Name: The Twenty Days of Turin
ISBN: 9781631492297

Giorgio De Maria

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.

The Twenty Days of Turin

Alfredo santos

So so creepy!

This book, which is very short by the way, is written in a very "Gogolian" style. I could say it's a mix of Russian old school meets Lovecraft.

The story itself is not as complete as you might expect, but the writing style compensates this.

It is a weird story, in the sense that not much is explained and you have to take a strong leap of faith AND imaginationwith the author to truly summerge yourself to his prose.

I found it refreshing and different from all that I've read lately. I don't give it more than three stars because I think the characters couldve been a bit more developed, and the story be more coherent regarding it's grammatical structure, what I mean is that maybe the translation wasnt clear enough to know when the "description of the dream" stopped and whem normal scenario started.

Worth your 2 hours? Solid yes i f you're into the genre.

Bryan Alexander

A very strange and intriguing novel.

Giorgio De Maria's Twenty Days of Turin is a work of imagined history. Something terrible happened to that Italian city in the 1970s; decades later, our unnamed narrator tries to write a book about it.

I do want to place some thoughts behind spoilers, since part of the book's pleasure is in discovering what happened and how. For now I'll just say that each chapter offers a different slice of the mystery, usually involving meeting a new character and exploring another location. If you go into this expecting a horror story, or a fantasy, or a historical novel, you'll be surprised at the mixture.

Because something *did* happen to Turin in the 1970s, along with much of Italy. Italians now refer to that time as the Years of Lead, as the country experienced a low-intensity civil war between small, extreme groups on the political left and right. The Red Brigades and crypto-fascists took turns committing murders, kidnappings, and bombings, sometimes blaming each other for the crimes. A prime minister was killed, along with one of Italy's great writers and directors. Parts of the Italian government were to some extent complicit in these acts, the full nature of which remains controversial and even obscure now.

In Twenty Days of Turin Giorgio De Maria offers a fantastic riff on that situation. *Something* killed people, but the murderers remain hidden, decades later. Few feel they can speak out loud about the events for fear of reprisal. The more deeply the narrator digs into events, the more horrors and mysteries appear, and the more trouble he evokes.

Several scenes impressed me, most especially a chapter about an esoteric audio recording device (better than Raudive's EVP, 80) with a mix of horror, comedy, and technical media. There's also a now-famous invention of a "Library", a covert proto-internet where people share secret writings with each other.

All right, now for spoilers. (view spoiler)[The Giuffrida chapter is my favorite, with its eerie technology,
 and the scary, then hilarious, then scary again revelation of the underground forces. I'm impressed at these creatures, this "new experimental form of life" (130) - does that make this science fiction as well? And then we move to the anticlimax,
 where the narrator can't tell his story (except to us)... then the twist finale, with exile and monsters.
 That's a lot of plotting to cram into a very short text. I can't think of another weird novel that worked this way. (hide spoiler)]

Stylistically, in translation it's a pleasure to read. There are clever turns of phrase:He had an aquiline nose, a slightly crooked one; it made him look like a hawk that had ruined its beak after nosediving badly into a mountain of rock. (15)And there are plenty of ideas tossed off in all directions:I thought of an urban legend... that the abnormal growth of the Library had forced the sisters to cut back on space for the inmates, to cram them all into fewer rooms,
 in monstrous amalgamations. In the deepest ward, which the eyes of strangers had never pierced,
 there lived a tribe of demented giants who were set free at nighttime. They carried out their carnage,
 then returned at daybreak, appeased... (54-5)De Maria loves his city, and shows its many odd details, its tunnels and statues, quarters and byways.

Recommended.

Thanks to Jim Groom for commending the novel to my attention.

The Twenty Days of Turin

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