The Twenty Days of Turin: A Novel
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Best Book of the Year
Written during the height of the 1970s Italian domestic terror, a cult novel, with distinct echoes of Lovecraft and Borges, makes its English-language debut.
In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the ether." But when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library’s users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity. As the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day "phenomenon of collective psychosis" culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history. That is, until a lonely salaryman decides to investigate these mysterious events, which the citizenry of Turin fear to mention. Inevitably drawn into the city’s occult netherworld, he unearths the stuff of modern nightmares: what’s shared can never be unshared.
An allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years. Now, in a fretful new age of "lone-wolf" terrorism fueled by social media, we can find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria’s vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet—and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing—this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever.
Brilliantly translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov, The Twenty Days of Turin establishes De Maria’s place among the literary ranks of Italo Calvino and beside classic horror masters such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Hauntingly imaginative, with visceral prose that chills to the marrow, the novel is an eerily clairvoyant magnum opus, long overdue but ever timely.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in Italy in 1977, De Maria's cult classic makes its English-language debut. What was behind the series of bizarre deaths labeled the 20 Days of Turin? Though some believed the unsettling period was a "dire warning signal from on high addressed to humanity," others dismissed it as just a "phenomenon of collective psychosis." Ten years after the event, De Maria's unnamed narrator pursues the truth in this subtle, enigmatic novel, which contains some eerily prescient predictions about the ways people would communicate in the Internet era. The violence began when someone, or something, killed Giovanni Bergesio, a bank employee, by slamming his body into a tree. The narrator interviews the dead man's sister, who relates that her brother was certain that two of the city's statues had switched places shortly before his death. The oddities multiply after an interview with an attorney, who reports hearing some terrifying screams at the time of Bergesio's murder that had something "gray and metallic" behind them. De Maria (1924 2009) excels at creating a growing sense of cosmic menace in this mesmerizing work of literate horror.
