Susanne Collins, "Hunger Games"

What creates an editorial phenomenon is the novelty of the subject. The same goes for Eco’s murderous monks, Meyer’s “vegetarian” vampires, Dan Brown’s sangreal lineage, or James’s sadomasochistic bondage. Everything that comes after is in the wake, it is an imitation of the original.

Susanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” opens a season of teenage reality show to the death, but its being the forefather of a new genre lies in the cruelty of the subject matter that nails you from the first to the last page.

Katniss Evergreen is a teenager from District 12, in the post-apocalyptic continent of Panem, a wild and barbaric North America, where refined science and the Middle Ages coexist. As punishment for an ancient rebellion against the rich and ineffectual capital, the various districts must annually offer a human sacrifice. In a reality show, which everyone is obliged to follow, each district randomly draws a boy and a girl to offer, or rather to sacrifice, in a fight with one winner and one survivor. The name extracted is that of Primrose, Katniss’s little sister, and she cannot accept it, she volunteers in her place.

Thus begins a preparation that has all the unpleasant taste that years of television broadcasts like “The Island of the Famous” or “Big Brother” have accustomed us to, made even more sour by the awareness that the elimination of the young participant will coincide, not with his return to home, but with his death. Competitors are trained, dressed, interviewed, embellished by stylists and make-up artists, only to be thrown into the arena, a place reminiscent of the dome of “The Truman Show”, where nothing is natural and everything is maneuvered by the Strategists, i.e. the authors of the program. The streams flow or dry on command, the rain pours to order, the air becomes hot or freezing according to what the program and the audience require. Katniss looks at the moon and hopes that at least that is true, that it is the moon of her home, to feel less alone, less vulnerable, less at the mercy of a dictatorship that kills, whips, tears out the tongue for the slightest disrespect, for a word too many or a defiant attitude.

In the arena a deadly fight takes place with hands, nails, teeth, blades, arrows, which takes us back to a past / future already seen in films like “Mad Max”. The competitors, or rather, the “tributes”, must kill each other to survive, otherwise they will be eliminated anyway. A cannon shot marks the contender’s exit and a hovercraft lifts the body and carries it away. The only feeling is fear, which turns into blind fury; friendship is only a momentary alliance against the strongest, no weakness is allowed.

It is not understandable how “Hunger Games” can be defined “a novel for children”, if not, perhaps, in the inability of the protagonist (and the author) to face and fully develop the relationship with the young man who loves her, Peeta, and the threesome with his childhood friend, Gale. It can be objected that the novel is centered on the microcosm of the arena, in a space-time bubble that looks like a video game, where loving each other is secondary to staying alive, to keeping intact the possibility of experiencing human feelings.

“I’m not sure how to say it. I just don’t want to… lose myself. Does it make sense? —he asks. I shake my head. How could he lose himself? — I don’t want them to change me in there. That they turn me into some kind of monster I’m not? “ (page 143)

The distressing emblem of this nightmare situation is the seal that is projected on the screen of the sky every night, preceded by a hymn. Immediately after, the image of who died that day appears. The stomach contracts with horror when reading.

“Night has just fallen, when I hear the hymn that precedes the summary of the deaths. Through the branches I see the Capitol City seal appearing to float in the sky. Actually, I’m looking at another screen, a huge screen being carried by one of their hovercrafts. “ (page 157)

The meaning of the novel is the revolt of Katniss and Peeta, the boy who loves her, to all this pain, to the obligation to do evil anyway, to kill or be killed. Even suffering, even feeling sorry at the thought of killing an innocent comrade, is considered an insurrection. When Rue dies, the smallest of the tributes, so similar to the protagonist’s little sister, Katniss weeps for her and sprinkles her body with flowers, before the hovercraft comes to pick her up, and this is already an act of rebellion. The same goes for the final gesture: Katniss and Peeta choose to die together rather than kill each other, they choose to do what Peeta has decided from the beginning, that is, not to give themselves to the enemy, to remain human, to remain internally pure and free. They will be saved at the last minute, but the ending remains open for the other books in the series, “The Girl on Fire” and “The Song of Revolt”.

This book is a mixture of genres from which, perhaps, a new, syncretic genre arises. The cosmos of Panem contains two worlds. The first is the technologically sophisticated one of Capitol City, a sort of Ghotam City, where many science fiction clichés are found — from the possibility of completely healing deadly wounds, to genetic manipulation that creates deadly new species and monstrous hybrids. The second is the medieval, dark, miserable one of the districts, where hunger rages, where everything is forbidden, electric current comes and goes, and bow and arrows, snares and traps are used to hunt.

“Capitol City sparkles like a huge expanse of fireflies. In district 12, electricity comes and goes and is usually only there for a few hours a day. It often happens that evenings are spent in the light of candles. The rare times we can rely on electricity are when the TV shows the Hunger Games or some important government message that must be watched. Here, however, there is no lack of electricity. Never.” (page 83)

Katniss, Peeta, Rue, Volpe Face, Gale, from time to time resemble the protagonists of “Alien” or “Prometheus” and, together, the offspring of the Shannara lineage, between technology and backwardness, between past and distant future. The only present, perhaps, is that of television studios, which brings us back to today, to our being constantly under the cameras on screens, on the street, in social networks.

The style is paratactic, involving, youthful, made incisive by the historical present. The action that prevails over everything else falls into it, letting reflections and moral sentiment arise as a reaction to what happens, to the horror of images, events, suffering, in a crescendo of anguish that is almost addictive.