It is the latest literary revelation in Italy. An author who has just turned 28 and who last year with his first novel, ‘My stupid ideas’ (Gatopardo / Club editor), won one of the great prizes for published work in the country, the Campiello. Bernardo Zannoni (Sarzana, 1995) still has the expression of one who does not quite believe what happened to him, although his speech flows generously. The book has become a quality bestseller at a time when many of his fellow Generation Z and millennials are concerned about their intimate or family experiences in that ever-widening literature of the self.
Zannon’s proposali is older and therefore more classical and for this reason it is also very original. He uses Aesop’s old fables to, like George Orwell in ‘Animal Farm’ or recently George Saunders with ‘Fox 8’, come to the conclusion that the best way to talk about humanity is by giving animals their human characteristics. Here the beasts sleep on beds with blankets, cook and sit at the table in front of a plate, but not all of them are capable of achieving, as is the case with Archy, the protagonist, an intense self-awareness, in short, of truly humanize
a thinking animal
Archy is a male weasel who is lame after a fall and his mother, following the ferocious law of the jungle against the weakest, gives him up to the old fox Solomon in exchange for the meat of a chicken and a half. Solomon is a wise fox who transmits his knowledge to him and turns him into a rarity, an animal that he thinks.
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Why a weasel? Why not any other animal? Zannoni is a country boy and there the weasel, an animal similar to the fox because it steals chickens like this one, is not unknown, but it is more difficult for urbanites to provide it with content. “I liked that it was an animal far from stereotypes, it is not faithful like the dog or hardworking like the beaver, the weasel is elusive and perhaps also cunning but it does not have a specific character associated with it, so for me writing about this animal was like have carte blanche & rdquor ;, he says.
Zannoni began this novel when he was 21 years old without a set plan, driven only by the pleasure of writing. He went from writing song lyrics to building a story in which he imagined a forest, as if it were a chessboard, “and as a consequence the animals arrived& rdquor;. There is no concrete moral to this story, although the author is surprised that over the year and a half since his appearance in Italy, the interpretations most pilgrims of readers. For the author, that weasel capable of learning to read and write and of developing a deep awareness of existence contains a transcendent idea, an enemy of nihilism, something quite surprising in someone his age. “Religion,” he explains, “is something natural for someone who discovers mortality. When someone knows that their life is going to have an end, they need to give it meaning and it is easy for them to wonder about the existence of God. Deep down, the work is saying that this present must be improved before it becomes an apocalyptic scenario& rdquor ;.
