Francesco Gungui, "Inferno"

“There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.”

Can Susanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” merge into the first Canticle of the Divine Comedy? Yes, in the case of Francesco Gungui’s “Inferno”.

The Ukronic and dystopian scenario of this novel, published by Fabbri, is a future Europe, united to the point of no longer distinguishing the various nationalities from each other, based on the clear separation of social classes and guided by a totalitarian oligarchy. There are the workers, who live by making do in the slums or in the skyscraper cities and those who, on the contrary, are in Paradise, in Mediterranean colonies very similar to the tourist villages of Red Sea, between ponds, swimming pools and birthday parties. Heaven is a place where you can have a life like in “Beverly Hills 90210”, where everything is as beautiful and false as in the film “The Perfect Woman” by Frank Oz, where nothing is missing but freedom and the awareness of truth. And then, at the bottom of the social ladder, there are the condemned, those who rot in Hell because of a crime or a breach of the rules, even just having become familiar with members of a different social class or having asked questions about what’s outside, beyond the wall and the armed guards. In short, a bit as if the protagonist of “The Truman show” was interned in Alcatraz because he discovered that beyond the confines of his world there is reality.

Gungui had already mentioned Dante in the novel “I like you like this” of 2008 and here he makes him the cornerstone of his macrocosm. Hell is a volcanic island designed as a penal colony and modeled in the image and likeness of Dante’s first canticle. The infernal mountain contemplates the Dark Forest, the Acheron River, the Stygian Swamp, the city of Dite, the cerberi, the harpies, the minotaurs and the centaurs resulting from genetic manipulation, the guards dressed in red in the guise of devils. Everything reflects the work of Alighieri, from the circles to the retaliation, from the writings on the walls that recall triplets, to the torments inflicted on the damned. The reworking of the first canto is interesting, with the dark forest infested with the three wild beasts which are nothing but poisonous hallucinations produced by volcanism (as in ancient times in the cave of the Pythia). And the “I found myself in a dark forest” materializes in “he imagined the darkness that slid like a dark liquid into his mouth, dyeing his throat, stomach, then all vital organs black, until it reached the surface of his body, which was like an earthenware pot that suddenly crumbled and disappeared. “

Here too, as in “The Hunger Games” — but, we can also say in the probable development of our future of always connected and social at any cost — everything is captured by the cameras. The damned are continually visible on large screens mounted in the cathedrals of Europe, where worship is no longer practiced but there is punishment of the guilty as a deterrent to crime.

Alec and Maj are the two young protagonists. Unconscious son of the builder of Hell he, daughter of an oligarch she, in this horrid and violent universe they will fight to stay alive, not to lose their reason and to maintain their humanity. While vivid, they would have benefited, in our opinion, from greater psychological subtlety. Even Maj’s change, from a girl from Paradise to a pugnacious Amazon, is more of a transition than an evolution, and could have been more in-depth.

“In those days spent within the network, Maj had built her new skin, an intertwining of pain and adrenaline. That skin had become a thick bark that had imprisoned inside the girl from heaven that she had been. “

For example, her fear of waking up on the ship that takes her to her final sentence is not sufficiently cleared up. She almost seems like an aseptic spectator of herself.

In “Game of Thrones”, by George Martin — to remain within a contemporary paradigm and not touch Tolkien or other sacred monsters — every character, even the worst, is so distinct as to arouse empathy and participation, every character is given once and for all and remains in the hearts of the readers.

If on the one hand the narrative fabric can bring Gungui’s text into a very specific genre, the Italianisation magnifies everything through the apt reference to Dante and his Comedy, considered “the principle of everything”. Letting ourselves be carried away by free associations (an exercise that is perhaps critically sterile but emotionally satisfying), we are reminded of a little book read and reread in the sixties, of which Gungui, born in 1980, cannot be familiar with: “The Divine Comedy explained to children”. Here, this is, instead, the Divine Comedy explained to the young adults of the third millennium, to digital natives, to the social generation. The universe of the immortal Alighieri is transformed into a video game, where young people of good looks (with romantic attitudes) challenge death in a post-atomic “Mad Max” atmosphere.

But, in addition to the action, there is also a subtle philosophical intent, the suspicion — adolescent but not only — that, in any case, life has little meaning, even with the freedom won and the truth revealed. The theme of death is persistent and painful.

“But what’s the point then? We survive for what? “” To get out of here, to be free. “ “And then? What awaits us next? Hell is also out there, you take longer to die, but it’s all the same!

“I was afraid of dying, but I only realized it now. Death scared me, not being there anymore, first you are there and then you are not, and with you everything disappears, the universe ends. “

“I’m afraid that everything could end at any moment and if that were the case our life would really be nothing. It’s okay with me to die, I don’t care about living, I would just like to keep my eyes open to the world even when I am no longer there, I would like to be sure that something keeps happening, because otherwise what sense would everything have? “

These are the questions we all ask ourselves, the subtle, pervasive fear (repeated term) that our life may be interrupted at any moment, without warning and without having been able to give it an orientation and a purpose, without accomplishing anything, in short.

The plot includes a great journey in search of love, salvation, the way out. But it is also, subtly, a symbol of life, the need to survive that does not end in itself but is investigation, vertigo of the ephemeral, the need to reaffirm one’s weight in the cycle of nature. And there is that gesture of “removing the soul”, removing the microchip from the chest, which indicates loss of identity, fall of the reference points and, not surprisingly, is a painful laceration, a tear that, however, also triggers the renewal, the opening of possibilities, the escape from lies towards a more authentic reality, towards freedom of thought. The journey to hell is, as in Dante himself, also descending into the unconscious, recovering one’s truest self, returning home. And, if there is one message, it is that “we cannot be in the world just to survive. We must live ”, perhaps because, Dante would say, we were not made to live like brutes.

The theme of female homosexuality is also present, in a delicate way, in the figure of Chloe and in the group of free amazons who remind us so much of the heroines of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Inferno’s style is functional to the genre and to the young adult target, standard in the positive sense of the term, that is, not particularly original but clean, correct, polite, smooth.

And now, let’s wait for the sequel, let’s wait for Purgatory, aware that “you have to die in order to be reborn.”