The Roman writer Daniele Mencarelli – among the most recognizable and loved voices of Italian fiction in recent years – returns to bookstores with «Four presumed family members» (Sellerio) and measures himself for the first time with the territory of noir. A story that focuses on the waiting and pain of those who remain, taking a lateral step compared to the novels that made him famous – from «The house of glances» to «Everything asks for salvation», from which a very successful Netflix series was also based – using the device of the genre to question the fragility of relationships, the sense of guilt and individual responsibility.
The story begins with the discovery of a skeleton in the woods of Norma, in the province of Latina, but Mencarelli transforms noir into a novel about the ambiguity of power and those who exercise it. At the center of the narrative there is also the policeman Circosta, an investigator who is anything but heroic, a fragile and restless figure who goes through the story as a witness to a moral conflict bigger than himself, in a province where the past continues to re-emerge, just like the skeleton from which everything starts.
Daniele, how did your noir turn come about?
«I’ll tell you a secret, this is the novel I wrote first, I’ve been harboring it for eight years but in the meantime the urgency arose to dedicate myself to “The House of Looks” which opened a trilogy with an autobiographical look, recounting that phase of my life. In the meantime I rewrote it several times, addressing the topic of artificial intelligence and new techniques for collecting and comparing DNA, until the time came to publish it.”
An atypical noir because it focuses on the waiting and pain of those who remain in limbo. Can you explain us better?
«At the time I was a fan of “Who has seen it” and this book was born from the discovery of a skeleton and what follows from it, in obedience to our legal system, that is, the summoning of presumed family members who reported a disappearance in a time compatible with the state of the remains found. A lottery of pain.”
Why?
«When I do meetings, I propose this exercise to the public which for me is real torture. I give the example of my daughter who is 15 years old and I say: “If Viola didn’t come back from school today, if she had the phone off the hook and the hours continued to pass, what would I do? I would go and report her disappearance to the police, but always according to our law, 48 hours must pass. Then the 48 hours pass, Viola doesn’t return and a day, two days, three days pass which become entire lives, because I think time would expand in an inhumane way.” I ask the public: “if your closest and most fragile affection, a child, a partner or a parent suffering from Alzheimer’s, never comes home again, if years pass, how would you live that wait that never ends?”.
What do the numbers say?
«These are disconcerting numbers. In 2025, between 67 and 68 people will disappear in Italy every day; of these, 80% return or are certified as having voluntarily left, but 20% disappear forever and there are 3-4 thousand people a year who disappear into the darkness.”
If I think of “Hunger for Air” and the painful journey of Pietro and Jacopo, father and son, I think of the temptation to give up our lives and leave society, its duties. Is this an idea that has ever fascinated you?
«Certainly, you can reach an age where, if you look back, you realize that this was not the life you wanted and that the dreams you were chasing are all gone. Reality and our aspirations hardly coincide and in this overlap those who suffer from mental distress are increasingly exposed.”
Its protagonist is the police officer Circosta, very far from the classic detective.
“Decidedly. He is a 33-year-old officer with ten years of service under his belt. A mediocre man with an aspiration, a desire for good, to quote Simone Weil, which we all have. Circosta is the man thrown into time who has to deal with the impulses that perhaps lead him to actions without remedy and he confronts Marshal Masi, mirroring himself in his actions”.
There are two crucial places in the narrative, the hospital and the Latina barracks. Does this book have a black soul?
“Yes. I wanted to tell a whole series of characters and lives closely linked to public health and, at the same time, deal with the theme of power and those who exercise it, sometimes in a shrewd way and other times in a distorted, if not decidedly perverse, way. Power and those in power have had moments of great ambiguity and equivocality in the history of this country. From this point of view, Latina is not a provincial city, it is the capital, the center of everything.”
Why?
«We are a country in which an archetypal theme such as education in power has had terrible phases which today are once again experiencing a phase of exhumation, a bit like the skeleton that is found, using words and methods that are not even distant from the words of the Twenty Years Anniversary. If ten years ago they had told us that an army general would present himself at a political election praising the Decima Mas, we would probably have boycotted the polling stations. The problem is that there is increasingly a clash between politics and justice, and not only in Italy.”
