The charm of the shadow

Pier Carpi (1940-2000) was one of the most original and unsettling figures on the literary and intellectual scene in the 1960s and 1970s. A comic book writer (Topolino, Diabolik, but also Batman and Superman), novelist, essayist, and director, Carpi was a master at depicting esotericism, magic, secret societies, and the occult as elements capable of better understanding the zeitgeist in which he lived: a feverish post-economic boom Italy, in the midst of a spiritual and financial crisis, bloodied by terrorism. To tell the story of a nation that seemed to have lost its points of reference and was struggling to find new ones that were not ephemeral, Carpi did not hesitate to resort to the supernatural, horror, myth as happens in his most famous novel, A Shadow in the Shadow , first published in 1974 and now re-released after an absence from bookstores of over fifty years by the publishing house Alcatraz (2026, Euro 17.00, pp. 296).

Adapted into a film by Carpi himself in 1979, A Shadow in the Shadow remains, even after half a century, a hard-to-digest, disturbing, and unclassifiable novel among contemporary Italian literature. The setting is Milan, in the early 1970s. In a gray city constantly in motion amidst the daily grind, many women are bound together in a magical coterie that is unrestricted by wealth or living conditions, and which adopts rules and rituals as if to combat an irremediable sense of loneliness. But their equilibrium will be shattered by the arrival of a new girl, an adolescent endowed with powers superior to the others, who will master the sisterhood's secrets and refuse to integrate into the community and the seemingly inescapable cycle of existence that holds her captive.

Carpi's novel, however, is much more than the story it seeks to tell. It is a direct challenge to the reader, who is "invited" to cross the disturbing and subtle boundary between that knowledge, that knowledge which reassures, and that knowledge which becomes dangerous and disturbing because it does not correspond to our rationality. For Carpi, this knowledge, which can simultaneously make us understand and lose, is magic. The novel, in fact, is a modern story of witchcraft, power, and damnation, in which the author, however, avoids any form of sensationalism and complacency. For Carpi, the supernatural is something that is part of reality and, for this reason, cannot be simply removed without renouncing a part of knowledge. A knowledge that the book's female protagonists choose to fully grasp, becoming the custodians of an ancient, ambiguous, and extremely powerful knowledge. Thus, the female figures cannot escape the tension between salvation and perdition, between domination and submission, between freedom and condemnation. Extremely modern women, those of Carpi, who know, fully pay the consequences of their decisions. And that's why they shocked half a century ago and continue to do so, subtly, even today, when reading A Shadow in the Shadow, a novel about power and desire, faith and transgression, light and darkness. A novel that invites us to enter the shadows to understand how deeply we want to know ourselves.