The Leaning Tower of Pisa. What if she's right? Don't worry, it's not the August heat that has affected my abilities, but rather a reflection that—if you'll give me the chance to argue—you'll agree with me makes a lot of sense, and which comes from the pages of "The Woman Who Killed the Fairies" (Elliot, 224 pp.), the new novel by Gesuino Némus.
In the small village of Telévras, nothing is happening. Or almost. The municipality is still under special administration; Gonario Manizàre, president of the milk producers' cooperative and a man devoted to the practice of grab grab , has decided to throw himself into politics with a vengeance ; the farmers, exhausted by the low price of sheep's milk, discuss how to get something more from politics than a gesture of solidarity, as self-interested as it is useless; Gioacchino Dicciòsu – who in 1969 had participated in the Pratobello uprising – warns of the futility of the struggle, that "we were slaves then and that's what we remain"; the marshal of the meritorious Ettore Tigàssu is counting the minutes that separate him from 2037, when he will finally be able to retire; and that crazy liar Gesuino Némus – the character, not the author! –, after promising to write a novel about the village and its people, has disappeared.
Everything revolves around the “Pubblica Mescita Cannonau & basta”, the agora of this microcosm of not even a thousand souls in the heart of Ogliastra, close to the Tacchi but 25 kilometers from the sea whose blue you can just see.
In Telévras, as we were saying, nothing, or almost nothing, happens. For example, old Digiòsu is found murdered by his shepherd servant: someone shot him in the back with a smoothbore hunting rifle, and you'll understand what an investigation this is in an area where there are more guns than residents. The assets—and with them the deceased's debts—should pass to his sister Elvira, the only living relative, who is however deemed incompetent because, seventy years earlier, she drowned her only daughter, a few months old, in the river. She is a mad old woman who lives between a ruin on the riverbed and the abandoned Gairo Vecchia.
What is already shaping up to be a farcical tragedy will be joined by the arrival from Switzerland of a famous university professor of Clinical Psychology, Professor Marco Venturini, convinced he wants to buy a house for one euro in which to live for at least six months of the year, and convince the residents—first of the village, and then of Sardinia—of the wisdom of transforming Sardinia into the twenty-seventh Swiss Canton, the Maritime Canton.
The crime is merely a pretext to recount, with disenchantment and a cutting voice, the quirks (and vices) of this beloved land of ours. While in the background, foreign and continental corporations attempt, with carrots and sticks, to grab land for wind turbines and hectares of solar panels, the novel's entire narrative is anchored in a nostalgic and romantic self-mythology of a proud, self-confident, hospitable, and generous people, almost incapable of committing evil except as a consequence, a form of punishment meted out by man, since the justice of the palaces cannot be trusted. But Sergio Atzeni had already written that "Aside from the folly of killing each other for irrelevant reasons, we were happy," warning us that evil didn't only come from outside. So does Némus: he laughs and mocks, he entertains in the most etymological sense of the word, forcing us, between laughter and scholarly reflection, to change our perspective. So much so that, in the end, it will no longer be clear who, in Telévras, is truly mad… in short, whether, after all, the Leaning Tower of Pisa isn't right.