Book Review: The Twenty Days of Turin

"We’d have a hard time managing to express ourselves except in deep allusions”

In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, while they slumber on their beds — Job 33:15

Giorgio De Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin begins with a brief meditation on forgetfulness; how people agree in the wake of some cataclysm to slowly consign the event to some space out of memory.

Published in 1977 and subtitled ‘A Report from the End of the Century’, the spine of the plot concerns the anonymous protagonist’s attempts to uncover the truth of a mysterious and brutal series of murders ten years before, in a Turin that wants desperately to forget. For twenty days, people roamed the streets at night unable to sleep, made confessions to a Library constructed in an unused wing of a madhouse, and found in the mornings the evidence of massacres conducted in the darkness before. The protagonist’s efforts are met with silence and hostility, and a growing sense of personal danger. As the millennium draws near, strange groups take to the streets, and things buried and hoped lost start to make their way back into sight. “In this city,” one character remarks grimly, “demons lurk under the ashes”.

When eventually translated into English in 2016, reviewers seized on The Twenty Days as a far-sighted dystopian novel predicting the woes of social media. This does it a disservice; while there is a strand of the plot that parallels it, the most-quoted passages are all drawn from a single chapter in the opening quarter of the book. Viewing this as the primary offering would be a mistake.

Before the murders begin, in a sanitorium staffed by a religious order, a group of young people establish the Library. In a country riven by economic crisis, baking in the heat of summer, parched by drought, rendered uneasy by a shaking out of migrants and returning of emigrants and the breakdown of social bonds, the Library presents itself as a cure, a way to connect with people. For a small fee, you can deposit your writing and read that left by others: “true, authentic documents reflecting the real spirit of the people”.

And for another small fee, you can learn the name and the address of the author. All the better to make friends, of course.

Drawn in by the thrill of being read and reading, people give themselves to the Library too freely, and too deeply. It is only too late that they come to realise the bleak reality: that what is written can never be unwritten, that giving your all leaves you drained and emptied, and that the Library attracts “people with no desire at all for regular human communication”. Instead, “the typical patron of the Library was a shy individual, ready to explore the limits of his own loneliness and to weigh others down with it.”

Instead of the promised connections, membership furnished “the illusion of a relationship with the outside world… nourished and centralized by a scornful power bent only on keeping people in their state of continuous isolation”. That, I will admit, is slightly too familiar for anyone who’s found their time draining away scrolling a timeline. Social media algorithms are hostile paperclip maximisers that want your attention, and don’t really care what you give up or miss out on in order to provide them with it. But again, this isn’t about social media.

Small wonder, one character remarks, that the twenty days were marked by insomnia, paranoia, and lethargy: “Do you think human beings are really like bottomless wells? that we can drain ourselves endlessly without sooner or later finding our souls depleted?”. The users find themselves trapped in webs of mutual espionage, malicious and futile, joining crowds roaming at night unable to sleep, wondering who among them has read their confessions.

Ten years on, no-one wants to acknowledge this past, let alone consider that it may be about to return. The Library, the murders, the sleeplessness could only have arisen in a certain climate, a particular moral atmosphere. It couldn’t possibly happen again, even when we don’t quite understand how it happened the first time. This denial allows it to slip back into the city in a far less vulnerable form; a distributed network of nodes, lone outlets rather than densely linked groups. After all, once a thing has been dreamed into being it can’t be undreamed.

The Turin of the novel is a place where everything is inexorably falling apart, and it is only through great collective efforts to resist acknowledging this truth that things can carry on at all. Set against these efforts are the people who wish to pour accelerants on the embers, reignite the fire, and cleanse the city in the flames.

De Maria wrote in an Italy thirty years with live and painful memories of the war, gripped in the middle of the ‘Years of Lead’ — a twenty year stretch marked by far-left and far-right political terrorism. That an author in such a period might be moved to write of dangers lurking just below the surface of every day life, authorities unwilling or unable to confront them, of secret societies, aversion to remembrance and the re-emergence of something thought long gone is hardly surprising, and indeed this return is overseen by young men in dark suits and neat blonde hair with “a severity about them that left you anxious”, who some speculate have behind them “national and international groups hungry for vengeance after certain recent defeats”.

While people look for scapegoats, or mistake the manifestation of a problem for the cause, they remain in a country with a political system strained to breaking point, and a society which feels at odds with itself.

The authorities, sensing something is awry, make flailing efforts to address it; holding endless discussions about what is to be done, attempting to fill the void with community centres, in case “new forms of ‘psychological alienation’” supplanted the old ones. For all their efforts, only the old and organic institutions survive, tomblike, attended by the elderly who have always done so, dying quietly in a city which has lost its social structures.

The Library, however, thrives on isolation. The problem with conceiving of it purely as an institution is that it gives it a causal role it doesn’t deserve; it’s a form of behaviour that required certain conditions to emerge, and those conditions haven’t changed; the deep sense of lethargy, the exhaustion, the drained sensation, the uneasy peace enforced not by goodwill or by a break to re-arm, but through heat that drives people off the street into the shade, waiting to re-join battle when night falls.

Eventually, the protagonist begins to see all around him that the networks which have vanished from every day life emerge in secret, small ways; groups within groups plotting and working for their vision of the world.

Against these deep threats the city sets “optimism, willpower, and no shortage of constructive vision”, or avert its gaze rather than draw attention to itself. After all: to look is to make yourself a target.

“I fear today that if the two of us were bold enough to come clean about our speculations, we’d have a hard time managing to express ourselves except in deep allusions”

Cover image courtesy of Marit and Toomas Hinnosaar, used under a creative commons licence