the twenty days of turin by giorgio de maria

This is a book written in 1975 and featuring no technology more advanced than high-end analog audio recordings, yet it grasps the implications of social media in ways cyberpunk never did. I’ve been looking forward to reading Giorgio De Maria’s 1975 novel The Twenty Days of Turin since reading the LA Times Review of Books piece on it by Peter Berard: '.even days later, I’m still flinching at shadows, unable to forget the riveting details of a newly unearthed uncanny classic.On the long journey to New Zealand I detailed in my previous post, I had some time to read a novel given there was no internet for most of the 36 hour journey. 'It may be the novel that foreshadows our moment more accurately than any number of speculative fictions.' - LA Review of Books Hauntingly imaginative, with visceral prose that chills to the marrow, the novel is an eerily clairvoyant magnum opus, long overdue but ever timely. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet-and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing-this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever.īrilliantly translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov, The Twenty Days of Turin establishes De Maria's place among the literary ranks of Italo Calvino and beside classic horror masters such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. Now, in a fretful new age of 'lone-wolf' terrorism fueled by social media, we can find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria's vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence.

Inevitably drawn into the city's occult netherworld, he unearths the stuff of modern nightmares: what's shared can never be unshared.Īn allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years. That is, until a lonely salaryman decides to investigate these mysterious events, which the citizenry of Turin fear to mention. When their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library's users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity.Īs the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day 'phenomenon of collective psychosis' culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history. In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create 'the Library,' a space where lonely citizens can read one another's personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in 'dialogues across the ether.'

The twenty days of turin by giorgio de maria