Andrea Biscaro's "Il Vicino"

Up to the last two chapters, “Il Vicino”, by Andrea Biscaro, is a thriller that rivets you from the first line.

An anguished situation in crescendo: the protagonist — a painter of some fame who lives in the countryside with a cat after a divorce — receives a snuff film in which he appears as the protagonist. It is a pornographic amateur video, in which torture is shown, culminating in the death of the victim, specifically a woman whom, after sex, he cuts off the head with a saw. Let’s say that the various crime sequences in the novel are too splatter but still functional to the genre. The painter, who does not remember ever having done anything so brutal, lives isolated in the countryside of Tuscia, near a village that can be traced back to Pitigliano, as beautiful as it is disturbing legacy of ancient Etruscan testimonies. A strange character has recently come to live next to him, an architect with fascinating but ambiguous ways. Page after page the fear grows. Biscaro is very good at rendering the expansion of horror, the feeling of being more and more trapped, the threat.

We cannot reveal the ending, even if there will be a kind of retaliation, a punishment for ancient sins. Despite the rationale, we intuit that not everything is as it seems. In any case, there is a lot of unconscious, very repressed, behind the events / hallucinations of which the painter who is the protagonist of the story is a victim.

“I see their black beaks dripping with blood. I can’t move. It is not just fear. It is impossible to move in the midst of this invasion, this violence of wings, this black storm. (…) Their beaks reach my throat, tear it open, cut my carotid artery. Their beaks invade my eyes, they drink my bulbs. Their beaks make their way into my flesh, into my chest, dig into my bones and nerves, find my heart and devour it, peck it, strip it, make it disappear in their croaking throats. “

What happens to him is no coincidence, what he feels comes from remorse and inner torment. And this, in the end, deserves to be developed better.

The narrative, we have said, runs like a train up to the last two chapters which, in our opinion, create an anticlimax that is too hasty, too explicit and therefore disappointing, especially because not everything is credible.

The style is excellent, the persistent parataxis — almost to the limit of poetic writing — at first unsettles, but it serves the purpose of producing a pressing and ferocious rhythm, a vice that tightens around the narrator until it crushes him, and it is offset by perfect writing that leaves nothing to chance. The choice of an omniscient narrative is intelligent, with the expedient of the repeated “if someone could see me from the outside”, and the objective rendering of the dialogues, reproduced, not so much as scripts, but as real tape recordings.

“If someone could see my face now from the outside, he would see the orbits of my eyes become dark, hollow. He would see the skin on my face stretched in a mask of horror. Someone might think they see a cigarette in my right hand, squeezed between index and middle fingers. Someone might even guess the shape of a full glass in my left hand. “

“To think”, “to intuit” are verbs that draw our attention to the possibility that what is described is not true, is the result of an illusion. By contrast, the staging concocted against the protagonist appears more real than ever, while what he does, his actions, are questioned by his own thoughts. The painter claims to have stopped drinking, smoking and doing the other wrong things that led him to where he is, that is, to be a lonely and hunted man, but, perhaps that glass is still in his hand, the cigarette is still between his fingers, vice is always inside him, gnawing at his heart like the beak of crows, evil lurks waiting for compensation, for revenge.