LE LARVE
(The Larvae)
Pendragon, collection Linferno, 2008
ISBN 978-88-8342-648-3
pp. 227, euro 14
The characters of this novel slither and slip away, they move furtively, like intruders or ghosts, they couple in broken shadows, they plot in the corridors of a large and incongruous palace, whose unexplored underground passages run deep like roots in the ground, among myriads of larvae. All around, desolated fields and woods buried in the fog, muddy rivers, ditches and swamps.
Le larve is not unlike a familial saga kneaded with a gothic atmosphere, a Bildungsroman oscillating between an obsessive observation of reality and the imprecision of the dream. It tells the influence of the personage of the grandfather, a ruthless and oppressive patriarch even after his death, on his incapable son and on his grandson (the first-person narrator) who seems to have inherited the grandfather’s amoral cruelty, sharpness and lycanthropic neglect – on the setting of a house isolated in the countryside of an imaginary 20th century marked by the passage of the rural world to the industrial age.
Marco Codebò, in Reti di Dedalus: “Biting example of cruelty narrative, Le larve is the autobiography in first person of a hero of unpleasantness.”
Carlotta Vissani, in Mangialibri, finds “the style outstanding and the language refined, the oppressive images powerful and the prose intense and full of life. It is a mature, well-structured story, conceived and studied down to the last detail, risky – so to speak – precisely because of the complexity of the intrigue, yet fascinating and very, very sound.”
Alfio Siracusano, in Il Sottoscritto, highlights the implicit moral intent: “When it comes down to it, Morandini thus pinpoints the evil that prevail again in the imagination of men and takes us in a story that could appear as pure macabre fantasy, mournfully gothic in its narrative structure, but that is actually a condemnation of a certain trouble, the confession of some strangeness, a search for confirmation of a shared repugnance.”
The first pages of the novel are on:
http://ombrelarve.blogspot.it/2008/07/le-larve-la-prima-pagina.html
http://ombrelarve.blogspot.it/2008/08/le-larve-una-pagina-dal-capitolo.html
http://ombrelarve.blogspot.it/2008/08/le-larve-una-pagina-dal-cap-cinque.html
The booktrailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8MjA6_SV3M&feature=youtu.be
