Mark Haddon, "Lo strano caso del cane ucciso a mezzanotte"

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is one of those unputdownble narratives that keep both the inveterate and the occasional reader glued to the book, in spite of those who curl their lips and raise their eyebrows in front of a novel which is read all in one breath. What catches and affects the stomach is the point of view. The story is told by Christopher, a boy suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of savant autism. Christopher has the intelligence of a computer, he can do very complicated calculations in his mind but he is completely unprepared, naive and defenseless, in front of life. With his few means, highly developed intellect and extremely fragile emotion, he will have to solve a mystery, the incomprehensible killing of Wellington, the neighbour’s dog. He will dive into the investigation with the same rational and analytical spirit of his beloved Sherlock Holmes, but the investigation will take an unexpected turn, it will force him to dig even in his own life, in the relations between his father and his mother, to come to terms with the absence of the maternal figure, to face risks and descend into the metropolitan underworld and then go back to the light of the stars.

“And when the universe has finished exploding, all the stars will slow down their run, eventually they will stop and start falling again towards the center of the universe, like a ball thrown into the air does. And then there will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars of the world because they will come closer, faster and faster, and we will understand that the world will soon disappear, because when we look at the sky at night there will be no darkness but only splendour of light of millions and millions of stars, all shooting stars.”

What enthrals us is not not, I repeat, the story itself, but the fascinating and extraordinary personality of Christopher. An Asperger is a monad without windows, closed in a centered ego world, in a circle of which he is a prisoner and in which no one enters, keeping every other human being at a distance. He feels superior to all, he cannot even conceive that others also have a “thinking mind”. Christopher is alone on the heart of the earth, as Quasimodo would say, does not like confusion, hates being touched, always tells the truth, takes everything literally, notes every detail to the point that his mind, overloaded with stimuli and data to analyze, goes in tilt and he suffers overwhelmed by anxiety, by fear, by a cosmic solitude.

“I wanted to sleep so that I didn’t have to think, because the only thing I could think of was all the pain I felt because there was no room for anything else inside my head, but I couldn’t go to bed and all I could do was sit where I was and there was nothing else to do but wait and continue to suffer.”

Haddon uses a language mimetic of the protagonist’s way of thinking and expressing himself, an artificially simple and naive language that winks at the reader and borders on poetry.

“But my mother was cremated. This means that she was put in a coffin and burned and pulverized and then turned into ash and smoke. I don’t know what happens to ashes and I couldn’t ask questions at the cemetery because I didn’t go to the funeral. But I know that the smoke comes out of the chimney and disperses in the air and then sometimes I look at the sky and I think there are molecules of my mother up there, or in the clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or that they come down in the form of rain in the rainforests of Brazil, or turn into snow somewhere in the world.”