The circuit is straightforward: you pick up a novel - Manual investigation of Jedediah Berry, published by Adelphi - one begins to read it, and now it turns out that the same book we have in hand is also one of the key elements of fiction, that its chapters, the ones that we read are the same ones who read the stars and, at least in one case, the main character and the reader read the same page (106) at the same time. As if the huge golden eye that stands on the cover of the novel hypnotic (and namesake of the manual in the plot) had transported us into another dimension, wonderfully metaliterature. And this is just the beginning, because then the book by Berry - New York thirties who made his debut with this work - subject to a number of surprises that accompany the already confused reader into a parallel world made other parallel worlds and dreamscapes where an obscure clerk, Charles Unwin, unwittingly finds himself catapulted on the scene with the unprecedented role of detective to solve a mystery - probably the mystery of mysteries - and all this just to be able to play back and ordered his maniacal work of the copyist.
The story is incredible, obsessive and surreal, but as he says at one point Unwin, the devil is in the details and in the case of Berry are extraordinary details that give Investigation Manual a visionary force Kafkaesque: the cramped conditions in sub-employees who work in sleep, the huge building that houses the powerful and dark Agency the hotel rooms where he lives the ambiguous Cleopatra Greenwood. Always with such situations Magrittian (the giant, the small anomalies of scenarios seemingly "normal") and a homage to the classic role of the detective, for whom spend the name of Philip Marlowe is as obvious as a duty.
As he wrote in Corriere della Sera Livia Manera, we are facing "a reinterpretation of Process of Kafka, a nod to Calvino's Invisible Cities and a reinterpretation of Alice in Wonderland , without losing sight of the hard-boiled style of Raymond Chandler. "But, next to a reading experience that renews the genre of detective story , the strength of Berry's novel is also in the reflection behind the plot, and never as in this case the parallel with Franz Kafka is irrelevant. It is in fact talking of power and its relationship with the mind people, control and the ever unfathomable closeness of those who present themselves as the guarantor of order and disorder, who makes the promotion of its mission. Between these two poles, only seemingly irreconcilable, it moves a crowd of sleepwalkers who seems to be out of the best works of filmmakers like Terry Gilliam visionary and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and that, on closer inspection, has the face of all of us.
Among the many possible quotes from the novel are those essential importance of the mystery ("If the detective fails to keep its secrets, then it will never be able to learn the secrets of others"), but it also stands out, given by a supervisor at that point already dead, what can be called a small anthropology of marriage: "In all the occasions when I met my wife on the ground, so to speak, I was always amazed by the magnitude of current events. I must admit that it scares me a bit '. "It is quite possible that at this end of 2009, Manual investigation can be transformed in our hands in the book of the year .
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