INVERNALE

Book included among the twelve candidates for the 2024 Strega Prize

Finalist book for the Orbetello Book Prize 2024

Book presented by Sandro Veronesi as part of the titles proposed by the Amici della Domenica for the 2024 Strega Prize.
With a language as alive as the noise of voices at the market, Dario Voltolini gives us a jewel of narrative, delicacy and memory, capable of dragging us along with impetus in the spiral of pain, now subdued, now chaotic, but always very powerful, of thoughts, up to a place that is at the same time hell and refuge in the memory of when everything seemed to be going well.

«Dario Voltolini confirms himself as one of the most interesting voices in our literary panorama. Emotional rigor is his great characteristic." - Romana Petri

«I have seen Voltolini handle almost all human circumstances in his stories. To do this he has only one tool that he built himself. No one else has it.” - Davide Longo

«Voltolini accompanies us in a highly original way on the most common and mysterious of journeys.» - Letizia Muratori

The father breaks the animals, enters their entrails, separates the muscles from the membranes, removes the organs and bones. The father sells animal parts. The father dives into the biological chasm and pulls out steaks. Cuts of meat are his profession and his art. The father is a butcher. The father has the task of entering the dead flesh and coming out of it by offering it to the living, so that life continues its voracious chain. He is a ferryman between the two shores of the flesh, between the viande and the chair, between meat and flesh. At the market sales counter he serves the fearful people who don't face the bodies they eat, they don't want to know about it, they delegate the dirty work to the butchers. One day something goes wrong in the perfect choreography of the blades and a crooked cut almost cuts off his thumb. It is the beginning of another descent into the flesh, this time his. At work, a bacterium contaminated him. He begins with an infection, continues with exhaustion, a feral diagnosis, health protocols, trips to clinics abroad. His twenty-year-old son Dario immerses his gaze in his father's deteriorating flesh and in the melancholy of farewell. A very strong intimacy envelops them, as happens almost only in the relationship between daughters and mothers. We enter the gaze of the son, prehensile and precise, who sees his father collapse. Precision is the form that her devotion and his suffering take.

Proposed by Sandro Veronesi for the 2024 Strega Prize with the following motivation:
«There are books so beautiful that they amaze. What do they have more than others? Maybe the author has already written other very good books, he is a well-known, appreciated figure, his strengths are well known and the quality of his writing should not surprise anyone: yet in those books he does it, surprises, amazes . Why? Why does it suddenly seem that that author was born to write that particular book, and that all the others he wrote before were nothing more than a step towards writing it? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I know that every time I open a book, every single time, in my heart I hope that it is one of those books, so that I find myself once again amazed by the beauty and confused in this mystery. . “Winter” by Dario Voltolini is one of those books. Voltolini's skill is well known. The brilliance of his writing is well known. The genius of his way of describing the world is well known. Yet none of his previous books had astonished me like this one – and it is to share my amazement that I decided to present it for the 2024 edition of the Strega Prize.