LOCUS DESPERATUS

Sooner or later, we have all had to part with something that we thought was only ours: but without what belongs to us, would we still be able to say who we really are? The protagonist of this novel lives in an apartment furnished with great taste and an equal amount of paranoia, two characteristics that are difficult to free oneself from. Especially when you suddenly receive a notice of eviction, which seems to have an otherworldly genesis... After all, a haunted house can be a curse, or an opportunity to compile an inventory of one's past. "Reduced like this, I was king: of my things, of my collections, and therefore of myself, who had systematically transferred every most intimate detail of myself into those collections". In philology, the locus desperatus indicates a corrupt and irreparable textual passage, for which the philologist is forced to throw in the towel, marking it with the so-called "cross of despair". And what starts this story is precisely a small cross, drawn at night with chalk on a door. One morning, leaving his apartment, the protagonist notices that sign just above the peephole of the entrance to the house: who could have done it, and what does it mean? The man erases the cross, but the next day, and then the day after that, the sign reappears relentlessly. The mystery deepens when the resident is forced to make an exchange: someone will take his place, and he will have to move. But by changing homes he will also be forced to change his identity: all the things in the apartment, in fact, will have to choose. Either they will flee with him, or they will pass to a new owner - committing high treason. Because every beloved object has a soul, and therefore its own will. Houses have always been, in the history of literature as well as in life, the place where the most banal events mix with the fateful ones. The house at the center of "Locus desperatus", however, resembles the Hill House imagined by Shirley Jackson, or the House of Usher by Poe: a sentient entity, with its own very precise character. A place where the unconscious of those who live there, after a long frequentation, has become one with the books, the prints, the objects and the childhood memories. And who better than Michele Mari could tell the yearning and the obsessions for the fetishes accumulated during the course of an existence, engaging in a duel with one's own emotional memory? The author of "Verderame" and "Leggenda privata" gives us a strange descent into hell and at the same time a merciless taxonomy of memories. A tormented and funny novel about the ultimate meaning we give to objects: "Without my things I would no longer be me, and without me they would no longer be them."