A small light

What a shame – a book you don’t know which shelf to put on! Picking up the latest title by Eduardo Savarese – who published with e/o and minimum fax from 2012 to 2018 – and noting that it was published by a small publishing house in Viterbo, I don’t need to dig any deeper to guess what happened: the major publishers must have rejected the manuscript, not because of any doubt as to its undoubted quality, but because they couldn’t make head nor tail of how to position it on the bookshelves. Is it a children’s story? Is it an allegorical fable? Is it a political satire with a few Swiftian jabs? Is it an apocalyptic prophecy? Is it – horror of horrors – a philosophical novel? It is, unfortunately, all of these things without being any of them, as if, having approached one genre, the novel were to veer off and head in another direction for fear of becoming trapped.

Had it merely been the story of a destroyed world, or of an orphan’s coming of age accompanied by a black cat, or of the aftermath of Christ’s second coming, or of a journey through cities in each of which common sense is outlawed (the tactless one is very reminiscent of the Covid lockdown), had it merely been the chronicle of a spiritual ascent achieved by traversing the darkest and most unsettling corners of the human condition, "A Small Light" would have found its place in the most widely read catalogues, would have enjoyed a decent, even distribution, would have been sold, read, digested and forgotten, perhaps earning the author a few pennies and the vague promise of an adaptation into a screenplay. Instead, it is a book you have to go out of your way to find, because it does not come to us of its own accord. It is a parable, that’s what it is; but I fear the ‘parables’ section is no longer even to be found in religious bookshops. It isn’t written in modern standard Italian; it can’t be turned into a TV series; it doesn’t contain a ready-made thesis that can be summarised in a social media post; nor does it suggest easy questions for presenters during summer or mountain festivals. And yet, how wonderful are those books you don’t know which shelf to put on! They used to be called novels.

Eduardo Savarese

Alter Ego, 243 pp., 19 euros