Alessio Piras, "Omicidio in piazza Sant'Elena"

Undecided between the detective story and the intellectual novel, Alessio Piras, in Murder in Piazza Sant'Elena, mixes the two genres, alongside the classic, and highly inflated, Commissioner, another protagonist, a shoulder who actually towers over, the intellectual Lorenzo Marino , in large part, we suspect, the author's alter ego. The two find themselves collaborating on the case of Paco, a South American boy killed by a badly cut drug overdose in the alleys of Genoa. It will be discovered that behind it there are personal events and the hypocrisy of a moralistic and rotten bourgeois world.

The real protagonists of this story, however, are the city of Genoa and the literary references.

As for the latter, we immediately start with the cliché of the story in the story, to then move on to the numerous quotes from Sciascia, Saramago, Pessoa.

"Lorenzo, like Ricardo Reis, had returned home after about fifteen years. He was alone, like the eponymous doctor of Pessoa, and he was fond of the old habits of the human being, he was not a 21st century man Lorenzo, or he was entering them slowly and with great effort. " (page 20)

Lorenzo is someone who does not recognize himself in the mass which, as Josè Ortega, his favorite Spanish philosopher, believes, "is everything that does not evaluate itself - neither for good nor for bad - through special reasons, but which feels" like the whole world ", and yet he does not worry about it, on the contrary he feels at ease in recognizing himself identical to others." Not him, he gets bored with ordinary conversations. "The banality of certain speeches and the lack of intellectual curiosity annihilated him". (page 29) He is a scholar, a university researcher who loves his work and not just the position he occupies, divided between intellectual curiosity and roots, between a going that is always a return and a coming back that already contains in itself a new distancing, between desire for novelty and heartbreaking nostalgia. He is a man, Lorenzo / Alessio, who lives everything with his mind and soul.

"Literature again, it's not possible, Lorenzo, you have to find answers in real life, you can't go and look for them all in books, all inside these paper walls, in the reading rooms, thirsty for letters, for words that give a sense." (page 33)

“Literature, Lorenzo, it is in literature that we can find the answers. It seems fictional, it deceives you to escape from the world with your imagination, but it projects you into it deeply. And you are so inside that you don't notice it, you seem to stay out of it, to be in another world. " (page 144)

In the mixture of literature and life lies the meaning of this particular novel, a detective story in which events have the same space as reflections. The intellectual protagonist dives into life, participates in it, only through an investigation that brings him into contact with the most sordid alleys, with prostitution, with drug dealers, with flesh and blood. But we must not forget that it is still a "story within a story", which starts from a frame and returns to it, that even the real in the end is fiction and literature, in a game of mirrors and references amplified by jolts even within the same chapter.

Perhaps, the only real, tangible thing is Genoa, the Genoa of songwriters but also of the bakeries that churn out greasy and fragrant focaccia, of the alleys that stink and, if they did not stink, they would not be what they are, of the sea leveled and darkened by the north wind, South American prostitutes, black drug dealers, economic problems, lost opportunities for rebirth. The references to the recent past, to those nineties and two thousand that it seems strange to consider history and instead already are - many and structured with awareness and competence - are mixed with that nostalgia we were talking about, with that search for meaning which, after so much literature , after so much physical and book escape, in the end perhaps it adheres to the memory, to the past, to what our grandparents taught us, to what remains of when we were little, and springs, like a madeleine, from a smell, from a flavor, from a breath of the north wind.

The representation of the university world is also original and engaging, with the usual barons always attached to the armchair and the usual servile assistants. Here, perhaps, if Piras decides that, all in all, despite the undoubted passion for noir, it is not worth writing yet another detective story and concentrates on characters like Lorenzo - with their wealth of introspection linked to the wealth of knowledge. regional and cultural - his narrative skills would, I think, best exploited.