Finding The Twenty Days of Turin is like discovering a prophetic prose relic containing a fundamental message about being human: we seek to connect. A friend of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, De Maria was radically opposed to Italian clericalism (even publishing a short story about the assassination of a fictional pope), but in the late ’70s abruptly re-converted to Catholicism and stopped writing fiction. That idea and those lines don’t come from a contemporary brief for the benefits of social media networks, but from the first English-language translation of The Twenty Days of Turin, a 1977 novel by the Italian author Giorgio De Maria. It also sounds much needed, “considering how hard it’s gotten for people to communicate these days.” A community that begins anonymously-with members sharing their feelings, fears, and desires-and builds with the opportunity to “become friends” sounds appealing.
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