If there were no writers – and Francesco Recami, who died at the age of 69 in Florence, his city, was a true writer – if there were no novelists we would not be able to know many aspects of reality, the one in which we are immersed at every moment but which we are often unable to understand and perhaps not even perceive, except through books. Recami built a world and did so with his light and profound pen, with his irreverent but honest irony, with his refined attention to language and languages. The chiaroscuro, the halftones, the “criminal” side of man, our heavy time was told with fast and accomplished writing.
His latest book, «The Casoretto Monster» (Sellerio, like all his novels, around 36) which brings together stories that have already appeared in “crime” anthologies, sounds today like a testament, but also as a tribute from “his” publishing house which, despite appreciating his first novel, «Platinum’s Error», published it in 2006 because that delve into family interiors full of dark sides, the evil that embodies itself in the conscience until it becomes normality did not seem to reflect the glittering 80s. But then for Recami, a graduate in philosophy, highly cultured (after starting out as an author of mountain guides and children’s novels “Murder in the Paleolithic” and “Trap in the Snow”), success came with the fertile series of the Casa di ringhiera, the Milanese condominium at the center of the world which chorally distilled human comedy in all its forms.
A comedy that turns out to be black the more every jolt, every turbulence and every emotional reaction of the house in the ringhiera where the former upholsterer Amedeo Consonni and his mature companion, the former professor Angela Mattioli live, is recorded by the Florentine writer in a clever game twisted around a “mystery” that Consonni, a special talent for slipping into daring stories, tries to solve. Which happens regularly when in the middle of the condominium, inhabited by the eighty-year-old Luis De Angelis who has as his life’s aim only the obsessive care of his BMW 24 valves, by the elderly Miss Mattei-Ferri, a fake invalid nailed to her observatory window, by Mrs Donatella Giorgi who fights the economic crisis with dignity, by a family group of Peruvians, and gradually by various more or less “respectable” tenants, an unexpected event breaks out that sets the “investigations” in motion. Thus begins this human comedy in which the incursion of the “mystery” becomes a pretext for the grotesque adventures of Amedeo, collaborated more or less consciously by his colleagues in the condominium, between existential situations of desolate relevance (economic difficulties, solitude, obsessions, manias, neuroses) and daily malignancies, tragicomic events that coexist with criminal facts, the theater of misunderstandings and situations deceptive: the bad habits of today’s Italy masterfully staged by Recami, very skilled in weaving the many threads of his narrative plots with freshness and depth.
But to complete the fresco of the human, where it is humanity itself that is missing, there are also the black comedies, which from grotesque to grotesque, from misunderstanding to misunderstanding, seem to proceed in a spiral until they get closer to the heart of evil: «Black comedy n. 1», «The Riposo & Pace clinic», «The atrocious crime in Via Lurcini», «The refrigerated case» tell of the “culture” of waste, vulgarity, deception, greed, crimes committed with horrible lightness, a world of physical and moral degradation, observed with a desolate gaze and black humour. And while «The Sentimental Education of Eugenio Licitra» is the beautiful coming-of-age novel in the Florence of the 70s with the daring adventures of three students, in «Wunderland», a dystopian novel with a nightmarish entertainment-city where there is the possibility of living without any scruples whatsoever, false desires and miserable self-affirmations are chased in a reality manipulated by large systems that swallow up the lives of individuals. Novel in which Recami’s social satire is tinged with livid bitterness in the face of a world of lies.