The Library is a place in which average people are encouraged to deposit and read each others private journals. This dark time comes to be known (conveniently) as the Twenty Days of Turin.Īt the same time as bodies are being found, a group of young men travel door to door inviting residents to join a shadowy institution known as the Library. The murderers are never identified and the events remain shrouded in mystery. The following morning the mangled remains of the victims are discovered – their bodies broken at odd angles as if they’d been swung about by the feet. Our adventure begins when an unnamed journalist traveling to Turin to investigate an incident which took place 20 years before, when a collective insomnia took hold of most of the town’s population, causing them to shamble through the streets and squares at night in vulnerable, fugue-like states. It’s all a bit of a conceptual mess, but no less enjoyable for it. Lovecraft, Borges and Poe, has written one of those modern-day allegories that is open to an infinite number of interpretations: a commentary on the rise of fascism in Italy, for example, or a foreshadowing of the phenomenon of social media. Giorgio De Maria’s 1975 Italian cult classic The Twenty Days of Turin, translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov, is easily one of the strangest books I’ve come across in recent memory.
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