the twenty days of turin by giorgio de maria

Writers get paranoid any stranger might know their secrets. Getting names is just a way of going deeper into voyeurism. But the Library’s writers and readers rarely meet. People put their lives on display to strangers to for the promise of a connection. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the handful of corporate sites that took the place of personal websites as our homes on the internet. “The prospect of ‘being read’” is what the Library offers, and the writers’ outpourings are compulsively confessional.Įvery review of The Twenty Days of Turin mentions how much this sounds like social media. It’s all about getting people to open up to each other.

You can read anyone else’s writing, and if you feel a connection the nice young men will, for a fee, give you the author’s name. It accepts manuscripts from its members-memoirs, essays, personal ads, diaries, rants, whatever you’re compelled to pour out of your brain onto the page. The Library is housed in an old hospital, and run by clean cut young men in suits, and doesn’t house ordinary books. It all leads up to a big reveal (which I’ll spoil in part two) that, described baldly, sounds like the premise for a Monty Python sketch. He talks to the sister of the first victim, and a lawyer who recalls hearing inhuman cries in the night, and a scholar whose radio apparatus recorded voices arguing over the airwaves. The nameless narrator is writing a book on the subject. Ten years earlier, in Turin, an obscure series of events began with a mysterious Library and ended with insomniacs beaten to death in the streets. Giorgio De Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin was written in 1975 and is set sometime around the end of the 20th century. But it works great for fictional nonfiction. These books read less like serious attempts to explain their subjects than like high school “what I did on my summer vacation” essays. Often the only insight offered by any of this is that a historical site related to the subject of the book still exists as a tourist destination (be sure to visit the gift shop). They spend half the book narrating the interviews, and giving physical descriptions and miniature biographies of the interviewees, and telling us about the places they travelled to and what they did there.

Their “research” consists of traveling and interviewing experts. They write about these subjects by writing about themselves. It’s written by journalists straying into scholarly subjects-history, sociology, science. There’s a style of nonfiction I cannot stand.

The twenty days of turin by giorgio de maria