Locus desperatus

One morning, as he is leaving his apartment, a man notices a cross above the peephole of his front door. Thinking it's a prank, he rubs it out. The next day it's back, and the next, and the next. The sign reappears. Unstoppable. Who could have done it, and what significance does it have? Three disturbing characters provide the answers: Asphragisto (small, hunchbacked, unpleasant), Procopius (trembling, crippled) and Silenus (small, shapeless, “with the posture of a question mark”). He is the first, eager and disturbing, to explain to Michele that the cross is a sign of eviction: within ten days he must leave not only the house, but also his things and his life, allow him to take his place (and in turn go and replace someone else). Trying to understand what is happening, Michele finds himself having to deal with his past, discovering it is different from how he remembers. But one thing is certain: he is not leaving his home. He will defend his life and possessions with all his might, calling upon all energies, fetishes and amulets alike. “Four original plates from Magnus' Necron, two from Chester Gould's Dick Tracy... an equally original Piranesi engraving, a sixteenth-century wooden Madonna with traces of ancient gilding, Enzo Mari's Goose...". Locus desperatus by Michele Mari opens with a long list of objects that seem to catapult the reader into the protagonist's cabinet of curiosities. Through a narrative that borders on the dreamlike, the author addresses the theme of the reification of life and the danger of investing too much of oneself in the things one owns, losing sight of who one is and who one has been in favour of what one has. In fact, Michele entrusts his image, his memory and the testimony of his own identity to "things", creating a relationship of interdependence and turning the house into a place where those who live and those who are inhabited overlap, mix and lose all boundaries. In the form of a concrete extension of the protagonist, it must be saved at all costs. Thus begins a very destabilising journey in which every certainty of the protagonist's is shaken, distorted, crumbles, forcing him to doubt his own mind. Culture, language and words come to his aid. A shelter of Latinisms, Dantisms, Foscolisms, references to great Italian literature and cinematography, in which the narrator and the writer's self overlap, giving life to a surgical and daring writing, rich in overtly Gadda-like traits and courtly literary references that act as a counterpoint to the human visceral nature of the characters and their actions.  

Locus desperatus
Michele Mari
Einaudi, 2024