The Val di Non in this novel is not the vast plateau facing southwards where most Italian apples are produced; it is not the place where tourists return year after year in search of peace and quiet rather than strong sensations – until they develop a sense of belonging.  The imaginary town called Borgo San Giuda, where Veronesi sets his story, rather seems like a Nordic fairy-tale setting with few houses surrounded by dark and hostile forests, where the rules of cohabitation and even those of nature are suspended, where anything can happen, even violence or any sort of prodigy.  For example a massacre:  ten people, including a pregnant women, two children and four foreigners are killed while crossing the snowed-in woods on a horse-drawn sleigh – a means of transportation that is typical of fairytales.  The problem is that they were killed, in that same place and at the same time, by ten different causes, incompatible with each other and for the most part absurd within that context:  suffocated by carbon monoxide, cancer, beheaded, suffocated by a bread crust stuck in the windpipe, potassium injection and the successive surgical removal of all transplantable organs, strangulation, heroine overdose, shot in the head, disembowelment and mutilations following repeated rape and shark attack.  The list is necessary because it represents the key to the mystery, unveiled (so to say) towards the end by the leading character, a doctor:  “It’s as if a bubble containing all the fears of the world had burst in those woods.  The dead people seen on news bulletins.  Those that fill us with fear”.  That’s all there is, without any other clues, explanations:  nearly four-hundred pages to tell us, in such an oblique and paradoxical manner as to become painless, that one can die of fear.  Nothing to do with Poe or Kafka or even with Tiziano Sclavi and his Dylan Dog. They are explorers within our anxieties, individual and collective, of the space of indecision; writers who try to stop the text at the moment of hesitation and the beginning.  Of the fantastic.  A genre that was studied by Todorov in a book published quite a few years ago but still important.  Todorov explained that on one hand lies strangeness, which is an explained anomaly, or in any case part of the normal order of things; on the other hand lies the marvellous, which is the acceptance of the supernatural as such, without fear or surprise; in the middle lies the fantastic, an instable condition.  Veronesi has not written a fantasy novel, as he would like us think by inserting a 19th century classic such as The Black Bishop by Arrigo Boito in the appendix (for those who wish to read it, a new edition published by Albus is now available).  The story of XY only makes sense if one accepts the marvellous:  unicorns, vampires and wizards may also make their way inside.  But the problem is not limited to this, on the contrary, that this is not its purpose.  Its purpose is transforming the marvellous into “strange”, and homologating it.  This denies and overturns Hegel’s famous thesis, suggesting that only the irrational is real:  “What word should I use?  Supernatural?  All right, I’ll use it:  something supernatural happened.  There, I used it.  Supernatural.  Something supernatural happened.  It’s possible”.  Therefore a novel with arguments, with arguments that overlap the text without developing diegetically, within a narrative logic.  But “logic” is a concept not very dear to Veronesi, just like science or reason that he considers synonyms:  “Science, or reason, or logic, call them as you may, it will not fail, it will successfully find an answer to the questions:  it always does, but it is always so scientifically, rationally and logically incongruous as to seem humiliating”.  The other leading character is now speaking, the parish priest of Borgo San Giuda.  The considerations made by the two of them, the doctor and the priest, are alternated throughout the novel, the pages of two simultaneous diaries; until they both finally flow into a direct dialogue in the final part of the book.  Where, between science and faith, faith ends up victorious.  “One must understand all – else one must believe all”, quotes the priest without recalling, and without informing us, of his source - “but it was a great one”.  Namely Francis Scott Fitzgerald, in The Beautiful and the Damned, translated into Italian by Fernanda Pivano. But Fitzgerald wrote:  “One must understand all - else one must take all for granted”; which means that if one does not try to understand something, he might as well surrender to considering it taken for granted.  And not: believe it.  Apart from the translation, the meaning was nonetheless clear in the context of Fitzgerald’s book:  a couple of pages later he says of Anthony and Maury, whom that sentence was referring to, that they “were in love with generalities”. So are Veronesi’s characters. According to the doctor:  “Should words exist to say so, then it is possible”.  This is at the heart of the novel, and the sentence is rightly reproduced on the book cover.  