The New Italian Weird: Day of the Otter

I don’t have a statistic about the US editorial market, but a phenomena that happened in Italy in the last twenty years is an acceleration of the creative production due to many factors. First of all due to the rising of the level of education that is happening worldwide. Secondly due to the fact that writing is nowadays everywhere. We can just think about the social networks and the constant flow of informations that we reach thought that. Of course it is more of a quantitative consideration rather than qualitative. The situation where the media of the writing was exclusively used by a small circles of wealthy thinkers and by the members of the academic reality lasted until a few decades ago, but luckily now it is quite different, and that changed a lot according to the eruption of the internet. This is obviously a doubled-sided knife. If there are more people publishing, of course it is easier to get published, but it is harder to emerge into an industry that is packed and it is harder to be seriously considered by the editors (the investment of the editor on a single book is smaller, that means that if doesn’t sell very well, it will stay on the shelf for less time). Also the emerging industry of auto-publishing damaged the structure of the editorial market. Everyone could virtually publish a book behind a payment, no matter the content, no matter the form. That means it is harder to be considered by the readers.

The flooding river is breaking the embankments of the selection, and the internet has a very important role in order to keep some level of quality in the selection preserved. What happened in Italy is that along the 00’s and the 10’s a lot of literary blogs and online journals have been formed and that ended up to be the privileged place for the insiders to open discussions and confrontations about literature. In these places there was also spaces for short-stories and extracts of novels. A new writer had the possibility to be known by a very specific audience of readers that had a high interest in literature and of course in between them there were editors and workers of the small and big publishing houses. If a writer was published in few different magazines and was able to find an identity in this bubble, the possibility of being published was very high. For a publishing house it was easy to invest in someone that already had been noticed by strong readers. We have to say that today the Italian situation luckily remains the same, which is good for someone that still needs to emerge. So if it seems impossible to climb up the wall of the glory just sending novels all around or using agents, the internet gave the possibility to follow another more independent path. Andrea Zandomeneghi is the perfect example of someone that was able to follow this escalation.

We already mentioned Zandomeneghi on the first episode of this column, he was one of the main voices in this new current of the New Italian Weird, that we have to remember doesn’t exist. Zandomeneghi is an alcoholic that tries to discover the mystery of existence through the abuse of psychopharmacological drugs. He’s the co-founder of the online blog Crapula Club, that along the 10’s had a big influence on the Italian scene. From there he started to collaborate with Verde Rivista and there he get known from a wider circle of readers for his speculation about life and his sharp critique about the international literary world. Very influenced by Dostoevsky, one of his last columns is called Jurodivye, were he did a project of scouting of the new Italian voices (and his still doing that through is new project Degrado Magazine). I would like to quote his best stories and his best piece of critique, but they are all in Italian and I don’t think it’s worth it to keep going with the list. What is important is that according to this online movement he was able to be noticed and published by a small publishing house that has a very important influence on the contemporary scenario. His first novel is called the Day of the Otters (Il Giorno della Nutria), a mental detective novel where the discovery of a frozen otter is the excuse to start an inner process of discovery and exploration of the mind of the character. There is not a process of growth, there is not a resolution of the facts, the only elements that are important along the stories are the abuse of substances, the relation with the mother and the paranoia that follows a continuous climax. For sure it is one of the best works of auto-fiction in the last decade, and also the critics are confirming it: a self-referential novel that has no meaning, a mental masturbation that brings us nowhere. One of the worst books I’ve read in the last twenty years. Pretentious and vernacular. An exercise of vulgarity. As you can see, Zandomeneghi was able to move the minds of the readers, for that reason The Day of the Otters will remain one of the fundamental books of The New Italian Weird, that doesn’t exist. In fact, even this book has no elements that can be connected to the dimension of the weird: there are not extra-ordinary elements that are breaking the stories, there is no interruption or distortion of reality, everything just happens how it should happen in a small provincial town in Italy. What makes it unique is the language and the style. Pretentious, full of quotes, drives the reader into the deeper parts of the characters mind. Which is a quite strange journey.
Zandomeneghi is currently working on his second novel, he works as an editor and scouter, he is still chasing the mystery of consciousness through the substances, and is one of the main voices in the independent literary bubble.