The selection of the five finalists last May 31st, then a long tour around Italy that will culminate with the great ceremony at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Saturday, September 21st, starting at 8:30 pm, the curtain falls on the Premio Campiello 2024, the 62nd edition of the prestigious literary award established and promoted by the industrialists of the Veneto. A few months full of events have passed, the wait of the candidates and the most passionate readers is coming to an end, what remains is uncertainty. If with the Strega Prize the scenario was (perhaps) better defined, it is difficult to imagine the preferences of the popular jury ‘of the Three Hundred Readers’ who will decree the winning novel.

The five who compete for the characteristic ‘vera da pozzo’ are very different authors, but in the varied set of narratives and experiences we can find common points, which recur with a certain frequency in contemporary Italian narrative. The two novels that most met the preferences of the jury of literary figures led by Walter Veltroni – but only because they were both chosen in the first round of voting – are The fire you carry inside you by Antonio Franchini, published by Marsilio, and The Wizard’s House by Emanuele Trevi published by Ponte alle Grazie. Books that have at their center a parental figure that is ‘cumbersome’ for different reasons. On one side there is Angela, Franchini’s mother, a character with a strong personality and an almost impossible character, a temperamental woman that the author chooses to depict bluntly throughout the 200 pages of his work. On the other side there is Mario, Emanuele Trevi’s father, a famous psychoanalyst, among the pioneers in Italy of the Jungian approach: a protagonist with a certain aura, but in his own way distant from people other than his patients, a distracted and very thoughtful presence; for his son he is ‘the magician’, a healer of souls.

If I had to express a preference and narrow down the list of finalists – no offence to anyone – it would fall on these two novels, but I would have a hard time choosing one or the other, for different reasons. Franchini is sincere and frank (no pun intended) in creating a context and content on the figure of his mother. He was clear in declaring that his writing was not liberating, the intent was not to seek a cure for the wounds of the past, but rather to provide that type of ‘extreme’ experience to which, for example, some friends he invited to dinner at home had subjected themselves in the past and had to deal with Angela’s disruptiveness and lack of filters. For his part, Trevi, with a clear and seductive writing has made a narration that is not always easy ‘easy’: he manages to enthrall the reader by playing with genres, alternating biographical and autobiographical stories with psychoanalysis, philosophy, magic, historical narration. What might appear to be a jumble of contents when described in this way is instead an organic and inspired novel.

On the red thread Federica Manzon also deals with parental ties and the difficulty in relationships with parents Soulpublished by Feltrinelli. A novel, however, profoundly different from the previous ones, in which the author intertwines history and geography, constantly looking at the past and the present as its direct reflection. Manzon investigates the events of the so-called ‘border peoples’, of Yugoslavia ruled by Tito (with the eyes of someone who was only a child at the time), and therefore of its disintegration and the Balkan wars of the first half of the nineties of the last century. By telling the story of Alma, her hybrid origins, a father with no apparent roots, the bond with her grandparents – on her mother’s side – custodians of the Central European tradition, the author speaks of events not sufficiently known and often ignored, which deserve to be explored in depth, and which the pages of her novel encourage us to do so.

Then there are more experimental and short novels (but not in terms of reading time). Michele Mari with Place of Desperation (Einaudi) investigates people’s relationships with their past, which in itself is inconsistent but finds evidence in the objects that accumulate and collect. Abounding in Latinisms, courtly and obsolete terms, incomprehensible to most, it leads the reader to ask whether we own our objects or whether they own us. And it does so with a surreal background story, an intuition à la Saramago. Strange figures who seem to have lived more than one life propose an exchange to the protagonist: someone will take his place in his home, he will have to move to another apartment and change his identity at the same time. A gripping but ‘difficult’ story, not a read for everyone.

Finally, not in order of importance but because it was selected as the fifth novel by the judges, there is It’s spreading everywhere by Vanni Santoni, published by Laterza. It is the outsider, the work that most distances itself, among the five, from the narrative genre. A short novel that is above all a retrospective on street art, its evolution, on graffiti and writing in urban contexts, from their birth to the present day. Santoni’s latest work is the result of an enormous amount of research and documentation. A non-canonical literary work, which nevertheless fits perfectly into the narrative history of recent years, in which the conventional increasingly leaves room for experimentation and mixing.