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The Soldier
The deliberateness and quasi-surgical cleanliness of Mascheri's prose is reminiscent of J.M. Coetzee's endeavor to redefine the boundaries of memoir
Few authors had so far described in such bare prose the gloomy impotence and latent chaos of weary, morose Italy
Shortlisted at the Perelà Prize for fiction
The soldier of the title of what may fairly be considered the first significant novel about the Italian decline is a young man in his early thirties who runs a pharmacy in Arezzo with his father. He is prosperous. He has a relationship with a young woman, a relationship that provides him with emotional stability and a satisfactory sexual routine. He has long ago abandoned his youthful artistic aspirations. This is a normal life, in a prosperous Italian city at the turn of the twenty-first century, and yet this life seems to have slowly filled the protagonist with a sense of frustration and a dark malaise. It is when he attempts to break free from all the things that keep him from becoming a grown man that the “soldier” finds himself faced with a ferocious, cynical, and appalling reality—the Italy of our times. And he passes through a landscape that has nothing in common with the postcard Chianti-shire familiar to foreigners, but is instead a succession of industrial sheds, malls and shopping centers, dicey bars, and Slavic women willing to do anything to achieve prosperity. Together these separate tiles make up a mosaic of a bloodthirsty struggle for survival, a powerful novel about the present-day struggle between the generations in Italy.
Press Review
Il gregario
Pages
173
Publication date
settembre 2008
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