The eightieth edition of Witch Award arrives at the final with a peculiarity that already tells a lot about the Italian editorial moment: not five, but one sestina. Six books, six authors, six different ways of understanding the novel today. From the cruel game on time of Michele Mari to the fictional biography of Matteo Nucciwith the powerful voice of Bianca Pitzorno compared to toxic and magnetic Teresa Ciabatti with evil, until the mental descent of Alcide Pierantozzi and to the women around Albert Camus told by Elena Rui.
The result of the first vote was announced on 3 June by the Roman Theater of Benevento. It’s in your head Michele Mari with The stone guests (Einaudi), with 280 votes. They follow Matteo Nucci with Plato. A love story (Feltrinelli), 242 votes; Bianca Pitzorno with The sleepwalker (Bompiani), 195 votes; Teresa Ciabatti with Donnaregina (Mondadori), 184 votes; Alcide Pierantozzi with I twist it (Einaudi), 170 votes; and Elena Rui with Camus’ widows (The footprint), 163 votes.
The final will be six-man because the rules of the Award provide that, if a book published by a medium-small publisher does not appear among the first five, the best-placed title from that publishing area will also enter the second vote. That’s how it is Camus’ widows enters the final and widens the field.
Michele Mari, the favorite with The stone guests
Michele Mari’s novel starts from a class, III A, and from a pact signed after the high school exam. An agreement born almost as a joke, destined to bind the former teammates until the last day. But school time, which seems immobile in the memory, here becomes a ruthless machine: friendship, competition, money, survival.
In the book the past is never really past. He comes back, calls, demands the bill. The challenge between the former students turns into a race to stay alive as long as possible, into a very dark game on destiny, on envy, on bonds that declare themselves affectionate and then reveal their most ferocious side. Mari reaches the final as the favorite and with a choral, comic and dark novel, which seems to use school memory as a moral laboratory.
Matteo Nucci, Plato before becoming Plato
With Plato. A love storyMatteo Nucci brings to the competition a novel that looks at antiquity without transforming it into a museum. The protagonist is Aristocles, the boy who will become Plato. We meet him in 415 BC, in Piraeus, when he is still a twelve-year-old with a feverish look, immersed in an Athens where celebration coexists with the shadow of war.
Nucci follows the philosopher’s education: the death of his father, the relationship with his mother, the defeat of Athens against Sparta, the meeting with Socrates, the trauma of his death sentence, the journey to Cyrene and Egypt. But the heart of the book is eros, understood as a cognitive force, wound, passion, research. Plato is not treated as a statue, but as a living body, crossed by desire, pain, failures and ideas.
Bianca Pitzorno and the destiny of Ofelia Rossi
The sleepwalker by Bianca Pitzorno has Ofelia Rossi as its protagonist, marked since childhood by sudden fainting spells from which she awakens with the premonition of a future event. Her parents try to protect and hide that gift, imagining that a marriage can keep her safe. But that very wedding becomes the most dangerous place.
Ofelia escapes and rebuilds her life in Sardinia, relying only on her own strength. In his living room in Via del Fiore Rosso he earns a living by offering prophecies for five lire. Her clients are women affected by anxieties, desires and anxieties. The sleepwalker listens to them, simulates a trance, holds the pen and writes the response. Pitzorno brings a lonely and proud female figure to the final of the Strega, poised between gift, necessity and survival.
Teresa Ciabatti, the writer in front of the superboss
In DonnareginaTeresa Ciabatti builds the meeting between a writer and a man accused of armed robbery, criminal association, mafia association and 182 murders committed and commissioned. He is ‘o Nasone, the superboss. She receives the assignment from a newspaper to interview him, even though she does not deal with crime.
At first the two worlds should remain separate. Then something changes. The boss, ruthless and vulnerable at the same time, talks about lost women, dead friends, family affections, children with whom he can no longer communicate. The question that runs through the book is poisonous: is he manipulating her? The confrontation becomes a journey between confessions, projections and private wounds. When the protagonist looks for Misso’s son in the streets of Naples, she understands that she is also looking for someone else: her daughter, who is escaping her.
Alcide Pierantozzi and the precipice of I twist it
I twist it by Alcide Pierantozzi enters the sestina as a different, obsessive, almost physical novel. The question that runs through it is radical: what happens when reality breaks down and lets hallucination in? The book talks about fear, the shortening of breath, the mental precipice, the “uneven” one in which existence loses its axis and measure.
It is not a reassuring novel. It is a descent into an evil that affects many, told from the inside, with writing that shocks and at the same time attempts to soothe. Its strength lies precisely in not taming the experience of fracture.
Elena Rui and the four women of Camus
Camus’ widows by Elena Rui starts from January 4, 1960, when the Facel Vega driven by the publisher Michel Gallimard crashes into a plane tree in Burgundy. In the passenger seat is Albert Camus, who died instantly three years after the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The novel does not tell Camus from the centre, but from the lives of the women who gravitated around him: his wife Francine Faure, the actress Catherine Sellers, the painter Mette Ivers and Maria Casarès, a great interpreter of French theatre, who Camus defined as “the Only One”. Four voices, four wounds, four different ways of remaining connected to a man who disappeared suddenly.
The final on 8 July will not just be a competition between books. It will also be a snapshot of Italian fiction in its eightieth Strega: historical novel, biographical novel, scholastic memoir, moral noir, mental illness, female figures on the margins of great history. And in this six-way race, Michele Mari starts ahead. But the Witch, as always, likes to remember that predictions exist to be proven wrong.
