In the Carcass of This Thing We Used to Call Life
The Twenty Days of Turin and our collective dreams of annihilation
Something is rotted near the heart of the city. At some point something went very wrong, but the city’s residents are too polite and too isolated in their genteel introversion to ever face it in any meaningful way. The few who even acknowledge it do it in hushed, embarrassed voices. No one knows what it is, only that it is. The infection burst to the surface once already and now it looks like pus might be starting to out of the old scar lines from last time.
When summarized the premise for The Twenty Days of Turin doesn’t sound all that different from your standard Lovecraftian fiction. Giorgio De Maria’s inspiration was, however, more immediate to his surroundings than, uh, whatever it was that inspired Lovecraft. When de Maria wrote Twenty Days in 1975, Italy was deep into the Years of Lead, a protracted period of civil unrest where left wing and far right reactionary militias battled each other in the streets. The war was characterized by targeted kidnappings of politicians and labor leaders, riots and counterriots, student and labor strikes, and bombings that may or may not have been committed by the groups the government claimed were responsible. Of course life had to, as they say, go on, so people were expected to about their business and keep the rusted cogs of society creaking along as if there was no looming possibility of catching a stray round in a driveby, being caught in the blast trajectory of a car bomb meant for some deputy minister leaving his mistress’ apartment, or simply disappearing one day without a trace.
The sum psychological effect was a paranoia, but one shot through with a sense of cynical fatalism. For even if there was any truth to be had out of the opaque motives behind the havoc, it was common knowledge that truth would immediately be obfuscated in the official record under the weight of all the established powers in society sticking their finger on the scale: the Italian government, the police, the Vatican, NATO. It goes without saying that all the aforementioned powers always came down on the side of far-right forces like monarchists, Ordine Nuovo and Ordine Nero. Not only was truth unknowable, trying to pursue it could get you in trouble with societal forces whose nebulous forms loomed much taller and darker than the dozen neo-fascists drunks occupying the local café.
History and the present are sort of like poetry sometimes, y’know, it rhymes.
The thing is that’s not the actual unsettling part of this novel. The titular event, a nightmarish state of mass insomnia leading to an epidemic of people wandering the streets of Turin in the dead of night in an increasing state of collective anxiety and culminating in a nocturnal slaughter of dozens killing each other and dozens more smashed to death by some unseen force, is tied to an earlier phenomenon called “the Library.”
No one can quite remember how or when the Library started, but they do know that in an abandoned room of a Church-managed sanatorium is a repository of journals, diaries, scrap paper, and notes managed by a group of serene enigmatic young people. In the Library people can submit their anonymous writings and peruse and reply to the writings of other visitors. There’s no rules on what can or can’t be submitted to the Library, but over time the postings lean towards expressions of the loneliness and isolation, the muddy runoff of living as a solitary monad in the city. This soppy paeans begin to metastasize into darker expressions, a cataloging of every kind of depraved act, shameful antisocial urge, and impulse towards sexual violence that accumulates on the line between id and ego like a black lichen. The anonymous confessions and anonymous responses to them get worse and worse until something breaks and the violence explodes out from the confines of the Library into the streets of Turin.
It would have been eerie enough if De Maria had just predicted the broad outlines of social media thirty years before it came into existence. But no, he somehow also had prescience to understand how such a platform would interface with the contemporary Western psyche in all its social isolation. How the thin veil of anonymity combined with an audience would drive people to not just divulge thoughts they’d never dream of sharing in any other format, but to chase those emanations of the id down their hidey holes, elaborating on and evolving those ideations. How the dissociative effect of social media, the separation of speech from the self into the liminal space of anonymized text, wouldn’t hold out. That the nature of the comments made on the anonymous medium would drive people progressively insane, their id bubbling to the surface, made psychotic enough by people’s posts to give in to the desire to burst forth into reality to find the subject of their ire, tear away the mask, and exact their lurid retribution of those who dared to express aspects of their inner selves in a way that didn’t sit quite right.
It rhymes.
The Twenty Days’ protagonist is an unnamed blank slate. Other than an offhand mention of his hobby of playing the flute, we get zero mention of his history or inner life, much less his motivations for accepting the invitation to investigate the Library and its relationship to the Twenty Days. His sole relatable trait is his utter inability to get closer to the nebulous powers he investigates. For every lead he uncovers in unlocking the secrets of the Library and the Twenty Days, he’s immediately stymied with a dozen more deeper interlocking mysteries. A sudden, violent reminder of how he and any of his peers are from uncovering any kind of meaningful truth about the actual powers that be.
I don’t think I need to explain why this is so relatable. This sudden yet constant reminder of how little agency you have over the world and your own life. The sense that every breakthrough you think you’ve achieved is a base, momentary illusion permitted to you by the powers that actually determine everything. The vertiginous feeling of realizing how far you were from any sort of meaningful truth or catharsis.
I read the Twenty Days of Turin across the span of a week or so, reading it just before bed, and had fucked up nightmares every night -- a confused mashup of frantic home invasion scenarios and surgical anesthetic malfunctions. One of the sequences that really messed me up was when the unnamed protagonist feels like he’s getting closer to the heart of the conspiracy. He wakes up in the middle of one night and then hears a single massive knock on his front door as if the police just hit it with a battering ram. Nothing else happens that night and the next day he goes out like normal, but returns home to see a mark on his front door: the outline of a freakishly large fist. A few days later, undeterred, he’s made more headway in the case and hears the single deafening knock again. This time the knock is followed with a smash. The front door slams open, and feet thunder up the stairs and down the hall to stop at the door to the protagonist’s bedroom. And then nothing. The presence is gone, but the message is clear: whatever progress you feel you’ve made is irrelevant. We can and will terminate your efforts at any moment we see fit.
Ultimately, The Twenty Days of Turin is about a festering abscess lurking under a placid exterior. The fear of all the protagonists in the story is that it might burst to the surface once again like dormant infection. In a way it’s a warped carnival reflection of the horror we live in. Or maybe we’re the bent-up mirror image of the book.
In our reality the societal forces that hold us in thrall are visible in plain sight. They are fully woven into the fabric of our reality, watching us even as we sleep. The conspiracies we weave, uncover, and sometimes consciously invent all serve the same purpose: escape. A world secretly run by a cabal of cannibal pedophile liberal oligarchs, a second American Civil War, a “hot” war Iran or China, UFOs, a coup of the United States government by Donald Trump loyalists. They’re all dreams annihilation whose realization would allow us escape from this paralytic slumber we’re locked into. The nightmare is that our lives, this life, will just go on. The one where everything about society stays fundamentally the same, but just gets a little shittier every year. To be alive, to walk this earth — that’s the real nightmare.
Happy Halloween!