therefore recount the plot only up to a certain point. It begins with the suicide of Clara, the spoiled and eccentric scion of a social-climbing entrepreneurial family from Bari: a scheming and greedy father, a typical Southern building contractor; an absentee mother, placidly satisfied with the affluence they have achieved, and three siblings; an established physician, a twenty-year-old well on her way to becoming just as spoiled as her sister, and Michele, the son of one of the father’s mistresses who died during childbirth. The bond between Clara and Michele is particularly intense, owing also to the young man’s fragility, who finds in his sister—so self-assured—a pillar of support and perhaps an object of love. The novel seeks above all to delve into this relationship, doing so through constant temporal leaps, from the present (Clara dead) to the past, with the young suicide victim still cast as a vivacious girl with an unbridled sex life. Revolving around Clara and Michele, across these different temporal dimensions, are the other family members, all seemingly indifferent to the terrible tragedy that has occurred or to the increasingly morbid nature of the relationship between the two youths. Perhaps because > we are not ourselves, (...) we are driven by forces of which we are unaware, we act without knowing why, we say things whose motive is unknown, crimes without guilt and deaths without apparent cause . Our lives repeat themselves according to the cycle of the seasons, with an inevitability we would like to attribute solely to nature, yet which belongs to us as well. > Startled by the motorbike, the lizard plunged into the blades of grass. It vanished among the branches, tearing in its flight the web of the jumping spider, which, having reassembled the image of the reptile through its eight eyes, had managed to avoid the impact. The spider scurried. The dry, parched ground registered the information, superimposing it onto the alphabet of ants crossing paths, breaking, bifurcating, and then recombining a line that was never the same. The law they obeyed shifted within them, confirming itself in the law of every kindred creature; it received fresh impulses from the depths of the anthill, and further still, from the tremendous force that changes the face of the seasons . It is certainly neither a social novel nor a psychological tale aiming to probe feelings and motivations. The author operates on a metaphysical plane, rooted in the deeply southern conviction of the immutability of the human being and of the socio-political context. Hence, perhaps, the title: *La Ferocia*. Still, a narrative rhythm could have been provided! An intelligible plot! What worsens the literary outcome is the minimalist imprint, reflected in an exaggerated reliance on full stops and the near-total absence of semicolons and colons. In this manner, it is difficult not to splinter the prose, rendering it ponderous and unintelligible. An example: > Michele returned to his room. He made to lie down on the bed. He stopped. From right to left. The nightstand. The wardrobe. He looked around with a worried expression. The half-open window. His heartbeat quickened. Stay calm. She can’t have jumped out of the window already. He sat down on the edge of the bed. And so on and so forth; now one understands why I gave up reading. Why not read it? It is a bad, boring, and dated novel.