The faith to which Veronesi and his characters ask one to sacrifice reason is not the faith in God, namely in a being that is incomprehensibly “other”, whose existence denounces our marginality and instils doubts, choices and responsibilities.  On the contrary, it is the faith in our centrality as subjects: the burning regret for the faultless selfishness of childhood and that of the Garden of Eden, when things were possessed by giving them a name – a regret that is at the foundation of consumerism.  Cogito ergo est. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud spoke about “narcissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes”, of “omnipotence of thoughts”:  and he put them in relation with that primordial concept of the world that was called animism.  Unfortunately the sleep of reason and cultural animism do not only generate monsters:  they generate conservative politics and uncontested reactionary ideologies.   At the end of the novel the priest does not try, as I said, to convince the doctor of God’s existence.  He tries to convince her of Satan’s existence:  “It is not a figment of the human mind.  I have participated in impressive exorcisms, I have met and confessed people who practice the occult and I know that the devil exists, I know he works in many ways and is very powerful”.  The effects of this ontology of evil, namely its uprooting from concrete historical and cultural contingencies, is immediate.  The doctor blames herself as being co-responsible for what happened because she has sinned:  she has committed abortion.  Social practices are projected outside of reality and morality:  in a dimension of absolute good and evil, where chance and complexity do not exist and every event might be conveniently justified in terms of personal blame and expiated through the impression of punishment:  “I deserved to be punished!  For something that I did, something terrible that I did.  We might say that actually I have punished myself”.  A deregulation of self, a regression into immaturity.  This is the reason why we must speak of XY.  I would have preferred to ignore and forget it:  had it not been the symptom, which is made more alarming by its success for critics and public alike (it received excellent reviews from critics for the Corriere, Foglio, Sole 24 ore newspapers and from Adriano Sofri for Repubblica), of an irrational spiritual-like drift on behalf of Italian intelligentsia, even the Left-wing.  It is interesting to note that ten years ago it was again Fandango, the editor of XY, that published the Italian translation of the book in which a French journalist, Meyssan, declared that the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was a hoax set up by the U.S. government.  And it is interesting to note that Veronesi was the one who wrote the introduction.  Although the dishonesty and factiousness of the Bush Administration were enough to justify many suspicions, Meyssan’s conspiracy theory was superficial and factious in turn:  it was easily dismantled in France and his debts towards the American anti-Semite extreme-Right were soon demonstrated. But Veronesi was not interested in verifying the truthfulness of Meyssan’s interpretation:  all he cared about was the fact that it was paranoid.  “When reason, this waning light, cannot dispel the darkness in which we find ourselves, when you sense that there is something wrong but the normal way of reasoning does not offer any results, on the contrary it increases the sense of discomfort and frustration that grips at our hearts, paranoia may be useful for seeing where reason cannot see”.  Behind these words, exactly as behind XY, one can sense a desperate need for certainties:  annoyance for the slow, laborious and uncertain quest for concrete solutions; a will to rather abandon oneself to solipsistic, comforting, dazzling, instant and gratifying intuitions, exempt from any control.  Now more than ever, it is necessary to do our best to resist the arrogance of the wealthy, the hegemony of the market economy, the self-referential hedonism of consumerism, even the delusions of omnipotent technology.  But doing so in the name of intuition, paranoia, faith in Satan is not resistance: it is complicity.

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References:
- Tzvetan Todorov, La letteratura fantastica (“The Fantastic:  A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre”), Garzanti, 185 pages, €10.00
- Arrigo Boito, L’alfier nero (“The Black Bishop”), Albus, 84 pages, €8.00
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lineamenti di filosofia del diritto (“The Philosophy of Right”), German parallel text, edited by Vincenzo Cicero, Bompiani, 667 pages, €15.50
- Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Belli e dannati (“The Beautiful and the Damned”), Mondadori, 379 pages, €9.50
- Sigmund Freud, Opere (“Works”), vol. 9: L’Io e l’Es e altri scritti 1917-1923 (“The Ego and the Id and Other Works”), Bollati Boringhieri, 655 pages, €35.00
- Thierry Meyssan, L’incredibile menzogna. Nessun aereo è caduto sul Pentagono (“9/11: The Big Lie”), Fandango, 200 pages, €15.00