An ancient and ever-changing language to convey the chatter of Purgatory

“One day I had the opportunity to discover what a typical day in Purgatory is like. Time down there is disjointed, possessing a unique sensation that is both sluggish and oppressive, and characterised by an indescribable heaviness. A weight that crushes and numbs, a physical oppression comparable to the episodes we have all experienced in life – those bouts of constipation, with calprotectin levels exceeding 200 mcμg, a wretched condition from which only the providential effect of a laxative can free us.” These few lines alone, taken as a sample from her latest novella, Lotteria delle anime (Adelphi), would suffice to gauge with disarming clarity the distance that separates Rosa Matteucci’s writing from the stylistic hallmarks of contemporary Italian fiction. Whilst the writer’s linguistic craftsmanship is already evident here—reminiscent of the playful lexical experiments of a verbal tightrope-walker such as Tommaso Landolfi (not least due to the irony with which, on every page, the reader navigates the darkest and most painful themes only to be immediately lifted by flashes of humour)— a similar experimentation also pervades the narrative material itself, over which the surrealism of Roberto Bolaño (who, incidentally, appears in the book) seems to hover, albeit here stripped of its left-wing bias and steeped in the great Italian tradition.

In her previous book, "Cartagloria" (whose very title invites the reader to enter a distant world with its reference to a liturgical instrument of the Tridentine rite), Matteucci recounts how the death of her father leads the protagonist to question God (embodied in more or less orthodox beliefs and sought after across the globe) about the inevitability of the passing of loved ones; and this new short novel is steeped in the same surreal irrelevance, as it depicts a paradoxical situation: a woman who is hounded by the souls in Purgatory to pray for them with the “tried-and-tested ‘I adore thee, O Holy Cross’”, thereby reducing the time they must spend awaiting Paradise (“No one speaks of the souls in Purgatory; no one imagines the horror of the state of tribulation in which they live; no one worries about their condition as beings who were once alive like us and who, at a certain point, could do nothing but die – and so they died”). This curious narrative device springs to life from the protagonist’s ear, into which the chatter—‘the annoying murmur in the cochlea’—of the souls (from the old newsagent to the most distant relatives, from illustrious writers and musicians to complete strangers) seeking a swifter salvation reaches, and explodes with the discovery of ‘Father Alessio Jandoucheff’s’ invention, the ‘Purgatory Lottery’, a ‘grid of ninety squares listing the types of souls in Purgatory awaiting redemption’ for whom to pray. The redemption of souls, the pleas for help and the apparitions in everyday life (“some knock at the door or the window; others appear suddenly in human form, dressed as they were in life on weekdays; still others are evanescent—that is, clad in rags and moth-eaten furs—and thus cause fear”) These apparitions become, for Matteucci, an opportunity to complement the main thread of the narrative with a web of minute biographies—whether fantastical or real—a splendid gallery of characters who intertwine mysticism with everyday life, bearing witness to the erratic progression of Matteucci’s writing which, as always, begins at one point but then, in an unexpected yet captivating manner, takes the reader on a journey through the imaginative paths of her inspiration. The proudly archaic and ever-shifting language, combined with an original narrative style, make this little book yet another masterpiece by Rosa Matteucci, a writer one should never stop reading, an antidote to the aridity of so much contemporary writing.