Publishing house: Rizzoli
Series: Italian Essays
ISBN Code: 88-17-86271-1
Pages: 322
Price: 16.53
Every time you wake up you go through the stages of a ritual that has been established in you for years now. It is the ritual of preparation for social life, which awaits you outside the doorway; an old, voracious friend of yours. Have you ever wondered what such innocuous and underestimated "everydayness" might cause in a psyche tried by stress, by an inherent fragility? What heinous demons may lurk in the humdrum industrialized landscape of the Trieste suburbs? What heinous deeds might they inspire?
In an Hour, Madness is not a horror film. Although it is a collection of nineteen short stories, always poised between the distressing and the "gore," it is a treatise on psychiatry. Its pages tell tales of gory crimes, subtle perversions, religious obsessions taken to the limits of paroxysm, morbid ritualism. You won't find criminal geniuses or sublime sick minds behind it all, but what baffles, what violates the reader's mind is the fact that mere clerks, secretaries, very ordinary unemployed people can cultivate so much resentment against society that the libido explodes into sheer madness. The media phenomenon is certainly conducive to such crimes, and this is clearly explained. In the end it is the media that imposes a rhythm, a forced trend on society, and the ordinary man, who cannot keep up, collapses, plunges into a hate-walled universe.
The book is masterfully written, and what is most disturbing is the meticulous description of the logical steps that lead to the disintegration of individuals' personalities. In the end the most ferocious crimes appear logical, taken for granted. Andreoli is so good at characterizing his characters that one identifies fully with their figures. The truth is that each of us possesses a dark and animalistic part, but he manages most of the time to master it. But how long can he do it?
Review by Editor
