L'inevitabile accade

Italy is a country where the line between collective history and private lives sometimes seems thinner than elsewhere. It may therefore happen that an ordinary family from any village in a valley in the Brescia area, such as Val Camonica, finds itself related to one of the leaders of the Red Brigades, among the most wanted men of the 1970s.

This is what happened to Alessandro Gazzoli, who, in his first novel, reconstructs his family’s history in a blend of memoir and autofiction. Gazzoli’s narrative begins with the story of one of his father’s three cousins (here nicknamed the Karamazovs, through a fictional device that permeates the entire novel), who marries Arianna, the sister of Mario Moretti – known as ‘the Sphinx’ – the man alleged to be responsible for Moro’s murder. Beyond the personal dimension, the choice of subject is also driven by the author’s deep and avowed obsession with the communist world (its characters, history, fetishes and errors), which finds its fulfilment in this narrative. Thus, alongside a historical and chronological reconstruction of events in his hometown, the journalistic investigation gives way to autobiographical digressions and the writer’s own revelations; no longer set in the 1970s but at the turn of the century, he maintains a parodic and fanciful relationship with the ideologies that shaped his past.

The novel is thus structured as a dual narrative, oscillating between a mythological and brutal past and a present characterised by artificial imitation and ideological disorientation, alternating between fascination and disillusionment through a narrative that weaves together a multitude of vicissitudes and geographical settings into a variegated mosaic. Within this, we find the stories of Arianna, who has come to Val Camonica from the Marche region to teach at a secondary school; the three Karamazov brothers, who have made their fortune through industrial enterprise; and the lineage of hard workers such as Grandfather Burtulì, who rose from farm labourer to factory worker, and Uncle Gianmaria, who never attended school. Against it all, the backdrop of the village, Raglio – another fictional name – a place where history is etched and where the tragic tale of Karamazov and Arianna unfolds; upon them will fall, relentlessly, the ignominy of an unspeakable family connection that will force the former to break off his marriage and the latter to go into hiding for the next forty years, whilst the world changes, ideologies fade into the sunset, villages are forgotten and new storytellers emerge, ready to delve into the past.

Alessandro Gazzoli
“L’inevitabile accade”
Nottetempo, 204 pp., 18 euros